One bad decision, however small, can be multiplied exponentially by the falling sands of time. As the problem grows, out of sight and out of mind, it will be willfully ignored by those who are aware of it and unquestioned by those who are blissfully unaware.
I once worked in a job where they had tried to digitize all of the company's contracts with clients, but whoever had been charged with this task was laissez-faire about how what they scanned, with files missing pages and entire documents missing, or just being skipped over altogether.
Luckily, a lot of these files still existed in a physical archive in the back room of the branch where I worked. Unluckily, these too had not been cared for properly, and there were still documents missing from here and entire files that hadn't been put back in the correct place by those before me. So, what should have been a simple job of looking over what work we were contracted to do for a client ended up being a wild goose chase or a complete guessing game.
Similarly, this IT guy was left a ticking time blast-device by the person he replaced, who was known for their lackadaisical approach to their work. The client similarly had a hands-off approach that pretty much boiled down to "if it's not broke, don't fix it." The thing is that things were silently broken already, and all that was left was the match to strike. Lo and behold, when the guy who worked for the client managing their database retired, he simply deleted the entire thing off the desktop of his computer where it was stored. Leaving the company with no backups and no way forward, thanks to the rampant incompetence of the client's now-former employee. This left the IT guy on the receiving end of pointed fingers for issues he had been raising from day one.
The image is representative only and does not depict the actual subjects of the story.
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