The Circle of Fix
(Imagine this sung in the style of a bombastic Broadway ensemble number, with frantic developers in cubicles, offshore support reps on video calls, and a giant spinning wheel labeled “Circle of Fix” looming over the stage like the Circle of Fifths but made of Jira tickets.)
[Opening Chorus – The Onshore Team]
(to the tune of a rising perfect fifth, but slightly off-key because the build just failed again)
We shipped the code to Bangalore at night,
Thought we’d wake up to features shining bright!
But every patch they send comes back with flair—
A brand-new bug in every layer!
[Offshore Support Choir – sunny and upbeat]
Namaste, sir! Your ticket is resolved!
We fixed the null by making three evolve!
Please to be closing, rate us five out of five,
Regression suite? We keep that barely alive!
[The Circle of Fix – Full Company]
(sung in overlapping rounds, like a fugue that never resolves)
It goes C to G to D to A,
Then E fixes B which breaks yesterday!
Every dominant bug spawns a subdominant twin,
We modulate keys but the crashes stay in!
Round and round in the Circle of Fix,
Every perfect fifth costs us sixty-six!
We outsource the patch, they outsource the blame,
And the circle keeps turning—it’s always the same!
[Verse – The Senior Dev, world-weary baritone]
I once wrote clean code in the key of C-sharp,
Now I’m chasing stack traces through functions that warp.
They “refactored” my function to save fourteen lines—
Now it sings in twelve tones and summons daemons at runtime.
[Verse – The Offshore Lead, cheerful soprano]
We work for one-fifth of your Silicon pay,
So you get one-fifth quality—fair trade, I’d say!
We fix it in React, then port it to Flask,
Then wrap it in COBOL because PM asked!
[Bridge – The Product Manager, spoken over chaotic jazz chords]
“Scope is fixed, deadline is fixed, budget is fixed—
Everything else is flexible!”
(Beat.)
“Why is nothing working?!”
[Final Chorus – Everyone, descending into glorious chaos]
Circle of Fix, modulating pain!
Every tritone resolved births a bug once again!
We’ll be here forever in seven-sharp hell,
Pushing hotfixes nightly while stakeholders yell!
Round and round in the Circle of Fix,
The bugs go marching four by four—hurrah? Hurrah?
We modulate up but the quality dips,
And the circle keeps spinning…
(whisper) …send it to the Philippines.
[Blackout on a single unresolved dominant seventh chord that never resolves. A lone support rep voice from the dark:]
“Have you tried turning it off and on again?”
