Dither and Bicker

A previous employer entrusted the redesign of a major product to an offshore firm on the other side of the world. After about seven months, they lost total confidence in this team and severed all ties. It quickly fell on me to salvage the project and I believe it took about three months to getting it working "passably". Nevertheless I still got constant questions about why it was taking so long. Rather than try to explain all of the issues with the offshore code to management and the business owners of the product, I printed out a before and after of a single function in a single file (of which there were hundreds of others in a similar state).

So important to note here: my revised code was about two pages long when spaced for readability. The original code was about eight pages long, basically single-spaced, and didn't work at all.

I taped this over my workstation and whenever someone asked me about the delays I just pointed. It always did the trick.