No. The math was wrong. Unless… the trial wasn't counting real hours. It was counting working hours. The hours the application was open and active. The 23 hours he had spent wrestling with subreports. The 4 hours of staring at the "Group Expert" in despair. The cumulative sum of his life force poured into this single file.

The client, a regional logistics firm, needed a complex report: a nested summary of shipping routes, fuel surcharges, and driver overtime, cross-tabbed by quarter. And they needed it by 9 AM tomorrow. It was now 2 AM.

By hour ten, he had wrestled the database connection into submission. By hour fifteen, he had convinced the formula editor to calculate fuel surcharges without dividing by zero. By hour twenty, the report ran without errors. It was ugly, but it ran.

His heart began to tap a nervous rhythm. He opened the "About" screen. There it was, in cold, digital honesty: