I majored in English.
About a week agao, I deleted a guy’s desktop and My Documents folder. Ooops. Fortunately, he wasn’t too broken up about it because he had everything important in his network folder.
When I was in the Army, I knew a guy who was one of those perpetual PFCs. For some reason, he was never promoted to Specialist.
We found out why, at his last assignment, his unit was on alert for a drill and someone told him to cut his phone line as in unplug his phone or take the reciever off the cradle. He went into the wiring closet and cut all the phone lines for his battalion. Evidently, B-52’s were standing by to bomb the place because of the loss of communication and the colonel was going to personally kick the guy’s arse and the XO had to hold him back.
I managed to miscalculate interest payments to a large airline. For 9 months. I don’t feel so bad: despite the fact that I sent them support for the calculation every month, they never caught it either. When we trued up, we ended up owing them about $2.5m. Easy come, easy go.
I was a bit younger then, and was absolutely terrified. The rest of the world just shrugged and we paid them.
I was part of a clusterf* that had our entire revenue-generating system (really–we used it for everything!) down for over 24 hours, and when it came back up, people had to go back in and reenter the previous day’s work again.
Some impressive screw-ups here.
The worst I can remember is from when I was working maintenance at a printer/publisher. They were converting some warehouse space to offices, and had already installed the sprinklers for the new lower ceiling before all of the stock had been removed. When it finally came time to move the stock I wasn’t paying attention and backed up the forklift with the forks still raised after pulling a pallet from a top rack. Snapped off a sprinkler head which caused that whole section of the sprinkler system to drain.
Man, that was a lot of water!
I once accidentally deleted Minnesota. 
At least the Phone Companies records for it. Fortunately I’m smart enough to schedule the heavy work immedieatly after the Monthly backups were taken. So only about 1 hours worth were actually lost for good.
Doing bank closings in the early 90s (as in, bank going insolvent, FSLIC / RTC had to pay out depositors), a bug in a hastily-written program designed to keep people from getting more than 100,000 payout, caused the program to think that some folks actually owed money to the bank. That merely delayed payouts to some client organizations, but still…
Biggest one I ever witnessed:
- Imagine a data conversion test script, designed to clean out all the tables in the test environment so we could test the conversion process from scratch.
- Imagine a trainee database administrator looking at this script
- and (for some reason) doing a select-all and ctrl-C
- A few weeks after we’d gone live with the new system
- while logged in to the production database
- with administrative rights
- and accidentally hitting ctrl-V in the SQL client
Yes, I saw her paste MY SCRIPT… which did an awful lot of TRUNCATE TABLE commands (for non-DB folks: TRUNCATEs can’t easily be undone).
I remember screaming HOLY SHIT KILL THAT NOW!!!
in time to halt the process roughly halfway through destroying their entire production database.
I had the shakes. The real DBA, who was in the room at the time, was shockingly mellow and said something about reconstructing everything using the database logs. As this happened to be my last day on the project, I didn’t witness that. I know the trainee learned a very valuable and painful lesson about not being logged in with any more rights than you absolutely need! (to this day I don’t know why she was looking at the conversion script, or had selected/copied it…)
I sent to a reporter, via e-mail, the financials of a private company that was involved in litigation. They were discovery responses that should have gone to opposing counsel; I typed in half the e-mail addy and Outlook finished it, and I sent the e-mail before I realized I’d sent it to John Smith, reporter, and not John Smitten, attorney.
I called the reporter and told him what I had done, that he had received or would shortly receive an e-mail with several highly sensitive and private attachments dealing with the case he was following. I explained that if he reviewed them, much less used them, I would almost certainly lose my job, and asked him to delete them without opening them. He did, because he was a gentleman.
The weird thing was, I couldn’t help thinking that if I had been fired, that wouldn’t have been so bad. It was a red flag that the job was not for me.
This makes me feel better about my worst screw-up.
I was TAing for a class of 300 students, my first semester as a TA. The prof was out of town, so only us four TAs administered the final exam. I volunteered to go pick up the photocopied tests from the office, which closes at 5 pm, before the final at 6 pm.
