"I remember the day I took over a "database" responsible for running a £20m budget. On Excel."
My first "IT" job. I was a trainee engineer for a semiconductor firm. The engineering budget was somewhere in the region of £40M per day and I was given the budget variance report to run. It was an Excel spreadsheet that ran on an old 486 laptop in Excel 5 and took 20 minutes to run. The report was run at exactly 10:30 every morning (ready for the 11:30 engineering meeting) which just happened to coincide with the day shift's breakfast break (so tea/coffee and full english was consumed while the report ran).
Unfortunately for me I took over in the first week of April which meant having to rewrite the report for the new financial year. This being the first Excel report I'd ever used. And most of it being VBA driven.
Somehow I managed to decode 4 pages of VBA code over the course of a weekend and got the report out without any mishap on my first full day on the job.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
