Hapless

From Wikipedia:

A Rube Goldberg machine or device is any exceedingly complex apparatus that performs a very simple task in a very indirect and convoluted way. Rube devised and drew several such pataphysical devices. The best examples of his machines have an anticipation factor. The fact that something so wacky is happening can only be topped by it happening in a suspenseful manner. A Rube Goldberg machine usually has at least ten steps. One story about Rube Goldberg is that while sleep-walking barefoot in a cactus field, he screamed out an idea about a self-operating napkin.

The term also applies as a classification for generally over-complicated apparatus or software. It first appeared in Webster's Third New International Dictionary with the definition, "accomplishing by extremely complex roundabout means what actually or seemingly could be done simply."

In Britain, such a device would be called a Heath Robinson contraption, after the British cartoonist who also drew fantastic comic machinery, in his case tended by bespectacled men in overalls. See also Roland Emett, who created many actual working machines of this type, such as the Breakfast Machine in the film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

In Denmark, they would be called Storm P maskiner after the Danish cartoonist Robert Storm Petersen.

In Japan, they are called ピタゴラ装置 (pitagora souchi), which means Pythagorean Machine.

In Spain there is not a particular noun to mean such machines, but a reference akin to Goldberg's machines existed: Catalan cartoonist Jordi Sabatés made up and drew many of those devices for a section in the TBO magazine, allegedly designed by some Professor Franz from Copenhagen.

The Norwegian cartoonist and storyteller Kjell Aukrust created a cartoon character named Reodor Felgen who constantly invented complex machinery. Though it was often built out of unlikely parts, it always performed very well. Felgen stars as the inventor of an extremely powerful but overly complex car Il Tempo Gigante in the Ivo Caprino animated puppet-film Flåklypa Grand Prix (1975).

Another related phenomenon is the Japanese art of useful but unusable contraptions called chindōgu.