Sales built a business continuity checklist

“We didn't have time to wait for IT.”— HR Generalist

Reason:

Allegedly because Petra has the only working copy of Budget2026_new2.xlsx. Built during an offsite instead of the thing they were asked to build.

Built by:

Katrin, a key account manager

Build time:

an afternoon, mostly

Built with:

WordPress with eleven plugins and one critical shortcode

Database:

localStorage. That is the whole backend.

Authentication:

every employee is an admin because support tickets were taking too long

Deployment:

deployed 48 minutes before the builder went on holiday

Responsible:

Sarah, currently on parental leave

Documentation:

a Slack thread from April

Security situation:

production secrets are in .env.example

Future disaster:

It will get rewritten, producing exactly the same system.

Age: 7.8 years · originally expected to last 3 months · 3 owners so far · survived 2 reorganisations · last meaningful change 420 days ago · original builder left 2386 days ago

Rated rare mostly because: 4 accidental connections, alive 32x longer than intended, the builder has left.