False pride in a task that is soon to be irrelevant, usually one that involves minor improvements to a something fundamentally broken (e.g., attempting a refactoring exercise on a piece of code that isn't worth refactoring. How do you know if a piece of code is worth refactoring? If it looks like a turd, and smells like a turd, ... it's a turd.)
("You can't polish a turd, but you can stick a flag in the top") ["I claim this turd in the name of <insert soon-to-be-dead project name here>!"]
On the MythBusters? TV show, they successfully polished 2 balls of turds. Not a pleasant episode.