So, there’s this developer at work who I have kind of a friendly adversarial relationship with.

That is to say, he’s a decent enough guy and we get along well, but he really doesn’t understand what QA’s role is.  He thinks that it’s to test the code as he’s written it, while my outlook is more that I should be testing the code to see whether he’s written it according to the spec.

This means that I tend to file lots of bugs like “per spec section 2.2.8.1, x is incorrect behavior, it should be doing y.”

In return, he’s done things like send bugs back to me marked “won’t fix”, with the Reason field filled out with “pffft.”

Anyway.  We do get along better than this would suggest, because my point of view is that, eventually, the customer will either notice that the product doesn’t work the way they wanted it to, in which case I’ll be able to pull out the bug report and point out that I filed a bug on the issue, or the customer won’t notice, in which case no harm done.

The important thing is that there IS a bug report.

But I have embarked on a program to break him, anyway.

We have heavily-subsidized snacks at work.  Candy bars are a quarter, for instance, and we get free soda.  These are pretty nice perks.

The problem is that, when snacks are so cheap, it takes a little more willpower not to indulge.

Case in point, this particular developer and Peanut M&Ms.

Three or four months ago, I was in his cubicle talking about something, and he picks up the bag of Peanut M&Ms on his desk, shows it to me, and says:

“You see this?  This is my last bag of Peanut M&Ms.  No more.  I am off Peanut M&Ms as of now.”

So of course, for the next month or so, I would drop off another bag of Peanut M&Ms on his desk when he walked away, and he would come back, and he would swear, and then I would hear the bag being ripped open.

Our snack cabinet ran out of Peanut M&Ms eventually, and when it got restocked, they did not restock the Peanut M&Ms.  I believe this to have been at his request.

This evening, at the store, I saw that they had Christmas-themed 2-pound bags of M&M products marked down to a buck-eighty.

Someone’s getting a little present Monday morning.

I’m a bad man.