Why the hell does every manager I end up with think estimates are a reasonable thing to expect?!

And in fact, asking for an estimation is a sort of a "have you stopped beating your wife"-question. By answering, you always lose: If you finish sooner, you get accused of being a greedy dick who wants to charge too many days, if you finish later, you're incompetent...and in both cases you suck at estimating. It's like asking "Tell me what you don't know!".

I've learned to give estimates only on small pieces- individual worries- and always give a whole lot of disclaimers like:

-no one takes a sick day
-there are no prod issues
-the story requirements don't change and I understand them completely
-no unforseen cases come up

That last one is a big one because if your estimate was too short you can say it's because case xxx is not listed in the requirements and we didn't think about that.

I swear I wish we had to take attorney classes for my comp sci degree. Would of been more useful than discrete math.

*individual stories, not worries

So true! That should be in text books in between pointers and memory allocation.