When Michelle M. started her new job, she feared the worst, but hoped for the best. She'd be maintaing an app that had been around since the 1980s and made an impressive tour of technologies — from Clipper to VB to VB.NET and finally to C#. So I guess she didn't so much fear the worst as expect the worst.

That faint little ray of hope she had that the code wouldn't be so bad was shattered when she met the senior developer. The first thing he said to her was "the application sucks." Michelle smiled slightly, unsure if he was kidding (he wasn't). "I mean it really sucks," he reiterated.

When she finally got a chance to sit down at her desk, she opened on a random code file just to see how bad it would be. The file she clicked on had about a three to one ratio of comments to lines of code.

private void txt_fld_TextChanged(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
    // This code is here simply for debugging purpose to try to figure out
    // where the FREAKIN' data is coming from.  (This code SUX!  Have I already said that?)
    // Simply create a TextChanged event, insert this code, set break point on code, then
    // when this get updated you can step back to the actual code that sets this value.
    string debugFreakinPatheticCode = "sux";
}


//what a totally freakin stupid thing to do!!!!
//this is the dumbest, kludgiest, most unmaintainable garbage I've seen in a long time.
//If you're looking through this code, you're about to encounter a real treat; this is just the beginning.
//Congrats to the genius who put this crap together...

It was as though someone had gone in and added those comments specifically to scare Michelle off. She was able to make some sense of the code, but couldn't help sharing the sentiment with the Senior Developer and whichever developer had added the debugFreakinPatheticCode string.

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