Friends Don't Tell Friends They Know Programming
(
Aug 18 2007 - 04:25:34 PM by
Timothy Khouri) - [
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Probably one of the most frustrating things that comes with the territory of being a programmer, is when people find out, and they want you to work on a "dream job" on the side. One such "job" I'm working on right now (for a small busines) is a QuickBooks/Authorize.net integration.
They've recently started selling some of their products through an infomercial. So the Call Center will put the PGP encrypted sales records on their FTP, then I download them, decrypt them, load the customers into QuickBooks (using a nasty XML API), enter the sales reciept, charge the credit card with Authorize.net, print a shipping label (with another nasty API), and then cry... yes, that's the part where I just sit down and cry for a while because all this work isn't worth it :P
Even though I'm going to be paid for my services, it's almost never worth the money. The only thing I really get out of all of this is knowledge (as this is the first QuickBooks integration I've done). Oh, and I also get the knowledge (a reminder really) never to tell anyone that I'm a programmer :)