>>Unfortunately, I've been the one to follow the bad consultant/support/programmer and I've found it takes almost as long to get through to them that 1) I'm not like the last one they had and, 2) Yes, I truely AM trying to give them the best solution I can.
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>I once followed in a dead man's steps. Needless to say, the code he wrote in the last months was mostly unfinished, with lots of 60 line routines with "return" on line 2, and I managed to get most of the code in order, without too much refactoring. Still, I lost the customer after a few months because I didn't guess well which of the non-functional routines were important and which were just abandoned attempts. One of them was important, which I didn't fix.
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>The guy turned really nasty after that. He still owes me $2000 and it's a small price to pay for having no more contact with him.

Yeah....it would be worth 2K to not have to deal with that any more. (Sarcasm = ON) And I'm sure there was plentiful documentation on the project that told you what the requirements were. (Sarcasm=OFF)