The bamboo probably required less force to tear apart than the hat did.
Same company as above, circa 1999/ The Y2K panic was on. I got myself unassigned from the Y2K remediation team after some external contractors got control of it and convinced upper management that the sky was going to fall. These guys practically built a bunker for themselves for the Y2K situation room - satellite phones, UPS units, walkie talkies, the works. The company operated worldwide, and one of the first places the change rolled through was in Southeast Asia. There was an ISDN line between branch offices that quit working promptly at midnight. Much chaos ensued, as the team frantically worked on backup plans for every ISDN line in the company. Oddly enough, no other lines failed.
A few days later, when the mystery was unraveled, it was discovered that someone had failed to pay the bill for that line, and the telco’s computer shut it off promptly at midnight on the last day of the month. That turned out to be about the most significant “incident” that the Y2K team got to handle.
There is no mystery to this and I certain that everyone is telling the truth. Hueys are among the most fault tolerant helicopters ever built. The have to be because of their mission. There are many accounts of them taking vegetation and even gunshot damage to the rotors and still being able to fly.
The same isn’t true for civilian helicopters at least if they want to remain legal to fly. The rotors are remarkably fragile. A strike from just about anything can ground them and run up an eye-popping repair bill as can someone just reaching up and yanking down on a tip while they are on the ground.
My cousin runs a helicopter touring company in Colorado. His greatest fear is a strike like others described because it could put him out of business for weeks and maybe permanently. The problem is that helicopters don’t really run on gas. The true fuel is $100 bills. Even when things are working perfectly, his base operating costs are $700 dollars an hour before he pays himself or anyone else and he is usually the pilot as well. He had a small pebble strike to the windshield once and that was a quick $5000 gone.
Rotor strikes are vastly much more problematic. Helicopters are insanely complex and sensitive inventions that command extreme money to work on at all. Any type of rotor strike on a civilian helicopter requires a thorough inspection at least and that doesn’t just mean that you look it over closely. It means that you need a specialized helicopter mechanic to take most of the whole thing apart and put it back together again even if there is no true damage. That generally costs many thousands to tens of thousands of dollars.
A few from the oilfield. As a trainee Measurement Engineer (basically take surveys of where the well bore is going) I was wide eyed and clueless when the senior engineer screwed up the corrections from mag north to true north to grid north ( he had been used to correcting to grid north but this survey program was to true north but the grid correction angle was on the well plot because that was default for the software that made the well plot even though it wasn’t needed) anyway we drilled 0.5 degrees off for 6 days, ran a lot of casing and cemented it then ran a gyro for narrowing down the position uncertainty . Turns out all the surveys we did were great, just 0.5 degrees off and 400 feet from where we should have been. Cue cutting and pulling of casing and a section re drill . About 14 days to get back to where we should have been. Offshore rig , much much money spent. There were a lot of sign off and check sheets to make sure everyone agreed the right numbers for mag dec ext were entered, but the senior engineer and directional driller were too experienced for “all that paperwork bullshit” and the company rep (client) didn’t sign off either.
3 occasions of telling various company men and directional drillers they needed to ease up rotation or back reaming as they would break something downhole, they didn’t , so they did, leaving bits of their mud motor or rotary steerable system downhole resulting in cementing and side tracking ( 3 - 4 days of rig time). Again lots o cash .
In the ’ stop digging now" category Drilled down through the Brent group , then back uphill through the Brent formations , then back down again. That took a few months. The drilling assembly got stuck when the well was at total depth . Attempts to get free pulled the pipe apart. Attempts to run fishing assembly pulled that apart . Attempts to retrieve a radioactive logging source by coiled tubing got stuck inside the other drill pipe and pulled that apart. Numerous milling runs followed by another overshot with coil tubing back off charge that went off prematurely and severed every thing above the initial reservoir entry point . At that point they gave up and filled the well up with cement . Probably a good 40-50 million bucks later. Not sure if it was a screw up or simply a result of trying to drill a well that really couldn’t be drilled.
Someone missing out on a contract tender that the price was for one set of tools and a backup, they priced per tool fortunately the client backed down, but then it was call out so the company could have refused to work at the contract rate, and the other guys bidding made the same mistake. So more of a " nearly an epic fuck up"
None were me personally , I have plenty of indiscretions and almost moments but not on those scales, but they were very educational to be around .
I don’t know whether this one was on the architect/engineer or on the builders, only that I had the pleasure of trying to clean up the aftermath: The company I worked for had just built/opened a new $14MM hotel in downtown Savannah. Less than a month after opening, we had one of those frog-drowning summer thunderstorms common in coastal Georgia. About ten in the evening, I got a phone call from the two front desk agents on duty - the pool (located on a deck on the second floor, above the porte-cochère and lobby, had flooded, dramatically. I lived out in the county, so I asked whether either of the other managers were able to come in, because they were closer. Nope, both of the other managers lived on an island east of the city, and the flooding was bad enough that the roads were closed - they couldn’t have left the island without aircraft or a boat.
