A client's implementation of our report distribution service would unpredictably send copies of old reports, often completely different reports, often for compl

A client's implementation of our report distribution service would unpredictably send copies of old reports, often completely different reports, often for completely different entities, often reports that were not intended for distribution. The distribution service used the same reporting system as our ad hoc notification service. Records for scheduled distributions had a field that stored the ID of the scheduled event that prompted the report generation. In this way, the distributions could grab all the output by event ID without needing to know anything about the reports themselves. The problem: The ad hoc system relied on the same behavior, but since it didn't have actual scheduled events, the programmer who implemented it halfheartedly spoofed an ID based on the current time when the ad hoc notification created report requests. Over time, these spoofed IDs collided with the real event IDs used by the scheduled distributions. We entered a bug report. The bug report got closed, because the developers said the module was being re-implemented in a different language, so the functionality would likely be different (read as "broken in different ways"). Time passes. On a lark, the colleague I originally investigated the issue with suggests we do a code review to see whether the bug did indeed get fixed. The new programmer copied & pasted the original Visual Basic code responsible for the bug into the new Visual Basic .NET project, comments and all. In the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It's about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It's about love and memory. It's about sorrow. It's about sisters who never write back and people who never listen.