You may remember Tim from the sad tale of Hung, The Incidental Expert. Today, he brings us a story of the "Not Invented Here" philosophy and its ramifications.

In 1996 preperations were underway for the Olympics in Atlanta. And despite plans for Celine Dion to open the ceromony with "The Power of the Dream," people still managed to be excited. America was proud, and many profoundly American companies (e.g. those that sell apple pie, SUVs, beer, or guns) were happy to sponsor the games.

At the time, Tim was working at a large oil company in Houston. The Olympic Fever was spreading faster than the flu, and with more enthusiasm. The corporate offices were filled with Olympic-themed frizbees, coffee cups, desk toys, shirts, and posters. The promotional materials featured Ollie the Olympic Ooglyboo, whose name I just made up but I swear he's real. He was the 1996 Summer Olympics mascot; an anthropomorphic racquetball.

With the promotional materials, the company had received several pictures of Ollie playing different Olympic sports. To keep everyone in the Olympic mood, the company asked Tim to build a screensaver that would scroll through the images and deploy it to all of their computers. Tim reasoned that it'd make more sense to buy a screen saver, as it'd be cheaper than his time developing and testing, though the American NIH spirit prevailed. Tim would build the screen saver.

It didn't take long. Tim hacked together a .SCR app with its own configuration screen. It could be pointed to any directory with pictures, the order that pictures were displayed was configurable, it could go randomly, etc. He was satisfied with his testing, so he sent it off to Atlanta with deployment instructions.

Tim hadn't heard back for a few days, so he assumed all was well with the screensaver. He moved back to other projects, but after a few days, he wasn't able to connect to Atlanta's network. He later overheard coworkers saying "Yeah, it's weird, they're still trying to figure it out. Around 12:30 PM the network started running slower and slower, which is weird because everyone should be at lunch around then. The CEO's presentation to the board ended when his PowerPoint presentation was running too slow to continue. They've been rebooting the servers all day."

So the network problems started shortly after the screen saver deployment, and things would get really bad around lunchtime or the end of the day. In an "oh crap" moment, Tim figured out what had gone wrong — rather than copy the images to each workstation, they'd pointed everybody's screensaver to a single directory on a single file server. Each JPG was about 3MB, and there were at least a thousand workstations in the Atlanta HQ on a 16MB token ring connection. Once people started leaving for lunch or going home for the evening, their screen saver would come on. Tim's screensaver had effectively crippled the network.