Sales built a support escalation tracker

“The quarter ends Friday.”— Regional Sales Lead

Reason:

Mainly because the demo environment contains real customer data. Copied to production via floppy disks.

Built by:

Elena, a warehouse supervisor

Build time:

a long Thursday

Built with:

plain HTML and 1,900 lines of jQuery

Database:

an in-memory dictionary. Restarts are exciting.

Authentication:

the password was last changed 823 days ago

Deployment:

on a VM created for a workshop in 2022

Responsible:

IT, according to Finance

Documentation:

an Excel tab called Instructions

Security situation:

a security review was scheduled for September and quietly cancelled

Future disaster:

It will cause Security to ask "what application?".

Age: 12 days · originally expected to last 3 months · 2 owners so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 12 days ago

Rated mythic mostly because: 100% chance of becoming business critical, €222k per year, 100 users.