We had a minor crisis at work. I work on the Oracle HRMS system for a utility. After applying a patch and upgrade we could not transfer the time from the time card system over to the Payroll system. People like to get paid so we were more than a little motivated to get it fixed.
We gathered together as a team to work on the problem which took more than a few hours to fix. People were getting somewhat tense. Programmers as a group are on the OCD side and when we get stressed it tends to bring out this side even more.
Somebody wanted to double check something a different way. He apologized for being anal, but he said he needed to do this.
I remarked that, “Sometimes anal is good.”
The room all of sudden got real quite.
I realized what I had just said.