Dress IT

Iโ€™ve also worked for companies that refused to pay for support contracts or paid for inadequate support (tweet at us!). Itโ€™s terrible.

At one such place, because we had no support and no possibility thereof, I was forced to re-engineer from scratch a Windows service that was necessary for the companyโ€™s most important application. It took me nearly two continuous days of work with maybe a few hours of sleep during this 48-hour period.

For those who donโ€™t know what this means, imagine someone told that two days from now youโ€™d need to be able to sew from scratch a fully-historically-accurate Regency-era dress, with no assistance other than a musty book with no pictures from 1946.

Thatโ€™s the equivalent of what I did. And itโ€™s completely horrible as an experience and as a practice.

There are other times Iโ€™ve had to call vendors and tell them how to fix their products โ€” slightly different but also annoying. Companies donโ€™t seem to realize that you donโ€™t need support 99% of the time, but when you need it you really need it a whole damn lot.