I've actually had a similar and very Dilbert-like experience in real life. During one of my previous jobs I was assigned to a project the boss claimed was "90% complete" and expected me to finish it in a little over a week. (This implying that it had already been worked on for at least nine weeks by a previous developer who was then reassigned to a different project.) During that one week however it became clear that there was something seriously wrong with the given estimate. I ended up having to explain to the boss that although perhaps 90% of the required functionality had been implemented, it was actually that "90%" of every project that only takes about 10% of the actual work to implement (or auto-generate with some tool!), and the remaining "10%" (the parts requiring some actual effort!) would in reality take a lot more than just one week! To make things worse, what had been built already was actually just a .NET replica of a previous system from a different platform, with a 100% correspondence in specs. Which ofcourse just amounts to an unneccesary re-invention of the wheel, is likely to be costly and will probably just introduce new bugs! The whole thing had obviously been grossly underestimated from the onset, and the implementation/port had been tossed of in such a hurry that it was riddled with obvious defects. Subsequently the client was called in for a spec-review meeting, where said boss didn't even show up in person, leaving me alone to explain this mess somehow to the client. After the meeting it finally dawned on me where the heck that ghastly "90%" figure had come from, it was in fact the relative size of the requirements gap! Later discussion with my boss reluctantly revealed him as having totally underestimated the client's expectations, that the project was already way over budget even before it was assigned to me, and then told me to "just find a way to fix it ASAP!". I was of course outraged and pointed out how utterly unreasonable that was, and after several weeks of fingerpointing and me hopelessly trying to come up with a silver-bullet to rescue the project, the stupid boss still had the nerve to fire me for not succeeding! Not only was I completely run over by this fool, but the treatment I recieved was also a multiple-violation of worker legislation. Fortunately for me it didn't take long to find a new (and much better!) job, and I wasn't at all surprised recently when I found out that the previous company is now out of business and has been filed for bankruptcy