Today I was working on some changes that had been requested to a system we manage. Technically, they’d been requested through another group, passed to a third group, and they’d talked to me about it a month or so ago, I explained how it needed to process to update into our system so that the person asking could actually see the result, but we decided that, because it’s a legacy process that translates into our database, they’d get the system figured out and then we’d figure out how to pass the updates piecemeal. Since until the flags are set for each record, they can update the source all they want and nothing happens.
Today I got a forward of a forward of the tail end of a conversation between two people that had been passed to a third. Yeah, does that sound confusing? me too! End result being that the guy that requested the original change was wondering why he’d been told it was done but it wasn’t showing up.
Somewhere along the way, the flags were never updated. Oops. Turns out, upon further inspection, that they updated table A, we process from view B, which gets that data from C. C has no relation to A. So even if they’d updated the flags, we never would have gotten anything 
So after some discussion I processed their updates directly into our dev environment so we can make sure that they do what everyone wants they should do. I don’t actually know if the source data will ever get updated
On an entirely unrelated note …. What do you call a design that has two unique keys for every entry?
Now … what do you call it when it turns out one of them is not garaunteed to be unique?
OK … And what about when the other one is garaunteed to be unique EXCEPT WHEN IT ISN’T???
*sigh* Literally, I found a set of records where A and B shared key 1, then B and C shared key 2. There is no unique way of identifying these without using (a) both keys, or (b) information that exists only inside the database
Of course, I will never get an explanation as to who’s dumb idea this design was, because that person is probably one of the guys that’s gone by now. Just like all the other design idiocy decisions that vex me (us) daily.