I Love-Hate LOLA!!
Every time i give a course somewhere, I'll show this one slide that contains the Joel Spolsky's 'Law of Leaky Abstractions'.

A simple example:

You have an XML file. When viewed in notepad or whatever editor you prefer to use, it shows fine and the XML tools are all saying its well formed. Yet, when you send it using a filestream to an http connection the server always fails. Answer? The file contains a BOM. Sending this to the server was not intended.

All the tools we used (editors) recognized the BOM and dealt with it correctly, they 'abstracted this fact away'. When we used the FileStream we didn't skip the BOM, and therefore the beginning of the message send to the server was garbled.

I have kind of made a female identity (oohh, i hope i don't get flamed for this) for the name LOLA.

LOLA is the mistress of all developers. You cannot get away from her, neither would you want to since she stimulates your brain the most. LOLA will not be denied and always show her face when you least expect it. You cannot avoid LOLA, you can only deal with her when she comes along. The game is to keep reducing the time it takes before you realize that "LOLA's here!".

So, next time she visits you.....

Say "Hi!" from me