I asked the group what the most catastrophic mistake they made at work was and, oh boy… we got some amazing replies. #ThenIWasFired
I’ve selected the Top 10 to feature in the blog, congratulations to those that have featured!
** All surnames have been redacted for privacy (and to ensure their managers don’t see this and make a certain spontaneous decision!). **
#10
Coming in at Number 10, the type of RAID configuration his customer also should’ve had (1+0)… congrats Gareth!
“I had an IDE 3.5 HDD enclosure, put in a drive to recover some important university documents for a customer… enclosure blew the drive.”
#9
At number 9, we have Ram, who made the mistake of pushing a new GPO right before lunch…
“I created a GPO that locks users to login to a specific PC only to discover I did the opposite 😅
I locked everyone outside their PCs.
The cherry on the top was that i did this GPO and went for lunch outside the office.
Half hour drive distance…
So yeah… I’m lucky to still have this job 😅”
#8
At one Byte (#8), we have Angel. Have you tried switching it off and uhhh… what was that last bit again?
“Sending a remote shutdown without a restart option… on 100 servers @ 2 AM on a Saturday”
#7
Lucky number 7, congrats to Cosma!
“Hit the little white button on the back on a Wang 5000, thinking it would reset the console. It rebooted the whole Mini and kicked a hundred or so users off. Apparently, it took 3 days for the PACE DB to recover. I was “asked” to leave site and not come back 🙃
That was about 25 years ago. They say that Good decisions come from experience and experience comes from bad decisions. I have never done that again 🙂”
#6
Conrad is coming in at number 6, mainly because of how the whole situation unfolded so casually.
“It was late 1999, and I was with a friend as a church’s yard sale. They had some computer items for sale. One of which was a large stack of 3.5 floppies that I bought.
They also had two laptops. These were a bit outdated even for 1999. So, I wondered if they were updated for Y2K. To find out, I went into the BIOS of one of them and changed the date to something beyond 2000. I then restarted the system. Next thing I know there is smoke coming out of the vents around the hinge.
I cautiously and sneakily put the laptop back on a table and walked away.”
#5
We’re into the Top 5, congratulations Nick!
Nick was tasked to write an ASP page for users to change password. The SQL command used was “update usertable set password=@pass”. Yeah, I forgot to add a ” where userid=@userid” condition. We had tens of thousands of users…
Wasn’t fired though!
#4
Sitting comfortably at fourth place, we have Eric.
Eric wiped the OS off a $2 million system (their cost) that the software engineer spent 2 days installing. Luckily, it didn’t take too long to fix it…
#3
At third place we have Chris!
Chris removed the OSPF routing table from a core router of the state ambulance service. Oh boy were there some fireworks going off that day.
They should’ve deployed the backup service!
#2
Coming in at second place, we have Chris (a different Chris, I promise)!
Chris killed all cell phone service in Eastern Wyoming, USA, after dropping a socket into a UPS… oops.
#1
And the winner is… Joseph! Congratulations!
Joseph put concrete through a fibre line and took out an entire asphalt plant for a day, costing them several hundred thousand dollars and wasn’t fired.
I’d call that an achievement, right?
