>>At one place I worked, I would take printout to our secretary's desk and, having made sure I wasn't interrupting anything, would sit down and tell her what the code was doing - or, better said, what I *thought* I'd told the code to do. Generally the session would end with me saying "and here's where I do....wait a minute....what the hell?" and I'd go wandering back to my office.
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>>She often told me that she had no idea what I was talking about, as she wasn't a programmer. I'd tell her that making myself explain the code to her, I found the issue much faster than if I stared at the screen for hours.
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>>As for the 2AM thing, back in the college days - when dinosaurs walked the earth and everyone was on mainframes - I'd be driving home, having finally given up on finding the solution, and it would pop into my brain. And I'd ALWAYS be closer to home than school.
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>You just gave me a vision of college, standing in line waiting to get to the reader to program the mainframe. The class was over at 10 PM. We would have punched a set of IBM cards – sometimes hundreds – and they would be in a special box. After standing in line for over one hour (it was almost midnight) the guy in front of me dropped his box of cards. Cards were everywhere! I still feel sorry for that guy. He went home and did not return to class.

Yeah, we were known for sometimes 'shuffling' someone's deck when they were being a royal PITA.