Bert worked for a software solutions company in the late 90s that primarily served one client. This client requested help fixing a slow helpdesk scheduling application they had built. Initially, Bert discovered that scheduling just five workers took an hour and a half due to inefficient VBA code. One example of this poor coding practice was a long series of nested IF statements to convert zero-indexed months to one-indexed months. Bert believed the software was fundamentally flawed and that he was not the right person to fix it. His boss, however, insisted on keeping the client satisfied for financial reasons. Over several weeks, Bert managed to improve the scheduling time to thirty minutes. This improvement was deemed sufficient by his boss to report success to the client. Despite this, the program was ultimately never used and was abandoned. Later, Bert learned the client had planned to discontinue custom software services and assign the task to a new, non-programming hire from their accounting department. This suggests the client's own internal solution might have been developed by someone without a coding background.