Some times things work out so badly all you can do is laugh. After talking to the local programmer/project-manager I mentioned earlier, we finally had a chance to hire him, and it was a disaster. He had been a lead engineer with a dot-com company that went bust, and while he was reluctant to work as a consultant, he also needed the income, so we brought him on as a contractor before making him a full-time employee.
Unfortunately things didn't work out at all, ending up in one of the bigger disasters I've ever been associated with, and we ended up eating most of the money on the project he worked on. After a lot of discussions with the client, they are still with us, and I hope they will be for years, but this guy — who we hoped to hire for years — is no longer employed with us. I can't put all the blame on him, there were communication problems all around, but I also wasn't happy with some of the work, so I let him go.