More longer friend see that sky?

“It says 25. It should say 20”

The thought loomed. All attempts at distraction failed, turning into unwarranted meditations on how to make the number go down. Eventually, he simply resigned himself to the obsession and set to work

And work he did. He threw everything he had at it – algorithms, libraries, undocumented backhacks, brute forcing it through third party software just to see what happens, triple-booting virtual machines, leaving the tap water running in the kitchen sink. Still, the number remained at a steady 25, utterly unphased by all this creative destruction and unrelenting tomfoolery

But then

One night, he awoke, bolted upright, and walked straight to the computer. Nary a word was uttered in his internal monologue, just a vague but strong intuition that this one particular thing might actually work. He booted up one program, then another, then another, then had them ping-pong each other until

24

23

22

21

20

Finally

In his excitement, he forgot everything about having severe phone phobia and called someone to tell about what had happened. Not being well versed in phone etiquette, he began the call thusly:

“It says 20”

“My friend” the voice on the other end said, “you get it now. Congratulations”