It turns out, I only saw one of the two piles of tests. We only had 150 tests for 300 students, and couldn’t get into the office to get them. We only figured this out after we had given out all the tests (dumb, dumb, dumb) so we had to a) get the prof to email us a copy and go to Kinko’s and photocopy 150 of them, b) in the meanwhile, scroll through the pages on the computer on the class projector and c) keep the students from rioting or talking since, after all, half of the class was already writing the exam.
We ended up allowing them to give less weight to the exam in the final grade if they wanted, but this was after angry calls to department heads, meetings of department heads and our professor, and legal threats from students and their parents.
Everyone was extremely nice about it and refused to blame me, but I almost quit grad school right there and then.
I had a similar experience, but fortunately it was a near miss. I had spent days putting together discovery documents in a large bankruptcy matter. I finally finished at midnight and scheduled the Fedex pickup for first thing the next morning. I went to the bar, went home, and was about to go to sleep when I realized that I might have put privileged, unredacted financials into one of the boxes.
I put my clothes back on, turned around, and made it back to the office before the scheduled pickup. Fortunately, I had not actually made the error, but it sure scared the shit out of me at the time.
And another juicy mistake was accidentally delaying a $50m payment to another big business partner. That mistake only cost us about $5k in overdraft fees, but hot damn, it was embarrassing.
I’ve not yet had the opportunity to make any particularly costly mistakes, but the time I spilled about a gallon of olive oil all over the prep counter and floor at a sandwich shop was…not good. It takes a lot of time to clean up that amount of oil and make the floor not a slippery death trap.
In terms of financial cost, a friend of mine once managed to break a professional video camera setup which, according to him, cost roughly ten grand. It was his first day on the job and he wasn’t even supposed to be messing around with that equipment. It was also his last day on the job.
Unca Cecil’s answer right here.
I shouldn’t admit this in public, and I’m prepared to get Pitted for it, but the single worst thing I ever did at work was kick a student.
The background is, I was a public school teacher in Bulgaria and the morale there is, shall we say, very low. There’s virtually no discipline in the schools, especially with older students. There isn’t a substitute teacher system, so if a teacher is sick, the kids just wander around the halls all day and annoy classes in session. It’s great.
I was teaching a class of my small kids when this big (bigger than me) fifteen year old ninth grader opened my door, stood in my doorway, and proceeded to cause a commotion. I told him to go away - he just repeated my words in a mocking voice. I told him I would discuss his behavior with the director and his class teacher - he laughed.
This went on for about five minutes, and finally, totally infuriated, I reared back and kicked him in the shin.
This did, in fact, get him to leave, but of course as soon as I did it, I was horrified at myself. After the class was over, I went immediately to his class teacher and to my counterpart (the other English teacher) and told them what I’d done.
Their responses? “Oh, don’t worry, he probably deserved it.”
I was piloting a oil tanker…the Exxon Valdez…and anywho, I had just finished some cocktails on the bridge when out of nowhere, this continent shows up and POW!
Just kidding of course (but that would rule this thread).
Once I wrote a draft of a letter to the bank on behalf of my boss, and as a joke I undersigned it “Sweet Piece of Man Candy”. I figured it would get a laugh from him when he read it prior to signing it (and then I would go make the proper correction). The day got hectic, he didn’t pay much attention, signed it, and sent it…to the bank…signed “Sweet Piece of Man Candy”.
(I wasn’t embarrassed, I was a little proud).
In the same spirit of busting balls, I would allow him to walk around town for days with a suspiciously long nose hair hanging out and say nothing, until say Thursday and then do the whole “you do realize you have been wagging that nose hair around for like 4 days?”. After he would look at himself in the mirror and realize the length and pervasiveness of the hair, he would complain I hadn’t warned him and then I would retort “hey buddy, you have a wife for those kind of tasks”.
