Bangalore based software developer Rossell Bhargav, who works for HashInclude Technologies, had the worst day of his career after he found out that the company’s ISP provider had banned StackOverflow.com (a question and answer site for programmers) due to “regulations from the competent authority” (read Department of Telecom).

“I wanted to swap two variables”, said Bhargav, “but man it turned to be a daunting task! I’m not kidding, I’m a senior software developer here but we are all so accustomed to StackOverflow that we hardly write code without copy-pasting snippets from there. But I didn’t know what to do when I found that it was blocked!”

“I thought I’ll ask my overseas friends who could open StackOverflow from there and let me know the code but it was night there and they were all asleep,” Bhargav added. “I had no option but to go to our tech lead and ask for some help. But since he couldn’t figure out the answer either without StackOverflow, he tried to confuse me by asking whether I wanted it with or without using temporary variable! I told him to use his best judgement but he rebutted saying I didn’t know what I was doing.”

“I finally dug deep inside one of my earlier projects, searched for some comments that hinted at possible swapping of variables and tried it. Gave a sigh of relief as it worked like a charm, probably I had copied that from StackOverflow back then”, he confessed.