You been a-working way past dark
Banking software, office park, caffeine time
Code to deliver, you try to compile everything
The linker’s throwing errors, for the fourth time
Compile job’s died -- server doesn’t answer ping

Well now, you step inside but you don’t see too many faces
Coming in to server room, to find the rack’s gone down
Smoke emission from backplane places
Blue screen warns: partition’s not found

Disk farm’s gone south
Disk farm’s gone south, and powered down

You check out Punch Card George, he knows all the codes
But he’s algorithms, he doesn’t really have much code to sling
He got a broke spacebar on his old keyboard
When he wrote his code in FORTRAN, din’t need that thing.

And Harry doesn’t mind if he doesn’t make in C
He’s just a finance guy, his code’s not so tight
But he can write Excel macros like anything
Exports it out, his peeps rewrite

With consultants
With consultants at Ing

And a crowd of code monkeys fooling around on their laptops
Punked or geek-chic with their soul patches as they chat COM MODE
They don’t give a crap about any web e-commerce app
It ain’t what they call writing code

The consultants
Yeah, consultants write Cobol... Cobol

Then the man, he digs right into the microcode
And he says at last, just as the server pings
“Compiled! Now it’s time to go home”
Overtime amassed, he thinks “cha-ching!”

“We are consultants --
We are consultants at Ing...”