My very first full-time job was to adapt a COTS ATM protocol stack to run on embedded devices to power a truck & satellite network. The deadline was 1 year to get the stack running on the hardware, and would be the first of 4 annual milestones related to the project. After about 6 months, I was mostly done the work when I found out that the project was moving to a single release at the 4 year mark.

Ok, not so bad, except that the scope of my task remained the same. The project and my role was funded by the customer for the 4 years, but my deliverable remained the same. My job was to literally do nothing while being available to debug things if needed.