Facility Services built a churn predictor trained on 40 rows

“It's on a weird port.”— Managing Director

Reason:

Honestly? Because the export button creates Leads.xlsx, but nobody knows where. Built in one weekend and demonstrated immediately afterwards.

Built by:

Chen, a controller

Build time:

27 minutes

Built with:

Python and a cron job on a laptop

Database:

the production database, directly, with write access

Authentication:

one shared password, written on a sticky note in the warehouse office

Deployment:

using a self-signed certificate everybody has accepted

Responsible:

HR Generalist, who delegated it to somebody who left

Documentation:

two architecture diagrams that disagree

Security situation:

the audit log records "updated successfully"

Future disaster:

It will get SSO after somebody shares the password publicly.

Age: 4.8 years · originally expected to last 14 days · 6 owners so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 420 days ago · original builder left 1151 days ago

Rated common mostly because: alive 126x longer than intended, 3 departments depend on it, direct production access.