I once worked on a site-wide redesign for a Fortune 500 company. Every time we thought we had the requirements nailed down, another group in the company would show up and ask that their requirements be added. This went on for nearly three years! Luckily I wasn't in Steve's position, no one thought I'd made the project run long deliberately!
I worked for a large non-profit collective, primarily as a fundraiser, but had become the de-facto web guy because my professional background was primarily in computer-based multimedia and I built sites on the side. The organization focused on media, arts & education and as a whole was very eager to push forward into the internet. So, I wrote a pretty substantial grant proposal to NEA and got fully funded for a 3 year web project.
Well, it was a disaster. As a collective, there was no real central authority, so although I was the project manager, I had to cowtow to every individual project's wishes. Add the fact that it was primarily a group of luddites who had no, and wanted no, basic understanding of web technologies. After two years, we had a pretty decent site with some pretty neat stuff--99% of which I was responsible for--and we'd increased site traffic by over 1000%. But we were way short of our commitment to the funder and I knew we weren't going to get there, given the politics of the organization.
So in that last year, I focused almost completely on adapting a working CMS that each project could use to "do their own thing" once I was gone (which I was very definitely going to be once the money ran out). After research and testing, I settled on TYPO3 as the engine and dove head first into re-creating the site in that CMS. In my last month, I would train all the projects to use the thing.
Our site was on a leased dedicated server from a reputable hosting company, and I'd basically never had any real problems other than occasional short-time outages. It was the LEAST of my worries.
Well, I completed the build and scheduled the first project for training on using the CMS to update things. The training was to be after lunch on a Monday. I got back from a short lunch to find our site/server had been hijacked by a hacking crew who'd taken over several of the host's servers. I lost EVERYTHING I'd worked on for a year (no backup/test server due to budget).
To this day, there are former co-workers who think I sabatoged the site trying to extend my employment. It was the perfect ending to a horrible situation.
