What is the Biggest IT Cockup You've Ever Made?

[OwlHoot]

Ages ago I wrote a small web app for a local sandwich company which was essentially ordering a customised sandwich. The data was then emailed to a third party who would fax it to the kitchen. No database involved since they wanted it done cheaply and quickly.

Anyway, all done, tested on all environments and before go live I wanted to run some automated tests and decided that the best way was to comment out the line of code that sent the email, since I did not want the kitchen to start making sandwiches that I was testing.

On go live, I completely forgot about this and the site was launched and appeared to be busy. But no orders reached the kitchen and the phones went off the hook with customers angry that their sandwich never was delivered.

Was it you who tested a direct mail promotion to customers of a prestigious bank, and when it went live forgot to change the salutation from "Dear Rich Bastard" ?

[fool]

In my first dev role about 10 years ago, the Lead (only other) Dev was editing files in production and expected that I would do the same.

I said, sod that I'm making a development environment. I exported production (my first job lads and I had no other access to the schema or any way of producing test data quickly) and imported into a dev version.

It failed because of some MySQL configuration values which after a quick google suggested I needed to add a flag, fair enough, I'll just drop this...

CEO - "Why is production down"
ME - *Gulp*

To be fair we restored from backup and I finished setting up dev environments, SCM, etc.

[MrMarkyMark]

In my first dev role about 10 years ago, the Lead (only other) Dev was editing files in production and expected that I would do the same.

I said, sod that I'm making a development environment. I exported production (my first job lads and I had no other access to the schema or any way of producing test data quickly) and imported into a dev version.

It failed because of some MySQL configuration values which after a quick google suggested I needed to add a flag, fair enough, I'll just drop this...

CEO - "Why is production down"
ME - *Gulp*

To be fair we restored from backup and I finished setting up dev environments.

Seems like you lived up to your user name on this occasion

[fool]

Seems like you lived up to your user name on this occasion

Indeed, but it was a good time to learn the lesson that anyone can screw up...

[MarillionFan]

I am afraid to,admit I don't recall anytime I've fecked something up, minor or major. I'm the one who tends to catch everyone's elses possible feckups and don't make them myself.

[northernladyuk]

I am afraid to,admit I don't recall anytime I've fecked something up, minor or major. I'm the one who tends to catch everyone's elses possible feckups and don't make them myself.

Apart from your life, of course.

[MrMarkyMark]

Indeed, but it was a good time to learn the lesson that anyone can screw up...

Correct and its funny you have just reminded me about something I did when I had just started in IT .
I deleted a folder on a NW drive by being clumsy

Luckily was a small IT Dept, at the time, so got it restored without any issue.
I was always a lot more careful after that

[MarillionFan]

Apart from your life, of course.

The thread was about IT.

HTH

MF

[northernladyuk]

The thread was about IT.

HTH

MF

Please don't tell us you're a real person.

[fool]

Correct and its funny you have just reminded me about something I did when I had just started in IT .
I deleted a folder on a NW drive by being clumsy

Luckily was a small IT Dept, at the time, so got it restored without any issue.
I was always a lot more careful after that

Yeah it actually crippled my productivity when dealing with production systems for a good wee while. Now it serves as a story I tell the kids when they **** up, so they don't feel like it's over.

At the same place a guy deleted the main volume on a netapp that had all the LUNs for all the customer VMs that was sold as "Europes first cloud". No backups either. Had to call the vendor and ask them how to extract LUNs direct from the block storage.