Embarrassing mistakes at work

[kirk]

I was once sent to a data centre to de-commision a server which I duly carried out. Got back to the office and I heard one of the girls on the service desk repeating back to a customer, "You can't accesss bla bla server? Ok, I'll get someone to look at it for you".

They couldn't get to bla bla server as I had just decomissioned the wrong one and it was in the back of my car 40 miles from the data centre. Wooops!

Funny thing was, I took it back (tulipting it as I wasn't sure it would power back up) brought it back up, called the customer and he couldn't be more pleased that I had sorted it for him

[Pondlife]

Once had a french engineer on site configuring one of those automated 'phone some support monkey if there's a problem' systems. He didn't know what number to put in the test system so just filled the field with 9s.

Police were well chuffed with him.

[Let-Me-In]

I remember hearing a story from my ITIL instructor years ago. He used to be the OPS manager in a data centre and one night he came in to find a dog running around inside. Apparently one of the night shift had brought his dog to work thinking it would be ok.

The next day he was giving a tour to some senior managers from another firm and they went down one aisle to find a huge Richard the Third in the aisle next to a cabinet. The dog had only gone and poohed in the data centre.....

[SallyAnne]

Once had a french engineer on site configuring one of those automated 'phone some support monkey if there's a problem' systems. He didn't know what number to put in the test system so just filled the field with 9s.

Police were well chuffed with him.

brilliant!

[kirk]

I remember hearing a story from my ITIL instructor years ago. He used to be the OPS manager in a data centre and one night he came in to find a dog running around inside. Apparently one of the night shift had brought his dog to work thinking it would be ok.

The next day he was giving a tour to some senior managers from another firm and they went down one aisle to find a huge Richard the Third in the aisle next to a cabinet. The dog had only gone and poohed in the data centre.....

Ha ha ha, quality - this is our hot standby turd

[wobbegong]

I also once signed off with "Love" instead of "Regards" in an email to a colleague.

Arrgggghhh! That's one I fear doing! That's right up there along with calling your teacher 'Mum', when you were a kid.

[Chugnut]

Arrgggghhh! That's one I fear doing! That's right up there along with calling your teacher 'Mum', when you were a kid.

Agreed. This is even harder to explain if all your teachers were male.

[TheFaQQer]

Someone I worked with a while back got terminated for putting a comment in the code that said

"This probably won't work but by the time you realize it I'll be long gone"

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I did a demo to the client a long while back where the testers had put profanity in the test data. Standing in front of their IT director and senior management, trying to explain who exactly "Dickhead Gasgoigne" was was not a fun experience.

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Running through some software before releasing it to the users, I found two debug messages that my colleague had thoughtfully left in. Under certain circumstances (which were rare), the form popped up "F*** Off" and occasionally "F*** You".

[kirk]

That reminds me, at my last place we were running a terminal server farm with a back end data cluster - the data server was thoughtfully named BFOD - Big Fu*k Off Data Server. Oh how amusing when the management made presentations with said server in the diagrams

[darmstadt]

My second contract was working on a VM system with MVS as a guest and I had never used VM before but the outgoing chap (I was the only person there for a while) gave me a crash course. I would come in every morning, log on to the MVS user and then log off. All hell would break loose as there was no online systems and data had to be transmitted across the world to their various offices. When you log off from a VM userid you basically kill it, shut it down, terminate it. What I eventually found out was I had to disconnect from MVS. Got away with this for a couple of weeks saying I didn't have a clue what the problem was and then I saw someone enter the DISC command and the problem never occurred again.

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Did a big COBOL project at a bank on Frankfurt which was only meant to be 6 months long but because they kept changing the specs, went on for 2 years and I was getting rightly fed up with it (hated COBOL, still do but still use it occasionally.) I named the main variables, BMB, BOA and BOS (and there were some others. Just before the final handover they went through the code and asked what the meaning of the variables was. My colleague and me with straight faces told them that they were internal COBOL variable names which had to be used. (BOS - bag of tulipe, BOA - bunch off arse, BMB - bugger me backwards.)

I also wrote a large REXX program for them which used the names of German no. 1 pop artists as variables but I got told to change that one.

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Got caught saying some 'naughty words' over a microphone system with spacecraft controllers from NASA and ESA during a launch as things were getting slightly manic during early orbit and altitude dynamics. Lucky not to get disciplined for that!

Walked in to the mission and spacecraft controllers (MISCON and SPACON) while Tomorrows World were filming them and fell over the main camera cable sending everything flying.