Far smaller scale but this one still makes me giggle: Worked at large enterprise, at small project team working on the successor for a dated customer support s

Far smaller scale but this one still makes me giggle: Worked at large enterprise, at small project team working on the successor for a dated customer support system running in production. Apart from that vision, we had little idea about the domain and about what we were doing. Another team, located in France, was running the existing system, and they were required to cooperate with us. In reality think that they were quite unimpressed with our efforts. Anyway, we wanted to import their data into our system -- partly for indexing, partly because we saw this as the future -- and we managed to obtain credentials to use their SOAP API. There was a lot of data, and it was paginated by the API, for obvious reasons. Hence, we wrote a script which, when our system was spun up, would import the data from the legacy system by querying all pages of it in rapid succession. During development we imported from a test system of theirs which contained only a small amount of data but for alpha testing we wired it to their production system. After about 15 minutes we got a phone call from France demanding to know why on earth we were forcing the company customer support system to its knees in a DOS attack. By that time I think there was no doubt in their minds that they were dealing with clowns.