Hour three on the same bug. He had eliminated the obvious causes. He had eliminated the non-obvious causes. He had re-read the same fifty lines so many times the words had stopped meaning anything. He stood up and walked around. He came back and the code still made no sense. There was a thing that was happening that should not be happening, and every path he could see to explain it had been ruled out. He was not frustrated yet. Just stuck, in the very specific way a bug makes you stuck, where the world has quietly declared that it is not going to cooperate with any of your current models of it and is waiting for you to think of something you haven't thought of yet.
