What I do isn't on that level of hell, fortunately, yet. Right now it's just a lot of identifying, mapping, and fixing fucked up mappings. It's a lot less annoying than dealing with the daily inbox item maintenance requests.
Yea our one dev had a whole project to herself and about quit because the client didn't even know what data was being sent (because thats 'our job' as the service provider) and their shit would change formatting on a week to week basis.
The person was doing data input. "oh darlene is sending report requests...ok we need to watch out for wrong date formatting...." two days later automation breaks down, CEOs yelling at each other...the problem?
" Oh Jack(hole) is covering for Darlene this week? Ya, just send to straight to Rebecca (dev) so she can have her imtern redo the data entry (slightly longer form than a credit application)"
We didn't pay our dev enough for that bullshit and the owner wouldn't budge. She was gone 3mo later and was working at a bank doing the same thing for twice the pay. Our dept lost a huge talent and awesome person for bullshit. I didn't last long either. Most key people that weren't anchored to their jobs (local or couldn't get the same job elsewhere) were gone within a year.
There was a ZERO budget for IT. Every purchase was a battle at the same time the owner was blowing a half a million a month on ebay, old cars and his bus motorhome (2 million sticker price) that he used 2x a year. That bus cost more per month than 3x data entry staff because he had to take a loan out to buy it. Madness.