Nice try, HR.
Worst thing in the office place was when some idiot left their window open in the middle of Winter, temps fell below 0F with high winds, and froze the 2" sprinkler pipes running over their office. Flooded most of the 2nd floor then started running through and raining out onto the 1st floor (and then into the basement). And it happened during covid lock-downs so it was fortunate anyone was even in the building to report it.
My own personal oopsie was checking network cabling in a small room, bent over to check things low and then wandered out to check elsewhere… Then noticed there was a LOT of commotion on the sales floor. Turns out I hit the power switch on one of the phone cabinets with my ass and shut down half the phone lines.
I didn’t actually delete the data but for a solid 1min I thought I had deleted an entire production db of data.
I made a delete then I hit refresh and nothing came. I refreshed again and no records panic started to set in and I refreshed again and still no records. I knew that changes replicated over to our quick backup every min so I picked up the phone and when the guy answered I said I need you to turn off the replication right now I think I just deleted the ministry of health.
After a bit of troubleshooting it turns out the data was fine and my delete worked as intended. The issue was in my client and we checked a few things then gave up. I went for a long lunch after that.
The biggest actual mistakes I’ve done were all caught by a really good manager i had and so I can’t even remember them because they never blew up.
Accidentally hitting reply-to-all on a company wide email and more or less stating that I wanted to be transferred to another team.
There was a new team forming elsewhere, and in fairness, it was a great opportunity in a lot of ways. But… I didn’t get the transfer until another batch of jobs opened a few months later.
That… was a long few months.
Most recent, but not the absolute worst, was ripping my pants at work. I bent down to pick something up and heard the rip. It was over my crotch region too. Thankfully I had boxers on but was still pretty embarrassed.
Thankfully my boss was cool about it and I just drove over to Costco down the street and got a new pair and changed in the back of my car. He make a joke when I got back which was fine.
The one I still feel guilt over was a time when i found out someone had left an animal trap loaded when they left for vacation. There was a live raccoon in it. I know I shouldn’t’ve carelessly opened it, but I should’ve done something. Even killing it would’ve been kinder. I carry that one with me, to remind me to act when I can. I’m still bad at it, but I try.
The other day I told a customer I could smell gas in her apartment, and even though I feel like a dumbass because it wasn’t a leak (probably lingering smell from them moving an appliance and hitting it on and off by accident), I don’t regret mentioning it. Sometimes I just am going to be an obnoxious jackass about that stuff.
For the 2nd one, better safe than sorry. You would feel like more of a dumbass if you heard a story in the news about a gas leak fire, or some other form of damage/injury/death.
I recently had a gas leak scare. Originally thought it was plumbing. They checked for gas leaks with a tool and found nothing. No obvious plumbing problems. We called the fire department the next time we smelled it to be safe. No gas leak but a bad car battery being charged was releasing a sulfur smell and about to catch fire.
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Alt tabbed once too many times, clicked drop database and yes. Deleted the live authentication DB for America’s Army: Operation video game.
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Missed the word “add” in “switchport vlan add” on a switch, overwriting the list instead of appending to it. Took out the only connection between two datacenters we were in the process of migrating between. Took me 14 minutes to run to the datacenter, plug in a console cable and fix it.
Similar to your #2, but less serious, I once wrote a script to power down virtual machines for a data center move. It was a nice piece of work too, grouping them in batches, sending shutdown commands to the guest OS, falling back to forcing a power off through the hypervisor after a configurable timeout…
I don’t recall the specifics of the problem or the virtual infrastructure I was working with, but in short I didn’t have sanity checks on what was being shut down. Ended up force shutting off the hypervisor/virtual infrastructure management system.
Added an extra few hours the move with that.
I can absolutely see that happening in vsphere.
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Pushed to prod
Worked, after hours from home, on a Windows Server and fixed and issue with the Database on there. After doing so i thought I’d go to bed and shut down the machine… only I hadn’t yet left the RDP connection and shut the server down by Accident. Had to drive to work and start the server up again.
Accidentally shutting down a Windows server is impressive. They have that “why are you shutting down?” dialogue to prevent this scenario.
And there are ways of having that entry removed from the list of options entirely, and not just shifted to the drop-down menu. Makes it harder to physically shut down, but its absence can be a WTF big enough for you to realize which machine you are working on.
I don’t bother doing that to VMs, which can be trivially restarted, but their Hyper-V hosts? You betchya I do it to those.
