I was surprised that 'I got handed someone else's work' wasn't an option in the poll.

In my case, it was 1996, at a university, and we had a 3 person 'web development group' (I did graphics and design work), and the one programmer in our department graduated and got a better job offer -- so Dave and I got all of Tim's work. (Mind you, Dave was a liberal arts major, Tim had been Comp Sci, and I at least had a little bit of programming experience as a kid and some Fortran in my engineering degree.) -- So, I got the work.

And when we tried to hire a replacement programmer for our manager, our director decided differently, so I had to maintain all of Tim's work, and write new things as the need arose. (mostly text processing work to convert various text formatting languages to HTML, and a bunch of HTML forms)