One of my first purely programming tasks I was assigned to scrape a directory, and went about it lazily because I had other work I had to do (that I knew payed for sure) and thought how easy it would be. Turns out the site had javascript implemented to prevent raw scrapes, so I had to hire someone who knew frontend scraping (need to learn iMacros) to get the thousands of pages; after which I parsed into an excel file.
I bid low on the job and got it so I could get experience, and actually lost a little money on it, oops.
At least I got it done.