Annoying

Please to the ones of you who read or work with lots of code from other people.
Could you tell me about annoying/funny experiences you had?

I'm particularly interested in senior programmers who develop their own particular style and abusing their seniority force it onto juniors despite it being a clusterfuck and say shit like "Once you learn a little more you'll understand why I do it that way"


Thanks.

The worst I had to deal with is the code of a WIN32 BUSINESS APP DEVELOPER who made 90% of the tools the workers use and left the company years ago leaving behind him ~40.000 lines of uncommented source which amusing features such as hex literals instead of OR'd flags and customized message loops which recorded every keystroke in order to report to the supervisors matches to banned keywords such as "porn" "facebook", the name of any boss/supervisor and their family (I shit you not), and crap like "Al Qaeda" and "cocaine."

Funny anecdote: workers beat the keylogger at first by hitting backspace a couple of times in middle of words, also screwed each other typing banned words in others computers leading people to unplugging the keyboards( and sometimes steal them ) whenever they left their posts.

Funny anecdote2: The solution they found to beating the keylogger is adding to the banned keyword pool: "po", "por", "rn", "orn" if the banned word was "porn"

Funny anecdote3: Over time employees found which combinations of chars and backspaces lead to beating the keylogger like 'p' 'p' '\b' 'o' 'r' 'r' '\b' 'n' Or just leave every char key pressed for a couple seconds and then backspace for a while.

The deal was they updated to win7 and MSE detected the program as malware, also a modern and friendly look was requested too along a keylogger that works.

After a couple hours reading the code we decided to solve it  rewriting everything in Java by reverse engineering everything it did, nothing especially hard really.
The keylogger was forgotten because honestly no one gave a shit.
To this day there's still people who use the "character combinations" for banned words.

The end.