What on earth more does a programmer need? Twinkies??
Pizza.
At a large travel agency, I had a huge project to deal with so they let me bring on another contractor. I hired one of the first ones I interviewed, but warned the IT manager that this guy was a "pizza guy". When asked to explain, I told them that this guy was an absolutely brilliant programmer and I hired him for his slavish dedication to efficient code (very necessary as this was a huge app that had to run very fast on slow equipment), but that he should never be allowed near any of the other employees and definitely not within a mile of any customers.
Just lock him in an office and slide a pizza under the door every several hours.
Speaking of which, that particular company presented me with one of the funniest situations I ever encountered and at which I made my best first impression in the least amount of time.
I was brought in out of desperation (this was when I'd jacked my rate sky-high because I was getting burned out and didn't want to do it 40+ hours per week anymore) because the business itself was getting hurt badly due to the slowness of their system and their inability to find anyone well-versed in all of the languages used (it was a combination of FoxPro, C, Procomm's Aspect scripting language, and a bit of Assembler).
On my initial visit to the client to sell each other on me working there, we went to the file-server room where I was introduced to a machine that was getting absolutely clobbered! I was told that it was crashing repeatedly, and I didn't doubt it. The disk drive lights where practically glowing rather than flickering.
They told me the machine had 32 meg of memory in it (a quick check showed that Netware only saw 8 meg) and that it was something like a 486/66 (decent horsepower at the time), but the "speed" command (if I remember correctly) told me it couldn't possibly be running anywhere near 66 Mhz. I had a similar setup at home that showed results about 8 times higher.
I asked permission to fiddle with it for just a couple of minutes but with the warning that I might crash it during a seeming peak usage period, and they told me to go ahead, as it'd likely crash within the hour anyway.
First thing I did was push the "Turbo" button, and it lit up. I was worried that it might not be wired to the motherboard, or worse, wired to the Reset jumpers. Apparently it wasn't. I ran "speed" again, and saw figures that looked more reasonable. Don't know if everyone remembers "Turbo" buttons, but we had them for quite a while. Their purpose was to slow machines down to the standard 8 Mhz when necessary (some needed this slow-down for boot-up, and many games were unplayable at higher speeds). Well, their's was turned off and the machine was apparently only running at 8 Mhz. One push of a button increased the machine's speed 8-fold.
Then I typed the "register memory" command to tell Netware to recognize 32 meg of memory, stepped back, and told the IT manager to hit the Enter key and watch what happens.
He did, and we watched as the hard drive lights went from their glowing to a rapid flickering, then barely flickering at all. Same with the lights on the hubs. Since the server was serving up data a bunch more rapidly, the network itself was no longer swamped with pending requests and slowly-delivered data. And we were no longer hearing the incessant chattering of hard drives being thrashed within an inch of their lives.
Basically, with one button push and a couple dozen keystrokes, in the span of about 30 seconds, their network's performance went up a BUNCH! The users could see us through the glass doors of the file-server room and probably wondered why we were all hooping and hollering.
We stayed in there for several minutes checking things like CPU, hard drive, and network activity and found that while the machine was still working pretty hard, it was just a fraction of what it had been earlier. After checking with some users (all of whom reported it was like they were suddenly on new computers), I was hired on the spot. The server ran crash-free for several weeks until I replaced it while also switching them from Arcnet to Ethernet.
Did I digress? I think what I'm trying to say is that I like pizza. <g>
