[memorius]

By far the worst: on site doing commissioning / systems integration testing of warehouse automation systems - cranes moving pallets around, boxes trundling on conveyors, etc.

The automated equipment we were debugging (and volume testing with things moving around continuously) was the least of it... the huge site was still under construction. All around me there was racking being cut and welded, electricians installing stuff, aromatic concrete floor sealant being applied, various random drilling and banging.

I had to write large amounts of new code on the spot as we found problems (missing features, mostly) during testing, while the automation engineers stood around annoyed and waiting.

When I first got to the site, I didn't even have a laptop - had to lug a desktop PC and CRT monitor there and back every day (carrying it across half the site and the loading dock) for the first couple of weeks. For part of the time, this involved carrying it across iced concrete, since it had been snowing.

Oh, and there was the engineer from one of the third-party equipment suppliers, an Italian company - nice chap but he didn't speak very good English; the noise level didn't help the already poor communication, and when we started our testing, we discovered he had developed his control software from an interface specification three versions old and half a year out of date.