CEO Office built a licence renewal reminder

“The admin page isn't linked anywhere.”— IT Service Desk

Reason:

Because the workaround has its own workaround. Started as Budget2026_new2.csv with a script attached.

Built by:

Sarah, a product owner

Build time:

5 hours 56 minutes

Built with:

Svelte, which nobody else here writes

Database:

a YAML file with 81,556 customer records

Authentication:

email magic links to Daniel's personal Gmail

Deployment:

deployed from the main branch because branches were confusing

Responsible:

Sarah, whose laptop contains the only working environment

Documentation:

a diagram on a whiteboard, photographed, then deleted

Security situation:

the incident response plan starts with "call Daniel"

Future disaster:

It will discover the backup password left with Kevin.

Age: 325 days · originally expected to last 4 weeks · 1 owner so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 19 days ago

Rated common mostly because: 86% chance of becoming business critical, 27 users, alive 11x longer than intended.