I Found a Comment That Said Do Not Touch This and I Touched It

I Found a Comment That Said Do Not Touch This and I Touched It.

This is a story about found a comment that said do not touch this and i touched it. It involves approximately 47 different ways technology has gone completely off the rails, 14 engineers who should have known better but did not, and one middle manager who approved the whole thing without reading any documentation. The documentation, of course, does not exist. The README just says "TODO." It has said TODO since the initial commit in 2019.

We investigated the situation thoroughly. The investigation took 14 weeks and involved 47 stakeholders across 3 time zones. The findings were inconclusive. The recommendations were to monitor the situation and escalate if necessary. The situation has been monitored continuously since 2023. Escalation was deemed unnecessary by the escalation review committee, which meets quarterly to review escalations that have not been escalated. The committee last met in 2022. The minutes from that meeting were stored in a Google Doc that nobody has edit access to anymore because the owner left the company.

The moral of this story is that technology is amazing until it is not, and by then it is usually too late. The code has been deployed. The database has been migrated. The users have been notified via an email campaign with a 47 percent open rate and a broken unsubscribe link. The unsubscribe link has been broken since the third deployment. Nobody has reported it. We are choosing to interpret this as user satisfaction. The fix would require touching the email template, which was last modified by a contractor whose contract ended in 2021. We are hiring a senior email template engineer. 5+ years of experience required.