The Management Assistant built a lunch order aggregator

“It's behind the VPN.”— Sarah, The Management Assistant

Reason:

Mainly because the architecture diagram contains a box labelled "magic". With 174 users and zero documentation.

Built by:

Sarah, a field technician

Build time:

a long Thursday

Built with:

Excel macros, exposed over HTTP

Database:

a Map().

Authentication:

the guest Wi-Fi password is also the admin password

Deployment:

deployed into production because staging was broken

Responsible:

Ravi, according to nobody except Tobias

Documentation:

one README with 6 TODOs

Security situation:

the API key is shared by 5 applications

Future disaster:

It will hold the only copy of Budget2026_new.csv.

Age: 1.2 years · originally expected to last 4 weeks · 1 owner so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 19 days ago · original builder left 179 days ago

Rated rare mostly because: 206 users, €270k per year, nobody owns it.