And so began a period that lasted just two weeks, but that now (visible to me only as I look back, and only after allowing myself to remember Ethan Levin and everything that happened) is a time I see as a gate, a suddenly opened door that introduced me to the real pleasures of the programming life: to its compulsions like a hunger, the desire to make something work an almost physical need. I was too harried at the time to enjoy it, too pressured by the company’s desire to ship a product, nearly overcome by new management responsibilities, not to mention devastated in my personal life, lonely, drinking, smoking myself sick. Yet even through all these difficulties, it came: the feeling of being a squirrel on the hunt for a buried nut, an animal rightness to the whole exercise, as if all of evolution had taken place only to produce a creature like me, fabricated to dissect its own mind and the thoughts of others of its kind. I was going to find the cause of that bug. Nothing would stop me. Nothing would give me more pleasure. No other experience in life could offer the satisfaction that would be mine at that moment when, understanding what had gone wrong and how to make it right, I would sit back and pronounce the words a programmer always says on a soft, happy exhale: It works.