An anonymous submitter to The Daily WTF, retold by editor Ellis Morning, describes working in 2014 for a Brazilian company that built public-sector software. With the World Cup coming to Brazil that year, local agencies had near-blank-check budgets to modernize systems, as long as everything went live before the tournament ended. Sales staff oversold accordingly: a police department in a state capital was promised a system requiring a team of 20 engineers, delivered in three months with zero slack, even though the company could only staff four.

The scope covered more than the firm's core product: a custom public-facing website, live GPS tracking of patrol cars shown on in-vehicle tablets, and automated reporting. Staffing went wrong immediately. The team received 24 resumes and was told to pick 16 hires; only about three candidates were competent, but a full month was lost onboarding thirteen unqualified ones, a textbook case of the mythical man-month. Management's fix was to fly the core engineers to the client's city for two weeks of 12-plus-hour days, seven days a week.

One planned feature let citizens photograph incidents in progress and submit them through an app and website for real-time operator verification. The team privately nicknamed it the "dick-pic encyclopedia." Budget allowed only a single server, so this public-facing intake system would have shared infrastructure with the police-tracking system; it went live only briefly before being pulled.

A week before launch, the patrol-car tracking tablets passed every in-house test but failed unpredictably in the field. The submitter joined a ride-along to debug on-site, and the officer drove straight into a favela to reproduce the failure. The cause turned out to be poor cellphone coverage in those neighborhoods, which the software hadn't been built to handle.

The system launched on schedule but well below the agreed specification and over budget. When the company tried to dodge overtime pay by offering "prestige" instead, the submitter quit soon after. They later heard the company was sued over this project and similar rushed World Cup contracts, and nearly went out of business as a result.