I would also let him walk around with his fly open just to have something to snicker about around the office. Tee-heee
I was called to a radio site where the tower had been hit by lightning and had knocked our digital microwave radio out. I got to the site and discovered that the grounding system had partially failed and had knocked out my radio and a bunch of other equipment. Fortunately we have fuse panels to provide additional protection, and those had done their jobs and blown.
I removed the old blown ones on the radio and inserted new ones. They blew immediately. Of course the best solution to me at the time was to again replace the fuses. This time however, the backplane of the radio caught fire. This threatened to knock out radio communications for almost every state agency in a 5 mile radius, in a major metropolitan area, if it spread in this confined space. Fortunately the capacitor did not start a larger fire, and I only had to quickly disconnect the power at the rack to isolate things. I did spend the rest of the night tracking down and installing the new backplane and making sure everything else came back on OK. Actual cost was about $20,000. Potential cost was probably pushing $500,000.
Sounds like your mistake was kicking him only once, Kyla.
Infamous in the first legal office I worked in was the “Dear Dickhead” letter. A lawyer got in a pissing contest with opposing counsel and memorialized their heated telephone exchange with a follow-up letter. That’s a common practice but he, pissed off, started the draft letter “Dear Dickhead,” and, sure enough, forgot to change the salutation before sending it. The other attorney moved the court to sanction him, and he had to explain what happened and apologize. AND he got called on the carpet for unprofessionalism, which was fair. Any time one of us got mad or frustrated at opposing counsel, or a witness, someone else would say “Sounds like you need to send him a Dear Dickhead letter.”
Just gonna say reading this thread makes my mistake seem not too bad.
First month out of college I’m working as a civilian civil engineer on an Air Force base. My first project? Demolish three small observation buildings on the airfield. Wrote the contract, got the contractor, and off he went.
Probably would have been best if I had made sure the buildings weren’t still connected to the base power grid.
First one came down, there was a big blue flash, and half the airfield lost power.
I work at a sporting goods store and when the holiday season comes around we are really busy and we offer a lot of promotions.
Well at this time they give everyone a kind of managers status on the register so the manager doesn’t have to come over and approve all transaction and item promo’s…
well… We had a promo for 30% off your entire transaction, excluding under armour… Well… I forgot about it and this woman had come in only to purchase under armour (the cold gear) for all the skiers and snowboarders in her family, as most of you know… this product is rather expensive… I gave her the transaction discount… and when the discount came up, it took off about $200 dollars from her entire total, it seemed like a big number, but I shrugged it off and kept going…
The registers keep a running tally of the things that people have rung up in their shifts, the discounts that were applied and the amount rung up under that employees name…
…needless to say I got a very stern talking to… I wasn’t aware but our company pays out for the under armour we sell in our stores, so in order to make any sort of profit, we never mark it down… That was my first warning, and only that… Thank goodness!
I once dropped a ten gallon tank that housed about a dozen African Spiny Mice. Fast, highly pissed off and thankfully uninjured mice.
Those beasties really, seriously did not want to be caught and I spent the rest of the afternoon chasing them. Did I mention the needle sharp teeth?
I did finally get 'em all. For the rest of my time at the zoo I told new staff the story so that they wouldn’t feel bad when their big foulup came.
There was the time I found an eight foot alligator in the kitchen, on a Sunday afternoon when I was alone in the place, but that wasn’t my fault.
'Nuther oilfield story.
Was working as anchor operator on a laybarge, and we were pulling in the side anchors to get the belly out of the cable. I was new, a tug was holding tension while I reeled him in. Foreman was fuming at us to hurry it up and, being new, I just cranked the winch* up to max. It pulled an ~80 ft tugboat through a big wave. For an instant it was completely underwater. Luckily no one went overboard, but the impact caused their main food fridge to fly open and spill everything below. Apparently it was a huge mess.
*These winches were huge. They held 2 *miles *of 3-inch diameter cable. Pulling 200,000 lbs of tension was child’s play for them.
Also, I believe I am the only SDMB member who’s rolled a UPS truck.