anyone made a massive mistake on a contract?

[Scrag Meister]

My biggest mistake was on my first job ever (1987).

I worked for 6 weeks leaning a code development system writing some roofing quotation system and deleted the lot!!

Boss was not chuffed but I worked the next 5 days 18 hours a day and got a neater, more efficient and better app. Was there for 4.5 years, then a 2 year gap somewhere else and then he had me back for another 4.5 years.

[Spacecadet]

I just nearly had a heart attack, thought I had nearly lost someones data, all of it but thank god managed to get on the get it all back, I had no idea what I was going to say!

It made me think has anyone out there been on a contract and really bodged up on something which you could not get out of? What happened?

I once accidently deleted a backup file of a development database which had been parked whilst the developer was on maternity leave. About 6 months work gone. Obviously this was THE backup and AFAIK there were no backups of the backups on the dev servers.

I had a gut feeling about the situation and decided to not say anything... turned out to be the best thing. The girl decided to not come back after giving birth and the project was quietly canned by management as it was clearly a waste of time and money.

[Spacecadet]

There was also the time I forgot to order some software which my manager had told me I had to sort out whilst he was on holiday.
When he came back, realised it hadn't been purchased and angrily confronted me about it; I had what can only be called a message from God telling me that the software wasn't needed anyway. I calmly pointed this out (along with what the alternative was) and the bollocking turned into a praising.

[MarillionFan]

Once took the Siebel system of a huge multi-national down by incorrectly applying a trigger on the production system using a back door password.

I got on the phone to the DBA team in India to tell them the DB was locked and to reboot the server only to find that two people in the US had the ability to do it and it was 3am in the morning. Had the call escalated and the out of hours support never answered. It was down for another 4 hours & had locked out 1600 users.

As the system had been down recently and the same out of hours issue had happened before I decided to go on the attack stating that a lack of 24 hour world wide support had caused this and it was outrageous that the system was down for four hours.

THe offshoot was the out of hours support was bollocked and the ability to reboot the server was then spread to the other support teams outside the US. Eventually the out of hours DBA found the trigger but all he had was a very strong suspicion I had done it but couldn't prove it.

[conned tractor]

Not me but someone else and back in the permie days.

On a crappy perm salary, we were offered some overtime over the weekend by going out and reprogramming aircraft engine controllers in the field. One time it a rather large F****h airline I reprogrammed a controller at one airport that was going in a taxi on to another airport over the evening. Leaving me to follow on a flight the next day to do some more (they were desperate to get the first one).

Reprogramming to a slightly different type would mean changing the mounting bolts to a different length so that units were not interchangeable, so I had changed the software for a different variant of aircraft, changed the ID plates, filled out the release forms (JAA form 1 at the time) and sent it on its way.

Next day I reached the airport and the engineer asked my why the controller had the wrong bolts. I told him it hadn’t and pulled out the paperwork. It was reprogrammed to ‘x’ and all the pass off criteria, including changing the bolts specific to the variant requested.

Turns out monsieur DIY had some spare bolts and as it was required for another aircraft than requested he had changed them himself and fitted it to the aircraft. So upon shouting merd, merd, merd, left the office and flew off down the runway at a rather quick pace.

Don’t know what happened after but I assume some blame and fingerpointing ensued because I was told to return of the Eurostar as soon as I could.

[Pablos68]

Sorry for length.. but will give you lot something to do instead of work

Back in my permy days, when i was a young server support guy being taught the ropes and ways of the world by a senior engineer, we attended a large clients site at our local airport, who business was commerical exports, to replace a dodgy ram module.

This is really going back some years now, and building system redundancies, backup servers etc were a pipe dream, especially while they were so expensive at the time. (im talking netware 2.1 etc)

Our job was to replace the ram which was still socketed straight onto the mobo, with extra memory piggy backed in top of that on those long plastic legs.. extremely expensive at the time, and the client totally relied on this one server.

We rocked up, no anti static gear, middle of the day, told client it could not be done out of hours etc etc, needed to arrange some down time right now if they needed the faulty equipment swapped out.

I know how cowboy that sounds but i was the junior and was simply keeping quiet and doing as I was told..

We proceed to get the server out from under the desk.. (honestly) no cabinets or anything, dismantled it on the nylon carpeted floor, in the middle of the office and started removing the ram like something out of a game of operation..

Senior engineer gingerly removes & hands me the piggy back ram module and instructs me to hold it by the corners.. DO NOT TOUCH THE LEGS, YOU WILL DISCHARGE ANY STATIC AND KILL THE CHIP ! I was so nervous, unfortunately, I was holding it so lightly, and also leaning over his shoulder trying to see and learn what he was doing... he moved back slightly, I jumped ... and dropped the chip from about shoulder height straight back into the machines innards... bits of plastic and ram went every where. Ive never seen the blood drain from some ones face so quickly, then panic set in, and what was normally a very confident, cocky and easy going senior engineer crumbled in front of me.

No one seemed to notice in the office, and senior engineer quickly rallied, grabbed the gaffer tape and managed to put the piggy back chip back into some weird unholy order.. amazingly the chip we had went to replace was the one with actual chip damage... after 2 heart attacks (1 each) ageing 10 years in 10 seconds.. and some true blue peter bodgit moments, we got it all back together, and even more amazing.. it worked.

They dont build them like they used to.

Absolute nightmare, when i think back and what could have gone wrong when we put it back together and the subsequent consequences.. makes me shiver.

[Support Monkey]

Yes but data restore here is a real headache and it does not back up the 10 PST files he manually created and kept in a folder on his C drive but thats the not the question it was more on if anyone had made a mistake while on a contract that could not be rectified.

All the places i haver worked (and thats alot) the policy as always been if its on your C drive and it goes belly up its tuff tulip, in this day and age no one in a corporate environment should be keeping data on the c drive

I once dropped a PC and it smashed the case to pieces, i was concerned until i saw the place it was going into luckilly it was a nuclear fallout bunker and it was so dark in there even with the lights on you would never have noticed the damage, PHEW!!!!

[TestMangler]

Back in the days when big players in banking and insurance ran their servers on OS/2 LAN Server, then Warp Server, I was a server techie. Was in a server room with a new guy (contractor) who was brought in as he was an 'expert' in oS/2 and the newly emerging NT4

While in a server farm, i was doing something on an NT server and he started poking at the one next to where i was. I told him, 'Don't touch that, it's an OS/2 box' he replied , 'No it isn't, it's NT4' and CTRL-ALT-DEL'd the thing. It was the days of inter departmental servers and he flattened the DC for Aegon's investment dept. Oh, how we laughed

In the end, I got a kicking for letting him touch it

[RasputinDude]

First job as a grad, I deleted all the files on a UNIX directory. It was the entire source repo.

Now, I am uber paranoid.

[conned tractor]

First job as a grad, I deleted all the files on a UNIX directory. It was the entire source repo.

Now, I am uber paranoid.

i worked with someone who did that....ha was named delboy after that incident.