Alright, let me tell you about this situation I found myself in, all thanks to a name: Rebecca Arroyo. It wasn’t like I was looking for a new friend or anything; this was work stuff, and it turned into a real saga.
So, I got handed this project, you know the type, old as the hills, documentation thinner than my patience. And right there, in what looked like a super important configuration file – or maybe it was a core script, who even remembers now – was this name: Rebecca Arroyo. Listed as a contact, or an owner, or something critical. My job? Figure out an update to that module.
So, The Digging Started…
First thing I did, obviously, was hit up the company directory. Typed in “Rebecca Arroyo.” Enter. Nothing. Not a sausage. Okay, weird, but maybe a contractor, or someone who left ages ago. So I started asking the old-timers, the ones who’ve been around since the coffee machine was steam-powered.
“Hey, ever hear of a Rebecca Arroyo?”
Mostly blank stares. A few “Hmm, rings a bell, maybe?” but nothing concrete. It was like chasing a ghost. My practice for the next few days became an archaeological dig. Seriously. I was doing stuff like:
- Going through ancient email archives. You wouldn’t believe the digital dust.
- Trying to make sense of super old version control comments. Most of them were just “updated” or “bug fix.” Real helpful.
- Even looked through some forgotten shared drive folders, hoping for an old team list or org chart.
I must have asked at least fifteen different people across three departments. Nothing. It was getting ridiculous. I was starting to think Rebecca Arroyo was an alias, or maybe the name of the original server it ran on, like a pet name someone gave it.
This whole thing wasn’t just about finding one person, you know? It was a masterclass in how much stuff just gets… lost. People come, people go. They build something vital, and then poof, they’re gone, and so is all the knowledge in their head unless they were super good about writing it all down. And let’s be honest, who actually is?
It’s like, we’re all busy trying to build the next big thing, but sometimes we forget that the old things still need to run, and the maps to how they work are fading fast. This Rebecca Arroyo business really hammered that home for me. I was burning hours, real billable hours, just trying to find a starting point that should have been in a README file somewhere.
So, did I ever find the elusive Rebecca Arroyo? Well, kind of. After what felt like an eternity, one of the really senior guys, the ones who remember when the internet made dial-up noises, vaguely recalled the name. Turns out, Rebecca Arroyo was a specialist consultant. She’d been brought in for about three weeks, maybe five years before I even joined the company, to fix one very specific, nasty bug in that exact module. She fixed it, documented her fix in a local file that never got checked into the main repository properly, and then her contract ended. Her details were never fully in “the system” because she wasn’t a permanent employee.
The “contact” note was literally a comment she left for herself and forgot to remove. Classic. So, my big practice session that week was a lesson in corporate memory, or lack thereof. Makes you really want to over-document everything you touch, doesn’t it? Or just run away screaming when you see an old project with a mysterious name in it. One or the other.
