Marketing built an Excel-to-PDF converter

“We'll add monitoring later.”— Marco, Marketing

Reason:

Allegedly because Marco from Marketing is on holiday until January. Started as Suppliers_new2.xlsm with a script attached.

Built by:

Marco, a field technician

Build time:

a long Thursday

Built with:

Claude Code on the production branch

Database:

SAP, indirectly, through 3 CSV exports

Authentication:

the password is stored in a spreadsheet called passwords.xlsx

Deployment:

deployed through a GitHub Action that only Lukas understands

Responsible:

Managing Director, who calls it "the little tool"

Documentation:

an email chain containing the phrase "see below" 4 times

Security situation:

security is handled by keeping the URL secret

Future disaster:

It will outlive the vendor that was supposed to replace it.

Age: 15 days · originally expected to last 7 days · 2 owners so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 15 days ago

Rated common mostly because: 86% chance of becoming business critical, 3 departments depend on it, €48k per year.