This was at my first job, a site that sold magazine subscriptions during the dot com boom.

Times got rough during the bust. First sign, free snacks disappeared. Everyone started worrying, and checking fuckedcompany.com to see if we were on it. One day everyone's machines shut down, and someone walks around saying company meeting in the cafeteria. My Russian coworker asks if I have a screwdriver so he can liberate his hard drive. Go to the meeting. Most of the company is being laid off immediately. You have to hang around having interviews with your boss to see if you still have a job. I don't.

2 weeks later they call and ask if I'd like to come back. Turns out trying to run with 1 programmer wasn't working out for them. I go back.

First problem we try to tackle - the shopping cart is slow. We put in a hack SQL file to delete carts older than 1 week. Gets better. Then gets slower again. Rinse and repeat 2 times. Finally digging through the source in the perl folder (not what the main site was in) we find what scheduled job was supposed to do this. Dig in. What do we find out? sa_scheduled_tasks user account was deactivated, because only user accounts belonging to people who still had a job were left active.

Fuuuuuuuuuuuck.