# I need computer horror stories **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [May 12, 2009, 10:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-need-computer-horror-stories/496226 "2009-05-12T22:32:26Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Anne\_Neville](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Anne\_Neville](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Anne_Neville)\ **Post date:** [May 13, 2009, 4:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-need-computer-horror-stories/496226/41 "2009-05-13T16:58:34Z")
> [@Dewey\_Finn](#): > > What about it? “[WhiteHouse.com](http://WhiteHouse.com) is a non-partisan website which focuses on giving average Americans a greater voice on issues facing the country.” [It used to be a porn site.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitehouse.com) ---
**Author:** ![Dewey\_Finn](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dewey_finn/32/4222_2.png) [@Dewey\_Finn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dewey_Finn)\ **Post date:** [May 13, 2009, 5:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-need-computer-horror-stories/496226/42 "2009-05-13T17:01:11Z")
> [@KneadToKnow](#): > > I’ll take your word for it. Before it went to that, though, it was hardcore porn. Heck, I’m foolhardy enough that I went to it just to check, _from an office computer_. ---
**Author:** ![tdn](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/94ad74/32.png) [@tdn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tdn)\ **Post date:** [May 13, 2009, 5:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-need-computer-horror-stories/496226/43 "2009-05-13T17:01:46Z")
> [@KneadToKnow](#): > > I’ll take your word for it. Before it went to that, though, it was hardcore porn. I certainly hope that it was more Monica than Linda. ---
**Author:** ![Solfy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/848f3c/32.png) [@Solfy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Solfy)\ **Post date:** [May 13, 2009, 5:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-need-computer-horror-stories/496226/44 "2009-05-13T17:51:21Z")
A county IT department worker demonstrating the power of the internet to local government officials in the mid 90’s unwittingly showed them all [whitehouse.com](http://whitehouse.com) on a projected screen. This lead to a discussion of the differences between .com and .gov. And no small amount of blushing. ---
**Author:** ![Mrs.Cake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/2acd7d/32.png) [@Mrs.Cake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mrs.Cake)\ **Post date:** [May 13, 2009, 6:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-need-computer-horror-stories/496226/45 "2009-05-13T18:37:23Z")
I just lost 6 months worth of accounting and payroll data, due a glitch found in the back-up system after the server exploded at work. I am in the valley of despair. The manual data recovery is going to take months, and I’m already working 55-60 hour weeks. ---
**Author:** ![Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skald_the_Rhymer)\ **Post date:** [May 13, 2009, 7:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-need-computer-horror-stories/496226/46 "2009-05-13T19:30:30Z")
> [@tanstaafl](#): > > Shortest one yet… > > rm \* .c Which is? On other issues, I didn’t know [whitehouse.com](http://whitehouse.com) was no longer porn; I declined to look at it from work. ---
**Author:** ![Anne\_Neville](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Anne\_Neville](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Anne_Neville)\ **Post date:** [May 13, 2009, 7:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-need-computer-horror-stories/496226/47 "2009-05-13T19:34:52Z")
> [@Skald\_the\_Rhymer](#): > > Which is? rm is the Unix command to delete a file or files. The \* is a wildcard character. You would use the command rm \*.c to delete all files with the extension .c. However, there’s a space between the \* and the . in the post. That means Unix interprets it as rm \* followed by the nonsense command .c. rm \* deletes all files in the current directory. ---
**Author:** ![tanstaafl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/ba8739/32.png) [@tanstaafl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tanstaafl)\ **Post date:** [May 13, 2009, 7:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-need-computer-horror-stories/496226/48 "2009-05-13T19:38:17Z")
What **Anne Neville** said. And yes, I did that once… It’s probably worth adding that Unix doesn’t bother to ask if you are sure before proceeding with that command. ---
**Author:** ![Anne\_Neville](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Anne\_Neville](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Anne_Neville)\ **Post date:** [May 13, 2009, 7:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-need-computer-horror-stories/496226/49 "2009-05-13T19:46:06Z")
> [@tanstaafl](#): > > It’s probably worth adding that Unix doesn’t bother to ask if you are sure before proceeding with that command. Some admins and users alias rm so that it’s actually rm -i and does ask if you are sure, but the default behavior is not to ask if you are sure. There are other people who argue that aliasing rm so it does ask if you are sure is dangerous, because it lulls people into a false sense of security by making them think that rm always asks if you really want to do that. ---
**Author:** ![tdn](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/94ad74/32.png) [@tdn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tdn)\ **Post date:** [May 13, 2009, 8:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-need-computer-horror-stories/496226/50 "2009-05-13T20:40:17Z")
SQL Server doesn’t ask, either. A few years ago I wanted to make a copy of a table, so I generated a script. I was going to change the name to dbo.ValuableDataThatLivesDependOn\_copy, but I hit that run button a little too soon. And the first command was DROP TABLE. Yes, I soiled myself immediately. It was bad. It was very very bad. ---
