Peter,
>Yes. I get the idea. No wonder it looked like ....
Yeah! But it was a) an in house app, used by 4 people
(one of them me) for between 5 and 15 minutes a day,
saving each day about an hour of work.

Big company way of doing:
after letting mangagment know about the possibility,
another programmer was asked to give an estimate.
Since he liked doing manual jobs for an hour a day,
he asked for 1.5 days to give the estimate
(rule of thumb: this will translate into an estimate
of over 12 and under 20 days, and with "encurring problems"
through implementation will reach between 18 and 24
days to implement.), to make sure this would never happen.

So I said: I can implement it in less than 1.5 days<g>.
Not nice, but something running in the coffee break.
So the other guy fell for it, said "Impossible - I
am not sure if it will ever work, have to research API's"
and I offered not to charge for any time more than 2 days,
only payable if it worked.

Got more fun showing off the "impossible",
which raised the time spent up to nearly a day.
And so another ugly tool lived in happy silicon...

Be sure to lay your own groundwork FIRST <g>

rgds

thomas