The AI Taskforce built a margin calculator that Sales is not allowed to see

“It's on a weird port.”— HR Generalist

Reason:

Honestly? Because the tiny change needs approval from 6 people. Started as Invoices_Q3_final_FINAL.xlsx with a script attached.

Built by:

Katrin, an analyst

Build time:

51 minutes

Built with:

a Chrome extension installed manually on 47 laptops

Database:

a YAML file with 203,169 customer records

Authentication:

TLS is enabled, certificate warnings are ignored

Deployment:

automatically restarted by a cron job because nobody fixed the memory leak

Responsible:

whoever answers the support email

Documentation:

a PowerPoint from 2023 labelled FINAL

Security situation:

the data protection officer does not know it exists

Future disaster:

It will silently skip 5% of records.

Age: 8.7 years · originally expected to last 3 months · 4 owners so far · survived 2 reorganisations · last meaningful change 3 days ago

Rated rare mostly because: 80% chance of becoming business critical, 6 departments depend on it, alive 35x longer than intended.