When you're working on a system that's stagnated in the development phase for a few years and has chewed through more developers and teams than you even realized existed, it can be a daunting task just to explain why the system is as ridiculously bad as it is. As much as I'd love to feature such systems here, I suspect that most would prefer not to read thirty-seven pages just to get to the punch line. No less, Rick Harris was able find a *single line* of code that is a fair representation of such a system he was working on ... 

SET @intUserId = @@ROWCOUNT

And no, this was not taken out of context. And yes, it really was that bad. I'll leave it as an exersize for the reader to try to immagine what possibly could be surrounding this code.

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