The Bug: A Novel by Ullman Ellen

Author:Ullman, Ellen [Ullman, Ellen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Picador
Published: 2012-02-28T00:00:00+00:00

You tell yourself: you

can use this later, this

humiliation.

“I do QA now,” I said to my old friend.

She laughed. “Oh, I forget what that means.”

“Quality assurance. Testing.”

And then for the first time, I used the word without irony. “My title is QA engineer,” I told her.

She giggled and made a sound like a train whistle. “Whoo-whoo! Engineer!”

August thirtieth: Summer camp ended, the course was done, and the bug came back.

I brought Ethan the report.

“Again?” he asked.

“Again.”

“Don’t tell me: no core.”

“No. No core.”

His expression was odd, mouth fixed, eyes slitted, something there I couldn’t read. “No. Of course not,” he said. “This bug will never leave a core, will it?”

I shrugged.

“And don’t tell me: big-time customers or VCs or someone like that.”

“Federal Reserve, Washington, D.C.”

He laughed. “Only the best for my bug, huh?”

Maybe it’s here that I should have started noticing something about Ethan Levin. When I look back on it, it seems that my having learned a bit of programming might have brought me closer to him, more able to understand him, help him. But coding for me was still a lovely game. I was doing exercises, samples. My code didn’t have to interact with anyone else’s. I had no deadlines, no requirements, no venture capitalists standing over my shoulder. Most of all, there was no one keeping track of my bugs.

I saw the squint in his eyes, the bend in his neck, and did nothing. I put down the bug report, made some stupid remarks about “malloc,” the memory allocation routine, and left.

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