Zwei schräge Vögel (1989)

Computer-science students Peter “Kamminke” Galetzky and Frank Lettau have jointly developed an innovative debugging system as their diploma thesis at the Hieronymus Lotter University in Leipzig (“a unified system for finding and correcting software errors”). In their private lives, they are not only both in love with the same woman, the singer Gina, but are also the closest of friends. The prospect of being sent to different places after graduation through the graduate placement system provokes them into a rash confrontation with the university administration. Their system is to be tested on the university’s computerized room-allocation system. Because of the unrealistic utilization targets set by the clerk in charge, the resulting room schedule contains numerous overlaps and double bookings. The incompetent clerk blames the two students for the resulting disruption to university operations. Since they want to stay together, they are sent off to the remotest backwater: the VEB Stirnräder factory in the small, isolated Thuringian town of Finsterberg-Dodeleben, where they are put to manual work in production. There, they meet not only Petra, the attractive clerk whom they both fall in love with, but also the inefficient production processes of the planned economy. The factory has a brand-new CNC machine, but development of its associated software has stalled. As a result, the production facility threatens to become a million-mark investment fiasco for the company. Kamminke and Frank hear about this, but are under a strict ban on using computers because of the chaos they allegedly caused at the university. On New Year’s Eve, with Petra’s help, they secretly break into the premises, copy the existing software, and optimize it with their debugger. They have to act cunningly to avoid being caught by the overzealous plant security guards. Without the management’s knowledge, they get the machine running on schedule. But as they celebrate their success, plant security mistakes their celebration for an orgy and confiscates the software’s only backup copy, stored on a 5.25-inch floppy disk that they mistake for a new kind of record. In January, while the combine’s director general, Dr. Bauer, is addressing the workforce at a staff meeting over the failure to meet the software-development plan, the department head responsible discovers the disk containing the working software. Since the three cannot be punished for their “successful failure” in front of the superiors who have come all the way from Berlin, they simply turn them into a youth research collective. The absurd sequence of events ends with a demonstration of the working system at the Leipzig Trade Fair, where a Japanese computer expert has traveled expressly to meet the creators of the debugger.