abandon all sanity ye all who read this code

Ok now this one might be a dailywtf contender. I’m working on rewriting a legacy application in C#. The code is a terse glob of vb6 fun. Everyone loves reading from 100+ column database tables using offsets right? I mean thats second nature to most of us. As if that isn’t arcane enough, all of the fields are varchar’s, except for the record id. Now that would be fine, if the majority of the fields didn’t contain integers. It gets better. Some of the fields are apparently compound integer strings. Imagine the string 68125340, actually representing four two-digit integers. There is no good reason for this. At all. Ever. I’m wondering what would posses a person to implement such a rube goldberg system.