There I was, boarding a train on the day lovers consider special filled with the blooming hope that large scale celebration of love in global proportions will somehow cause the very atmosphere to be so infused with the romantic spirit that it would prove to be all but impossible that I will find myself not sharing my cabin in the train with a ravishing coy charming single female. By the time the first hour had passed however it dawned upon me with unusual distinctness just how possible the impossible can actually be. For to my right sat a slumbering sardar whose stupendous snores seemed to provide additional forward momentum to the train. Opposite him sat a middle aged gentleman who seemed to have only recently discovered the joy of leering at lurid pictures of scantily clad women in seedy magazines. To my left sat a government servant with an iPod firmly lodged in his ears and completely oblivious to the strange disturbing sounds that were emanating from his person apparently in tune with some melody that only he was privy to. In their midst sat the glum author of this post who before quietly crawling up to his berth spent a solemn moment in silent wonder of what the good saint Valentine must have in truth perpetrated to produce an effect of such undiluted strangeness upon circumstances long long after a tear was shed and a sermon was said upon his grave!

A recent experience at work has left me convinced that sometimes a bug is quite simply just meant to be. I do not refer mind you to bugs that choose to make an appearance only after the user has performed a jiggle in front of the monitor having muttered strange incantations while standing on his/her head with the planets aligned in just the right manner. I refer rather, to bugs that a blind man in a dark room would have been hard pressed to miss (now, if you feel the need to clarify with me the fine point of how a dark room can make the process of locating an object harder than it would otherwise have been to a blind man, then I strongly urge you to resist that need).

Any given feature in the product that I am working on must necessarily pass through the following quality checks before it ever sees the light of day. It must first negotiate a series of unit test cases cunningly designed to trip it up when it's not looking. It must then survive the traumatic experience of system testing where the entire development team has a go at it. This is followed by days upon days of unending torment by the quality assurance team. Only those features that display the resilience to pass through all this without blemish make it to the final release. And yet, a bug that failed the most basic of test cases managed to escape notice and show up in front of the customer!

Like I said, some bugs are just meant to be!