>http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The-Query-of-Despair.aspx
>
>No, not one of mine :)

Sadly, I can relate. This app I have been supporting for the past three months would give that one a run for its money. This past week I spent probably 20 hours coding an enhancement in a program that was particularly bad, even for its genre. The form prints a bunch of legal documents, with half a dozen options, three different states, all through common code with lots of IF statements. In come cases -- oh wait, there are lots of CASE statements, too -- the IFs are separated from their ENDIF siblings by hundreds of lines of code. The cmdPrint.Click() method has over 2000 lines of code.

You know what's even more hilarious? There is a cmdPreview button on the form which is entirely separate although nearly identical, so you have to be sure to change everything twice. Inheritance? Even a called procedure? Fuggedaboudit! I am so glad it's the weekend ;-)

In fairness, it isn't all horrible. This week I got to do some actual development as well. It's a law firm and part of the app behavior is to send an email to the various attorneys when a significant event occurs. A case being set for trial, for example. This was entirely hard coded with email addresses. The request came from the woman who heads the KC office, who grew tired of every email coming to her and having to forward them to the attorney actually responsible for the trial county. She attached a spreadsheet to the ER stating which lawyer is responsible for every Kansas and Missouri county they operate in. I got to do some real programming -- a new table in SQL Server, SPs to support it, changes in the calling programs to get rid of all the hard coding, a nicely done CRUD program to support the new table. So that was nice.

They give me a nice check every two weeks ;-)