AUTOPSY 001: he ran the haunting by hand
A new weekly series. Famous fictional disasters, written up as automation incidents. Episode 1 asks why there's always a man under the mask.
He pulled it off 214 times. The 215th, they pulled it off him.
Reported cause: meddling kids. Actual cause: he ran the haunting by hand.
The incident
There's always a man under the mask, because a man was doing the work. In the costume, on site, every night. The haunting only happened when he made it happen.
That's how they found him.
A projector, a speaker and a timer would have done the same job. Nothing to unmask. No one on site to catch. The whole investigation depends on there being a person inside the process, and he put himself there.
The part that should worry you
He's the caretaker.
He has a real job at that house, and he hasn't done it properly in 8 months, because every night went on the bit he was doing by hand.
That's the actual cost, and it's never the mask. It's the job he was hired for, quietly not happening.
Your version isn't a haunted house. It's the ops person who spends Monday rebuilding a report instead of running operations. It's the buyer raising the same supplier order 100 times before lunch instead of noticing that a price is wrong.
Nobody writes that cost down anywhere. It just shows up later as the thing your team never got to.
What AUTOPSY is
A weekly comic strip, every Monday. Famous fictional disasters, reviewed the way you'd review an incident at work.
One rule decides every episode: did a manual process cause this, and would a machine have made the call differently? Either the villain would have gotten away with it if he'd automated it, or the hero would have caught him sooner if they had. If an episode is only a joke with no ops lesson underneath, it doesn't ship.
Nobody dies in these. It's a postmortem of the scheme, not the person.
We name the films. We never draw anyone else's characters. The investigators are ours: an ops lead who looks like the person actually reading this, and a scruffy terrier in a hi-vis vest called Cron, who carries the exhibit and never speaks.
Next
Episode 002 is the only villain who did automate and still lost, because it sent 1 unit at a time instead of batching.
If you want to answer the question this one leaves open: what's the real job your team isn't getting to?