Field Service built an invoice matcher

“The business needed it yesterday.”— Nadia, Field Service

Reason:

Allegedly because the ERP needs 17 clicks and two approvals to order a keyboard. Already exported 163,209 rows to somebody's laptop.

Built by:

Nadia, a team lead

Build time:

5 evenings

Built with:

plain HTML and 1,900 lines of jQuery

Database:

one table called everything

Authentication:

the password is the company name plus 2026

Deployment:

deployed by copying files over RDP

Responsible:

Ravi, who only knows the database

Documentation:

three different architecture diagrams

Security situation:

security is handled by the fact nobody knows it exists

Future disaster:

It will stop working after someone renames a column.

Age: 2.5 years · originally expected to last 3 months · 2 owners so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 420 days ago

Rated common mostly because: 5 departments depend on it, alive 10x longer than intended, €2k per year.