Had one like that, too. The previous programmer didn't believe in constants and the code was interpreting a binary protocol. Globals all over the place, too - I

Had one like that, too. The previous programmer didn't believe in constants and the code was interpreting a binary protocol. Globals all over the place, too - I refactored a variable once and got a message that production is down; it was, the database was busy deleting customer history on all its connection pool threads. To this day I don't know how that refactor could've caused it. Fun times.