The Management Assistant built an onboarding checklist tool

“The budget expires this week.”— IT Service Desk

Reason:

Allegedly because the backlog contains 91,992 items and one priority. With dark mode and no error handling.

Built by:

Petra, a field technician

Build time:

3 evenings

Built with:

plain HTML and 1,900 lines of jQuery

Database:

MongoDB containing a collection called test2_final

Authentication:

the role is stored in localStorage

Deployment:

running in a region 3 time zones away from its users

Responsible:

Petra, who insists they are not the owner

Documentation:

tribal knowledge, technically

Security situation:

the data protection officer does not know it exists

Future disaster:

It will survive the official replacement system.

Age: 183 days · originally expected to last 4 weeks · 1 owner so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 183 days ago

Rated common mostly because: 6 departments depend on it, 63 users, alive 6x longer than intended.