A client asked for something that wasn’t in your catalogue but it was close enough, and the client was valuable enough. So the sales team said ‘Yes, we can deliver that.’ 

Engineering figured out a workaround. It worked, not well but well enough. The client walked away happy. And that once-off product somehow became one of your standard offerings. 

Three years later. Engineering has been outsourced to Claude and a team from India. No one understands the workaround any more. As a once-off it never got documented. And it won’t run on anything newer than Microsoft Vista. 

It’s inconvenient, but not enough to get fixed. Every production run takes energy, attention, resources and patience. The team hopes it won’t fail. Not this time, anyway. 

This string and sticky tape solution has somehow become a core technology. You never decided to have it that way, but you also haven’t yet decided to fix it properly. You probably won’t, either, until an irretrievable failure creates an existential crisis.