Colleagues IT Blunders

[up4it]

I used to work with a permie at a rather large UK defence company that will pay back-handers to anyone who will buys its killing machines.

He sat in a corner and used to take great delight in spinning round on his swivel chair for half the day in another World. Unfortunately, one day his foot caught on the network cable and unplugged it but he didn't realise he had done it!

That brought the whole departmental network down for about 80 engineers. :-)

It wasn't fixed until 1.5 days later when I spotted what he had done.

But when I pointed it out, the lying toe-rag tried to say I had done it! So it may pay to keep stum if you discover such things!

[Bumfluff]

I've seen someone (a contractor) running a delete script thinking it was hitting dev but the environment variables were set to hit prod. He managed to take down a money making prod system for 5hrs forcing them on to contingency he did'nt get renewed, felt bad for him.

[NickFitz]

I've seen someone (a contractor) running a delete script thinking it was hitting dev but the environment variables were set to hit prod. He managed to take down a money making prod system for 5hrs forcing them on to contingency he did'nt get renewed, felt bad for him.

secured his role at a higher rate

[Bumfluff]

secured his role at a higher rate

you should of seen his face when he realised

[KentPhilip]

What an entertaining thread - thanks all for your stories.

My "oops" moment a few years ago was to run a .bat file that called the wscript command, or something similar, to run a script. Trouble is I had called the file wscript.bat
When it ran it opened a new window running wscript.bat, which opened a third window, and so on at the rate of around 50 windows a second.

On the production database server.

Power - OFF!
Needless to say the boss saw the funny side...

[NickFitz]

My "oops" moment a few years ago was to run a .bat file that called the wscript command, or something similar, to run a script. Trouble is I had called the file wscript.bat
When it ran it opened a new window running wscript.bat, which opened a third window, and so on at the rate of around 50 windows a second.

On the production database server.

In the eighties I was working on a project for IBM PC compatibles in 8086 assembly language. Aside from edit and debug, the cycle was: run the assembler on the source to to produce a set of .OBJ files, run the linker to join those into an executable, and run that. However, as we still developed on 5-1/4 inch floppies in those days, it was necessary (when returning to the "edit-and-scratch-head-in-bafflement" phase) to delete the .OBJ files so WordStar (which we used as an editor) had enough space for its scratch files.

One day, typing

del *.obj

I accidentally caught the space bar, and typed

del *. obj

and the extra space after the dot caused MS-DOS 3.2 to believe I meant "delete the current directory and all its contents"... the current directory being, of course, the root of the disc.

It asked "Are you sure? (Y/N)" and a fraction of a second after I hit "Y" I thought "Odd, it doesn't normally ask that unless you're deleting everything on the disk..."



I then spent three days with Norton Utilities, trying to figure out which sectors were part of the latest version of the .ASM files and which were left over from old versions, gradually rebuilding the File Allocation Table by hand

Still, at least it persuaded the boss that the useless assembler he'd got free off a mate, which couldn't even be told to assemble the .OBJ files on a different drive, wasn't really good enough, and we switched to MASM 5.

[Sockpuppet]

I once dropped a yorkie bar while driving.

Chocolate is a bitch to get out.

[Sir_Edward_Matheson]

you should of seen his face when he realised

have

There should be a law forcing people who make such trivial mistakes, to pay back the cost of all the free education they received. This particular mistake is one of my biggest bugbears.

[NickFitz]

have

There should be a law forcing people who make such trivial mistakes, to pay back the cost of all the free education they received. This particular mistake is one of my biggest bugbears.

There was no need for the comma after the word "mistakes" in the middle of your first sentence.

It may be that you, yourself, pause to breathe at that point in saying the sentence out loud, but this does not necessarily mean that the written form of the sentence requires a comma at that point - and indeed, such a pause would, in the context of that sentence as it would normally be spoken by a person whose first language was English, be rightly interpreted by listeners as an indication of physical infirmity or unfamiliarity with the language, for there is no other reason for anybody to pause in the middle of saying such a straightforward sentence as, "There should be a law forcing people who make such trivial mistakes to pay back the cost of all the free education they received".

Even if you were short of breath, that does not make the written form of that sentence, as you have posted it here, grammatically correct.

Oh, and pot-kettle, mote-beam, et cetera, et aliud.



This particular mistake is one of my biggest bugbears.

HTH

[wxman]

Not too long ago actually..

I was part of a team that was creating a Credit Card processing interface as part of case management system.

During a fix and due to a quirk in the code, none of the live cases were flagged as completing the payment cycle and remained on the system as unpaid.

The upshot of this was that the system re-requested that payment again and again – in fact all through the night every 20 minutes. The only time it stopped taking payments, was when the credit card was maxed out and the transaction was declined.

The next day ½ the team were sacked as some 3,000 customers were affected as some £6 millions were taken over night!