Oh I was totally on autopilot and selected “Maintenance (Software)” because that is what I did… and I discovered the brainfart two seconds too late.
- Put down a bottle of bleach a little too quickly, a little spurt splashed exactly straight up out of it when it hit the floor and somehow hit me right in the eye. Washed it out in the sink and finished my shift with my eye bright red, instead of, IDK, going to the fucking doctor like I probably should have, because I was young and exploitable.
- Not me but a coworker: Found a handgun in our customer’s stuff, started messing around with it. You know the punchline. The bullet went through a few walls, cops got called, he made up some story about how it went off on its own while still in the cabinet which no one believed, somehow still didn’t get in legal trouble. He got fired over the phone before he had even left the customer’s premises.
- Got hired to a startup to fix the intranet slowness, started work as everyone was leaving, instantly fucked the router and broke the network completely for the whole floor, couldn’t fix it for hours and stayed there in a panic until about 3-4 in the morning when I finally figured it out, and fixed the network and the slowness both. Never told them anything except the ending, and they liked my work and hired me full time.
- Fucked the partition table to the main production server and my boss who was sitting right next to me had a mini panic attack while I reconstructed it from my notes and all the filesystems came back. Keep a notebook, it’ll save your ass.
Haha loved N.3
How old was the guy in N.2? Sounds like such a dumb kid thing to do
Maybe 20 years old. He was waving it around at the other guys on the job, too, joking around with it. He was lucky he didn’t kill someone and have to live with it for the rest of his life.
My dad told me when I was a kid: If you’re ever in that situation, just stand up and leave. Don’t say hey don’t do that. Don’t wait around and hope everything is okay. Don’t start joking around about it too. Just don’t say a word, stand up, walk out of the building, go somewhere else, the end.
Tripped and dropped a box, worth approximately $220,000 today, of extremely precise tooling meant for a cutting die. I was on my way to my bench to wrap them up safely. Boss was not pleased that day.
First I was like wow, then I started to count how many zero’s there came afterwards. Ouch that hurts.
Although this wasn’t the worst, it most certainly could have been, and always comes to mind when questions like this are brought up.
I was on a job site. A half dozen houses were being built simultaneously. I walked too close behind an excavator, which abruptly turned. I nearly got hit in the head by the back end of that thing - which is all ballast and has tremendous mass. I almost got myself sent to the emergency room, and it would have been 100% my fault.
At the moment, I was just glad that none of the guys on my crew saw me pull such a rookie move. I didn’t think about it seriously until I got home that day. That excavator would’ve shattered my cheap plastic construction helmet like it was an eggshell. I could have died.
Way back as a line cook I was on saute and it was the season for soft shell crab. I had a full rail of tickets, and 2-14in. saute pans with oil heating up on full blast while I knelt down to grab the crabs from my prep cooler across from the range.
The 'roided up chef stepped over me to get to middle to expedite the rush, and grabbed one of the pans with now very hot oil in them…realizing that they had oil he stopped his motion but Newtons law kept the oil flowing, down onto my bare forearm, hand and how I was positioned my ankle.
The grill guy immediately took a pan of water and splashed my arm with it, rolled down my sleeve and soaked it…and as a bonus being a dumbass I finished the shift before driving myself to the ER. Some good blisters but fortunately no scarring, very little pain because it was kept covered.
Bonus bits: The hotel/golf resort just implemented a drug policy, and if you were injured or did 200 USD of damage you needed to take a drug test, which I did. Policy also stated that you wait 3 days not working for the results. This was the start of a very busy weekend with a car show on the golf course, etc, and every warm body was needed, I went in to work the next day and if they wanted to send someone else for a drug test because they caused the accident, I suggested the ill tempered redheaded café chef…my results were discarded later.
Bonus bonus, right after the policy was put in place, a manager dropped a chandelier & walked away from his job after 5 years working there instead of taking the drug test.
Missing my first shift at a large retail store because of a misunderstanding. When I showed up the next week, the manager was furious. Not the best start
Was relocating a $10k piece of networking hardware and dropped it into another 10k VM server. Server was fine, network hardware was not. It was during a project that was a real mess, thought it was a stupid mistake though.
We were able to work around it, though we did lose the contract we were trying to make. Honestly though given how rushed and panicked that whole three months was though, we were lucky nobody suffered anything worse. Real shitshow.