20 years ago I was a year into my second job, had just about survived the layoffs that happened as a result of the merger between the insurance giant that owned the company I worked for and another insurance giant (the process later described as a "textbook way of how not to merge two large companies"). We'd gone through the whole "You must apply for your job" type thing, and they gave us the opportunity of applying for others as well, so everyone in my team applied for the team lead role (much to her disgust, no doubt). One of us found the interview scorecard - we'd all done better than her, so, of course, she kept the job... Other things thrown up by the merger was the team manager left, and we were incorporated into a larger team (still within the subsidiary company), and they were talking about setting us up into a sort of codetroubleshooter thing - see a problem and solve it with some decent apps development. Which would have been good; unfortunately, a new manager was appointed, and it swiftly changed to a BAU maintenance role - at which point I started hunting around for a new job. Six months later, I'd landed a dream job, resigned (the last member of the team to do so), and team leader immediately went off sick for a week with stress.

Happy days.

Oh, tech. Right. I went to that job as it was advertised as a VB programmer / SQL dev job. Great. That's what I was interviewed as, and, despite not having any real experience in either of those techs, I got the gig. In the month between them offering me the job and me starting, they changed their minds and started developing this thing in Application Manager from Intelligent Environments. Great tool, but not what I was sold. And it hadn't been designed to do what we needed it to do, so we had to work out how to fake OCX interface calls to drive the treeviews & tabviews on screen. And as for the interface DLLs to the other more complicated bits... ugh. We started a migration to VB4 after delivering the first pass of the system in AM, having already done the print system in VB.