Robots love paradox

It's a little known fact of Special Ops Engineering that robots do, indeed, love paradox. Their work ethic is subject to whimsy as much as anyone else's. Take this morning, for instance...

Due to a recent software "upgrade", it is now possible to schedule future events to occur in the past. This is compounded by dependencies, where A must occur before B. Today I managed to schedule A to happen as soon as possible (in the future), but B to occur 30 minutes in the past.

When I run the system, it tries to "catch up" the calendar to the present, by running all "skipped" past events first. So it tries to run B, but can't because A hasn't happened yet. A won't happen, though, until B gets executed. The system flags a bunch of errors and effectively gridlocks itself until someone with the requisite tech credentials and magic-password-knowledge intervenes.

Since nothing was going to get done anyway, I had a cup of coffee and wrote a bug report. Then I deleted everything in the calendar and carefully scheduled it in a less paradoxical manner.

(To be fair to our dev team, I knew it was a beta release when I installed it.)

Now my robot is behaving like nothing happened. (What, me? Throw a tizzy and ruin everyone's morning? Oh no, you must be thinking of someone else.) It occurs to me that the particularness of a technical project is directly proportional to its complexity. The more moving parts, software levels, variables, etc, at play, the more everything has to be Just So or nothing works at all.