Yesterday I spent hours trying to figure out this technical problem. I'm in the middle of refactoring an application. I looked all over the software project I was coding, trying to figure out where this one little session variable was coming from. Couldn't find it. Nada. Zilch.
I pinged a co-worker, and confessed my frustration, and asked him for ideas.
In about 10 minutes, because he looked at it a different way, he had an answer for me.
Awesome! (If you really want to know, the weird code solution was a Grails Filter). Then I started into the solution, and when I first looked at it, it seemed exotic, and strange. I told him as much, and we agreed to refactor it. Then I went looking in the framework documentation at how the original code had been put together, and found evidence that it was a reasonable thing to do. So, I just brought the code over, and kept going.
It never fails to amaze me how caught up I can get in my own perspective, and how when I let that go, I get out of my own way.