Should Not Take Too Long Right

Famous last words before descending into the nine circles of legacy code hell. You think you're just gonna pop in, fix that tiny little bug, and be out in 20 minutes. Fast forward three days later and you're still untangling spaghetti code written by someone who apparently thought comments were for cowards and variable names like "x1", "temp2", and "finalFinalREALLY" were peak engineering.

The real kicker? That "small bug" turns out to be a load-bearing bug. Fix it and suddenly seventeen other things break because half the application was unknowingly depending on that broken behavior. Now you're in a meeting explaining why a two-hour task turned into a complete architectural overhaul.

Pro tip: When someone says "it's just a small bug in the legacy code," immediately triple your estimate. Then triple it again. You'll still be wrong, but at least you'll be closer.