**Author:** ![Mama\_Zappa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/71e660/32.png) [@Mama\_Zappa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mama_Zappa)\ **Post date:** [May 13, 2009, 8:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-need-computer-horror-stories/496226/51 "2009-05-13T20:57:09Z")
> [@tdn](#): > > SQL Server doesn’t ask, either. A few years ago I wanted to make a copy of a table, so I generated a script. I was going to change the name to dbo.ValuableDataThatLivesDependOn\_copy, but I hit that run button a little too soon. And the first command was DROP TABLE. > > Yes, I soiled myself immediately. It was bad. It was very very bad. My gosh - I can’t believe I forgot this similar tale that is one that still gives me the willies. I was doing data conversion for a client. During the lead-up to going live, I frequently had to basically wipe everything I’d done, to start from a clean slate. To make this easier, I had a script that dropped a bunch of constraints (foreign key etc.), and either deleted from or truncated the assorted tables. I got a ton of use out of that script. Fast forward to a couple of weeks after go-live date. Everything was working fine. Late afternoon, I was chatting with one of the client staff members (she was learning how to do database administration), while another client staff member (the real DBA) was in the room. The apprentice DBA was logged into the production database in the interactive SQL tool. With whatever database user ID that had full rights to do anything at all. The apprentice for some reason did ctrl-V. A bunch of commands appeared on the screen, one after the other, and I saw with horror things like “deleted xxxx records” and “table truncated” appear on the screen. I yelled “KILL THAT SCRIPT!!”. She did… but the damage was done. I remind you again, this was _ **production** _. She had just wiped out a large fraction of the production database. Now, why she’d even been looking at my conversion script, was a mystery to me. And being logged in to production, with a user with that kind of power, when she wasn’t doing anything that required it… well, that’s just sloppy and shows you the sort of thing that can happen. The senior DBA was surprisingly mellow about it, really. He said they could reconstruct it from the database logs. Being late afternoon, simply restoring from the nightly backup wasn’t a great choice as they’d lose all their day’s work. This being my last day on that particular project, I never really found out how he did it all. Which was sort of too bad, as it would have been useful knowledge. ---
**Author:** ![HMS\_Irruncible](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hms_irruncible/32/7394_2.png) [@HMS\_Irruncible](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HMS_Irruncible)\ **Post date:** [May 13, 2009, 9:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-need-computer-horror-stories/496226/52 "2009-05-13T21:03:21Z")
> [@Skald\_the\_Rhymer](#): > > Full disclosure: unlike most of my polls, this one is not utterly pointless. I need some good stories for a training class I have to conduct this Friday for work. So share with me your tales of misfortunes brought on by careless surfing, foolish opening of attachments, inattention to regular backups, and so forth. Stories in which disaster was on the horizon but dodged through good practices would also be appreciated. > Thanks! It’s pretty much a rule in IT that 50% of storage doesn’t have backups, and the 50% that you think has backups actually doesn’t because it’s not backing up the right thing and nobody has time to test it. This comes up over and over in my IT career. ---
**Author:** ![Shodan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9f8e36/32.png) [@Shodan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shodan)\ **Post date:** [May 13, 2009, 9:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-need-computer-horror-stories/496226/53 "2009-05-13T21:04:09Z")
> [@tdn](#): > > When I did Word support, I would get this call at least a couple of times per week: > > “You guys suck! We have a million-dollar proposal coming up in one hour, and I lost my document! I’ve been working on it for a week, it was 300 pages, and without it we’ll lose that million dollars. If you don’t get my document back right now, we’ll sue you for everything you’ve got!” > > “No problem, ma’am, let’s open up the copy that you last saved.” > > “Saved?” > > ```auto > > ``` Yup, what we call a Code 4 problem. Say it with me - “Problem exists between the keyboard and the chair.” I had a colleague delete all the source code we had been working on in our Y2K environment. And it had not been backed up for seven months. A _former_ colleague. Regards, Shodan ---
**Author:** ![butler1850](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/779978/32.png) [@butler1850](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/butler1850)\ **Post date:** [May 13, 2009, 9:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-need-computer-horror-stories/496226/54 "2009-05-13T21:16:20Z")
My father somehow got it into his head that he could make changes to the hardware on my brother’s PC. Father is good with electronics, not so much with common sense sometimes. He decided that the computer’s fans were too loud, so found some software online that would allow him to reduce the fan speeds… Not enough cooling, leads to bad things. When he called me, he was very vague as to what he did, until I got the whole story… and informed him that the CPU was now blown. When the PC arrived at my house, I confirmed the same, and warned him never to fiddle with fans/cooling again. ---
**Author:** ![JohnT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johnt/32/15048_2.png) [@JohnT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JohnT)\ **Post date:** [May 13, 2009, 11:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-need-computer-horror-stories/496226/55 "2009-05-13T23:48:15Z")
I used to use FoxPro as one of my ex-employers critical applications ran on it. There was a fair amount of database manipulation going on in that job and I got pretty good at it, even though it wasn’t something I was trained for. I got to be fast… very fast. Sometimes _too_ fast. So I’m typing away at the command box and for some reason, at times, I would get ahead of myself and type ZAP: USE TABLE1.DBF REPL ALL BLAH WITH SUBSTR(BLAH2,3,40) FOR BLAH, BLAH, BLAH ZAP _… WTF??? DAWGAMMIT!!!_ Fortunately, I tended to backup my databases to non-standard backup extensions, like TABLE1.BAQ, TBL2BAK.DBF, etc before I made some major modifications to the data - I would end up with possibly 20 different backup files when all was said and done, so my (slight) tendency to ZAP would only cause me to lose 1/2 hour of work or so, not days of it. (ZAP, for those uninitiated to FoxPro, would just wipe the entire database, no questions asked.) ---
