Both work and home were both busy for half of a year. At work, starting in April 2008 and running through the end of October, I was training new teams on a few of the computer business applications I support. Applications I inherited, and therefore knew, well, nothing.
A couple years ago, our Information Technology group--the department in which I work--went through a round of employee cuts, and then less than a year later, it happened again. During each of those events, some of the other programmers in my department survived, but then after the round of cuts were done, they decided that the company morale was too low and left anyway. After two rounds of that, I ended up as the only programmer out of five who previously were in our department. And so I ended up supporting all the systems that everyone had supported.
Yes, I was doing the job of five programmers.
Well, some changes in April allowed me to start transitioning those inherited applications to other teams. Located in India. Half a planet (and a bizarre time zome change--12 and a *half* hours--away). The teams taking over the applications--they need to know how they work. Well, the only folks who knew that don't work for our company anymore! So, it was an insane six months during which we tore those apps apart line by line, figured them out, and trained the others folks. Oh yeah, and documented them so that the next poor sap who inherits them doesn't have the same problems!
Ya know, I'm really pretty good at figuring things out and organizing that info in a way others can use. I think I've found one of my niches. I figured out a way to map all the various parts of the system together into a structured outline, and each step of the outline contains a link to the piece of the system that does the work. This way we can capture multiple different things and different kinds of things working together, but see how they all interact, and explained in a plain English way (for the non-programmers, too)!
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