It is August 2026, and the great "Corporate Realignment" has finally claimed our floor space. The Director announced last month that we were moving to a new office space downstairs. He called it "embracing a leaner footprint." I call it "moving into what used to be the building’s stationery cupboard."
The downsizing meant one thing: the Great Purge.
In the back of the old server room sat a majestic, thirty-year-old dust trap. Box upon box of thick, ring-bound physical manuals, system documentations, and printed schema charts for dBase III, MS Access 97, Visual FoxPro, Lotus 1-2-3, and legacy COBOL batch scripts. They were the sacred texts of an era when databases were built by men who wore short-sleeved shirts with ties.
The Director stood over the pile, his smartphone in hand, looking like a conqueror inspecting captured loot.
"Dump it all, Dave," he declared, waving a hand dismissively. "We are in the AI Generation now. Nobody reads printed books anymore! If we need to fix an old query, we’ll just prompt the LLM. Pack them up and take them to the recyclers. Turn that paper weight into digital capital!"
I immediately stood my ground. "Sir, absolutely not. We cannot throw these out."
"Dave, don't be a digital hoarder," he scoffed. "It's just paper."
"It's not just paper!" I shot back, holding up a 500-page, grease-stained Visual FoxPro 6.0 Programmer's Guide like a shield. "Our core logistics engine is built on this exact version of FoxPro. Half the company's reporting runs on MS Access 97 macros that haven't been touched since the Y2K scare, and the warehouse inventory still talks to a dBase III file! If these systems twitch, ChatGPT isn't going to save us—these manuals will. We need these documents."
The Director smirked, taking the FoxPro manual from my hands and dropping it back onto the pile with a dull thud. "Nonsense. AI has absorbed the entirety of human knowledge. Clear the floor, Dave. That’s an order."
So, I packed them. Three hours of back-breaking manual labor, taping up cardboard boxes, loading them into my car boot, and driving to the recycling yard.
The final tally? 35 kilograms of foundational IT history, three sweating sysadmins, and a whole lot of wasted time.
The recycling yard boss weighed the boxes, spat into a drain, and handed me a crumpled banknote and a silver coin.
MYR 7.50.
Seven ringgit and fifty sen. When I handed the Director the receipt back at the office, he beamed, patted himself aggressively on the back, and said, "See, Dave? Operational efficiency! That’s pure profit on the P&L!"
That afternoon, Brenda from Accounts and I set up a quiet pool at the coffee machine. I bet her 50 sen a day that the legacy infrastructure wouldn't survive three weeks without those manuals.
The honeymoon phase of the AI Generation lasted precisely twenty days.
It started on a Tuesday with the legacy inventory system—that Frankenstein monster built in Visual FoxPro back in 1998. A single table index corrupted. Then, the legacy HR database—an Access 97 .mdb file held together by macro magic and prayers—refused to process monthly payroll. Finally, the main dBase III customer table locked up completely.
"No problem!" The Director chirped, rushing into my cubicle. "Just feed the error codes to the enterprise AI agent!"
I logged into our top-tier AI tool and fed it the broken FoxPro script and the dBase index error. The AI stared at the prompt for twenty seconds, generated a glowing loading wheel, and spat out a response:
"It appears you are using obsolete 1990s syntax. Have you considered rewriting your entire enterprise architecture in Python?"
It turned out that because Visual FoxPro, dBase III, and 90s Access macros died decades ago, modern AI models had almost zero training data on them. The "AI Generation" had no idea how ancient indexing locks worked.
"Where are the manuals, Dave?!" The Director yelled, his voice cracking as the HR Director burst into the room screaming about missing salary payments. "Where is the FoxPro index guide and the dBase recovery chart?!"
"They were recycled, Sir," I said, taking a slow sip of my water. "A few weeks ago. I told you we needed them. You bought half a sandwich with the profits."
The climax of the disaster hit at 4:00 PM. Desperate to look like he was in control, the Director took matters into his own hands. He logged into the core legacy server himself and pasted a hallucinated, AI-generated SQL query directly into the master dBase III console, attempting to "force-sync" the database.
The result was immediate and catastrophic.
The system didn't just fail; it inverted. The legacy dBase engine misread the AI’s botched syntax, triggering an automated Lotus 1-2-3 macro batch routine from 2002 that had been dormant for twenty-four years.
Across the office, every single networked printer suddenly sprang to life. They didn't print documents. Driven by the corrupted legacy command, they began printing out 4,000 blank pages of continuous-feed sprocket paper from the archive store, while the smart-lights in the ceiling started strobing in sync with the server room alarm.
To make matters worse, the automated inventory system—convinced by the Director's query that our stock levels were at absolute zero—automatically fired off an un-cancellable, priority purchase order to an old supplier for 12,000 physical 3.5-inch floppy disks. And used the old dot-matrix printers to print out the Purchase Order copies.
As the office filled with the deafening sound of printers screaming and the Director frantically trying to stuff blank paper back into the trays, Brenda from Accounts walked past my desk.
She looked at the chaos, sighed, and slid a 50 sen coin across my keyboard.
"You won the bet, Dave," she said calmly. "Now ask the Director if his AI model comes with a floppy disk drive."
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