**Author:** ![KneadToKnow](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kneadtoknow/32/3999_2.png) [@KneadToKnow](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/KneadToKnow)\ **Post date:** [May 14, 2009, 12:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-need-computer-horror-stories/496226/56 "2009-05-14T00:13:08Z")
Nowhere near the degree of devastation of these database guys, but I used Lotus 1-2-3 back in the days that printing was just unsure enough that the first macro I wrote on every spreadsheet I started consisted of the save command followed by the print command. ---
**Author:** ![Idlewild](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/8491ac/32.png) [@Idlewild](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Idlewild)\ **Post date:** [May 14, 2009, 2:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-need-computer-horror-stories/496226/57 "2009-05-14T02:15:52Z")
A few years ago we got an application that had shared files, and users had to refresh to see files other users had created. Refresh was done via the f5 key. I was admin for the application for a while, and people would call in desperation because (even though we just went through this last week when they couldn’t see a file someone else created) the files that were supposed to be there didn’t exist! I would tell them to refresh. Then I’d specify ‘press f5’. Then I’d walk over to their desks and press it myself, to be praised as having some kind of magical touch, because it sure didn’t work for them. It took me a couple of weeks (slow on the uptake) to realize that they were probably all hitting the ‘f’ key, then ‘5’ when I told them to ‘press f5’. That was the most irritating issue for me personally with the software, however, the worst issue was that we were using it wrongly, and users could get to the shared files via windows explorer as well as via the app. So they’d just circumvent the app entirely, and work on the files outside it, which defeated the purpose. ---
**Author:** ![Arglefraster](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/3bc359/32.png) [@Arglefraster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Arglefraster)\ **Post date:** [May 14, 2009, 1:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-need-computer-horror-stories/496226/58 "2009-05-14T13:15:30Z")
> [@Anne\_Neville](#): > > When I went to this site, it brought up a dialog box asking if I wanted to install the “Hot SEXXX Toolbar” in my browser. I of course clicked No. A box came up saying “Click Yes”, and then returned me to the previous dialog box. I had to use Task Manager to get rid of the dialog without installing the toolbar. I’ve run into a few that will install the crap even if you click “No”. It lulls you into a false sense of security by making you think you have a choice. Then you click “No” and you’re _still_ fubarred. :mad: Safer to use Task Manager no matter what. ---
**Author:** ![Erasmus\_Darwin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/c57346/32.png) [@Erasmus\_Darwin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Erasmus_Darwin)\ **Post date:** [May 14, 2009, 2:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-need-computer-horror-stories/496226/59 "2009-05-14T14:38:13Z")
> [@Anne\_Neville](#): > > However, there’s a space between the \* and the . in the post. That means Unix interprets it as rm \* followed by the nonsense command .c. > > rm \* deletes all files in the current directory. This is not entirely correct. .c doesn’t get interepreted as a nonsense command. Instead, it’s interpreted as another argument to rm, which in turn, means it gets interpreted as another file to be deleted. Of course there’s generally not a file named .c to be deleted, but that’s still significantly different from being a nonsense command. If there were a semi-colon between the \* and the .c, then it would be considered a command. It’s also worth noting that “\*” get expanded by the shell to all non-dot files in the current directory rather than all files in the current directory. So a file named “.foo” would survive. ---
**Author:** ![Mama\_Zappa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/71e660/32.png) [@Mama\_Zappa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mama_Zappa)\ **Post date:** [May 14, 2009, 4:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-need-computer-horror-stories/496226/60 "2009-05-14T16:42:37Z")
> [@Anne\_Neville](#): > > The [“ILOVEYOU” worm](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILOVEYOU) is a famous example of why you should be careful when opening email attachments… Oh gawd… that one hit my project. A colleague received it, and of course it forwarded itself to everyone on the project. I was also foolish enough to open the attachment… a split second later, I heard someone else say “That looks like a virus - DON’T OPEN IT!!”. :smack: Had to make a hasty phone call to Typo Knig suggesting that he _not_ open any emails from my work address that day, as an email from me with that subject line… well, would be a tad unusual but not entirely out of line. This was a DoD project, and the worm hit a lot of groups other than just our own. A couple of days later, everyone in DoD got a warning email reminding us to be careful with attachments, and “if you get an email from a general saying ‘I love you’ you should be concerned for SEVERAL reasons”. LOL!!! [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-need-computer-horror-stories/496226.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-need-computer-horror-stories/496226.md?page=4)