jurrie.net

Hell in a handbasket

Posted on Fri 06/12/09 in Personal

Looking back, it could’ve come right out of a daily wtf article, the project I took part in last year. I started out at my new job, a former PHP developer, to dive into the world of .NET. After dodging a UNIFACE bullet and working on a small .NET application, I was assigned to what I now refer to as the “terror project”. A very, very, very poorly designed web application written in VBscript, with a very, very, very, VERY poorly designed database.

The client and owner of the application is of the type “I will annoy you till you die!!” and will phone you between 10-20 times during your 8-hour working day. Every issue is major and must be fixed with utmost urgency. Due to the horrid design, testing well is hardly possible and each fix triggers a new issue somewhere else. Lack of documentation or even comments in the code, or a sane file / directory structure were also beyond the capabilities of the original conceivers of this turd.

Anyway, I was subjected to the terror for about nine months before a colleague took over all tasks in January of this year. I got myself a nice asp.net project and have been very content since. Fast forward to June 12th. It appears my colleague’s sentence was set to 10 months and now he is assigned to another project somewhere else in the country (coincidence?). Apparently, I was the first dot on the victim radar.

I now have before me a mail stating I will follow-up my colleague on the terror project, only handling the most severe issues (they all are) when I have some spare time from other projects (I never do). Coming Monday things will be set in stone and I will find out if there will be a sequel to the great evil of 2008. And as you know from the movies, sequels are worse most of the time…