Several years ago I had a client who needed to be able to receive files from a client of theirs. This was before Dropbox and the like, so I just went in and set up a quick and dirty FTP server. Worked fine, client got their files, all was good with the world.

A couple weeks later: “hey, we have another client that needs to send us files, can you set them up on the FTP?” Sure, no problem.

Repeat for about the next six months. The thing turned into this huge glob of a mess that miraculously enough still worked.

Finally, I call up my contact there and tell him if he wants this to be a permanent solution we should go in and set it up right, and to do that I’m going to need a bunch of information from him, who needs access to what, who should not be able to access what, etc. He says fine, why don’t you come on over and we’ll hash it all out.

I go on-site, we end up having a 2-hour meeting (billed, of course) where we go over all this stuff, plenty of notes are taken, decisions are made. We wrap up, I tell him all I need now is the list of users and their access needs and I can clean the whole thing up.

I never got the list. The thing just continued to grow and grow into some kind of unearthly abomination. Fortunately, I left that job before the thing imploded completely. Someone else got to untangle that mess.