A few years ago, Gregory was about to start development on a quoting system, when the client pulled-out all of a sudden. “We appreciate all the work you put in so far,” they told him, “but your overall estimate was just too much; we were able to find someone else who could develop this for less than a third of your cost.”
Gregory was surprised, especially since he had bid the system fairly low. He would have considered renegotiating, but the “someone else” they found was Fred Blogs, who happened to be the VP’s son-in-law. And one thing that Gregory had learned over the years is that it’s pretty hard to compete with nepotism.
That is, unless you wait it out. Less than twelve months after Fred’s system – a Microsoft Access database – had gone into production, the company’s process had slowed down so much that many employees were secretly moving back to paper quotes. This presented a problem on many levels, mostly in that reporting would be completely inaccurate.
Gregory agreed to help out, and his task was to completely gut what Fred had done (which, as it happened, ended up costing more than Gregory’s initial estimate) and replace it with something sensible. That, too, ended up costing more than his initial estimate, but the bright side is that the client was the proud owner of some interesting code. Namely, the MegaQuit():
Public Sub MegaQuit() Dim FredBlogs Dim intx As Integer Dim intCount As Integer intCount = Forms.Count - 1 For intx = intCount To 0 Step -1 If Forms(intx).Name <> "HiddenStarter" Then DoCmd.Close acForm, Forms(intx).Name End If Next If pboolCloseAccess <> True Then FredBlogs = MsgBox("Application will close. Continue?", vbOKCancel, "EXIT") If FredBlogs = vbCancel Then DoCmd.OpenForm "Start_up" Else pboolCloseAccess = True DoCmd.Quit acQuitSaveAll End If End If End Sub
Fred also left some other interesting tidbits in the code.
Public Static Sub FrErr(NameOfApp) Dim Count Count = Count + 1 If Count < 5 Then On Error GoTo FrErrErr MsgBox "I'm broken. I Don't know what happened (I wasn't running at the time)," & vbCrLf & _ "but I called: " & _ NameOfApp & " and bang! The duff code came back with " & vbCrLf & _ Err.Number & ":" & Err.Description & ". Sorry." Else MsgBox "I'm broken. I Don't know what happened (this isn't the first time)," & vbCrLf & _ "but I called: " & _ NameOfApp & " and bang! The duff code came back with " & vbCrLf & _ Err.Number & ":" & Err.Description & ". I'm very sorry. Have you considered restarting the PC?" End If Exit Sub FrErrErr: MsgBox "I'm Broken. I Don't know what happened and when I tried to find out I got an error. Sorry.", , "Sorry" End Sub 'A Pause function Public Function HoldIt(Longish As Integer) Dim Startof Dim temp temp = 0 Startof = Second(Now) Do temp = Second(Now) - Startof Loop Until temp > Longish End Function
Gregory