This story is about 10Plus1 in the Web Development industry, located in Toronto.
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The largest project I worked on when I was at 10plus1 was a multi-user game environment for a children's clothing company. The name of the company isn't terribly important, as this horror story isn't about the client, nor even 10plus1, but one of the devs on the team, a man named Tristan.

Tristan was in charge of the back-end coding, while I was in charge of the front-end coding. There were a lot of difficulties working with Tristan, though to be fair, many of them were clashes of personality (How many times can a person charitably laugh at a story about how awesome it is to get so stoned over the weekend that you can't move your legs?). He was a competent programmer, and would often quote us method and parameter, as it were, but he seemed to lack a certain creativity with the assembly of the pieces. Reading the dictionary doesn't make you a writer, and all that.

It was a frequent sticking point that he wanted to do everything perfectly the very first time, even though what we were doing was something none of us had done before. My thought was, and is, that we should get a good prototype running; even if it's not perfect, we'll have that to base future work off of. Tristan's way was much slower, and as the project slowly progressed I worried that his way would leave us with only a partial, non-functioning product. If we took too long to get the perfect product built my way, we'd at least have something to take to the client. Tristan disagreed, and would refuse to give us something quick-and-dirty that he could tidy up later on, once we knew it worked.

To counter what seemed to me to be a lackluster pace, I started working later and later, getting those initial versions of the code up and running -- so I could move on to the next bit of my work -- and giving that work to Tristan for him to take whatever time he needed to tidy up the code. Basically I started pre-chewing his food.

This went on for a while. As we hurtled toward beta, it became one of those projects where 60-to-80-hour workweeks were the norm (more to 80 for me than for Tristan). The night before a deliverable to a client, we had to stay late. Tristan, to his credit, stayed until about 10pm before heading home. I (along with Shawn and a couple others) stayed overnight to get it out the door.
I think I left at about 6 AM, or maybe 8 AM.

That wasn't the big issue for me, though, because from time to time, everybody needs to pull an all-nighter. What bothered me was that at about 11AM I got a phone call from the office; something was broken, and I needed to fix it.

I asked if it was something Tristan could fix, and they said he wasn't there. He'd called in sick, because he'd been working late lately, and needed to relax. So that left me to fix whatever was broken.

I got myself out of bed, drove back into Toronto (I was living in Oakville at the time), and nearly got into an accident due to a combination of an icy patch in the road, and my own extreme tired. I went into the office and found that the very small bug in the code, then reloaded it to find it working just fine.

As I was double-checking that everything else was okay, that I could indeed get the hell home and sleep, Tristan slunk in. Someone called him again, told him how late I'd been in, and how when called I showed up to fix the issue. He felt bad, he said, and to his credit he apologized, but, good lord, it was hard to hear.

Hey, Brian, I didn't realize how late you'd stayed, ha ha, but I'm here, now, you need me to fix anything?

No, I fixed it.

So we're cool?

Yes. Cool. I want to punch you in the brain.

What?

In the brain. In the BRAIN. Is that possible, do you think?

I was asked that day whether I thought the company could stand to lose him. I said no, but only because there didn't exist the time between then and the launch date to get my work and his done by myself. So it's quite possible his ass was saved by a calendar.