Years ago, a bright young programmer placed a comment in what he thought was code that would never execute. It did. In the field during a trial with a potential sale of hundreds of units. If not for the sense of humor with the client's field engineer at the time, I think we'd all have been fired. The comment was something to the effect of requiring the sacrifice of a black goat on the keyboard during a full moon. Placed by a person who had since left the company ... and we did not even know about it. Shame on us. Very tense scenario in the room when that message popped up. We were called in for a chewing out at the next available meeting. The sale did go thru, btw. A commment like that can cause a lot of heartache, even jobs, you name it. With the current jobs atmosphere these days, it's best to keep our frustrations to ourselves. I know of some employers who monitor comments on blogs even when you are not at work. It'd be a pain to work for such folks but they do exist.

I put in an error message during a late night debug session: "Oops, the XXX filter is corrupted. You must now sacrifice a black goat over the keyboard at midnight to restore settings". Then I forgot about it thinking it will never happen. This was my first real job as an embedded systems programmer and I was sure this would never hit. Right. Somehow, the code made it to production. We got a call from tech support about 6 months later who did not find it amusing. My boss remembered it to the day I left the company.