The nuns of St. Camillus pounded all sorts of interesting ideas into the heads of myself and my grade school pals. Some will no doubt come out in the inevitable therapy sessions I'll need when my kids crash into teenagerhood. Others, though scary at the time, make for good stories today. No doubt my guardian angel is a UNIX guru, working full time just to keep the sheer volume of my black marks from crashing all of heaven's database engines. The nuns neglected to tell us we're each others guardian angels.
Parents watch over their kids with a wary eye no supernatural creature can match.
Spouses look out for each other's interests. Friends in need find friends indeed. These thoughts bubbled to the surface recently when I asked an engineer to recode a few functions in assembly language. The system worked great but just seemed a bit slow. Some analysis turned up a busy interrupt service routine, supported by a couple of equally stressed main-line subroutines.