Apprentice developer defied orders – then got a job supporting her weird code

SOftware Apprentice developer defied orders – then got a job supporting her weird code Who wrote this rubbish? Oh ...  Simon Sharwood Simon Sharwood APAC Editor Published mon 6 Jul 2026 // 08:36 UTC WHO, ME? Welcome to another installment of "Who, Me?" – The Register's Monday column that celebrates mistakes readers make at work and reveals their escape routes. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Kara" who told us that in 1999 she scored an apprenticeship with a now-bankrupt telecoms equipment manufacturer. The gig saw Kara study software engineering one day a week and spend the rest of her time at work, where she was exposed to different roles in the company so she could learn how the business worked. Some of the roles were technical, others not so much. None lasted more than three months. REG AD The one Kara remembers best involved being dumped onto the company's Y2K supplier audit program, which was being run by the procurement team. REG AD "They were writing a physical letter to every supplier we had ever dealt with, asking them to provide a statement that they were Y2K compliant," she explained. To make that happen, Kara was told to extract data from a Unix minicomputer and manually transcribe it into an Access database. That stultifying job was necessary because the source data didn't include fields needed for the mailout. "I decided that this process was stupid," Kara told The Register,  "and it was made worse that every purchase the company had ever made was in the database. Even the local junior football club." Kara asked for permission to access the Unix box so she could automate the process, but was denied. "They didn't trust a spotty 19-year-old with that sort of power, so it was time to get creative," she wrote. Her creativity expressed itself in a script that used a telnet client to query the source database on the minicomputer and dump the results into Access. She showed it to her temporary boss on the procurement team, who liked it –