Comment by nyarlathotep_

> Bonus: the customer was the Department of Energy, and the program managed nuclear material inventory. Sleep tight.

These are my favorite (in a sense) programmer stories--that there's these incomprehensible piles of rubbish that somehow, like, run The World and things, and yet somehow things manage to work (in an outwardly observable sense).

Although, I recall two somewhat recent stories where this wasn't the case. The unemployment benefits fiascos during early Covid-era, and some more recent air traffic control-related things (one which effected me personally).