I learned that night that you can, so go offroading in a Ford minivan - “ford” being the operative word. I took back roads in from the west to avoid intersections blocked by stranded vehicles, up on curbs and in the middle of what I hoped was the roadway. Got to the hotel to find water streaming into the lobby through the light fixtures, behind the wallpaper, etc. Both front desk agents had their shoes and socks off, pants legs rolled up, but they were still in their uniform jackets and ties! Unlocked offices to move file cabinets and computers from underneath torrents of water pouring through the season. Tactfully retrieved the mop from the nice, helpful guest who was trying to help us stem the tide (he was the keynote speaker at a chiefs of police conference the next morning - nicest guy ever, but I knew he needed his rest!) Got on the phone with the building project foreman, whose crew were still finishing up a few details from our punch list - told him that I didn’t care how he got there, but that he needed to get his ass to the property right then, and find me at least a temporary fix. Unlocked the housekeeping department, grabbed every towel in the entire storeroom, and started drying. (Did I mention? Reclaimed antique heart pine floors throughout the lobby. Those were almost more important than our files and computers!)
By the time I left, around 5:30 AM, there were still trash cans all over the place to catch drips. I had washed, dried, and folded enough towels for housekeeping to make up rooms the next morning, but I left a note for our housekeeping supervisor: “I did what I could. Sorry!” Every washer and dryer was still full of the remaining dirty linen. Everyone’s office was cleaned up as well as I could clean it, but the desk agents and I had trucked all of our file cabinets into a locked storeroom that was dry. And I left a note on the manager’s desk, telling him I’d probably be late the next day (actually, later that day,) and to “deal with it.”
I honestly don’t remember how the problem was resolved - whether the deck drain angle had to be re-engineered, or whether it was a simpler problem like a plug that hadn’t been removed. Didn’t care. But it was fixed, along with the lights and wallpaper and drywall and such, and I never had to make that trek again… at that hotel.
A couple of years later, I was working for an entirely different company, and we opened a new hotel in coastal Georgia… about two weeks ahead of a tropical storm that dumped 17 inches of rain in less than 24 hours. The ground floor flooded. I was the only manager able to make it to the property, due to the flooding (and, at that time, I wasn’t even a property-level manager. I was the corporate head of sales and marketing.) But I knew the drill, and was pretty damned happy that this hotel’s lobby had tile, not hardwood! 
In a similar vein:
The airline I worked for got bought by a larger competitor. So along the way we all got their uniforms. And once we were all dressed like them we began working together as one big blended group.
At the old airline there was one just set of ties & pocket squares for the male flight attendants ("MFA"s). At the new airline there were 3: red, yellow, and blue. Each MFA was free to choose whichever color(s) he preferred. Officially there was no difference between them.
UNofficially, these colors had taken on meanings. Red was “I’m a gay swinger; fly me”, yellow was “I’m gay in an LTR or at least gay-friendly; We can talk fashions, but hands off”, and blue was “I’m straight; you pervos keep your distance.”
Which color code TPTB were unable or unwilling to tell our folks about.
Much consternation ensued when *hundreds *of our MFAs showed up for work wearing the wrong gang colors. Several awkward incidents occurred on layovers before the word got around.
Another one from the world of IT (remember - anyone can make a mistake - but to really **** things up, you need a computer).
One of the storage maintenance guys was doing some basic clean-up tasks. Now, as per usual, he was using a standard job (JCL), which he would then modify to perform the task he wanted, by deleting or commenting out unwanted instructions. As all old mainframe dinosaurs will recall, the ‘*’ symbol has two meanings in JCL - if used in a particular way, it means ‘Ignore the next instruction - it’s just a comment line’ (that’s commenting out). If used the other way, it is a wildcard character - meaning ‘replace with every possible symbol’.
You can guess.
He was working with a standard DELETE job. Been used '000s of times before. Somehow, instead of the critical command being read as DELETE ‘*’(meaning ‘what follows is a comment - look for next line of data’) it was read as DELETE *(Wildcard). Which means DELETE Everything.
Remember, he was one of the Storage maintenance team. He had access to every dataset. The job started running and started deleting everything. The job was eventually stopped (by the Ops team) after about 60-70% of ALL Company data had been deleted.
It took about 3-4 days before we had things running reasonably again (reloading data from tape backups, mostly), and about 2 weeks to completely recover. The overtime bill would have been huge. It was retail company with well over 1,000 stores, and all transactions were processed nightly.
All because of a single ‘*’ character being misplaced by one position in a single line of code.
The above is the ultimate of why NOBODY gets a “GOD ID” except:
- Head of Operations
- Head of Systems (as in Operating System) Programming.
Had an application programmer submitted that job, it would have deleted all of the test files for his application.
No, programmers don’t get to update live data.
In the spirit of 'to really fowl things up you need a computer.
One of our sysadmins once updated the login script to cleanup temporary files on the user’s workstation. Unfortunately for him, under a certain set of circumstances it would instead delete all the files on the user’s network drive. Fortunately we have a good backup system in place so no one lost more than a day’s work.
Dollar wise it was not anywhere near some of the ones here, but for making my heart jump into my throat, it rates right up there.
It was the morning of my second day working on Volvos at a dealer for the very first time.
First day had gone well, I was very happy. My repair stall was kind of a temporary arrangement out next to the wash rack. I had no other technicians working near me.
Anyway my first job was a 600 mile service on a brand new top of the line 760 turbo. Now one of the cool features of the 700 series cars is the hood can be opened all the way to straight up for ease of access.
So I racked the car, opened the hood all the way, and raised the car. Now shops have high ceilings so you can raise cars up in them. Except for this area. I looked up just in time to see the hood hit the roof rafters. Bent the hood into a giant C shape and drove it down into the cowl. I lower the car down to about waist level see the damage and all I can think is I wonder if I can get my old job back? I know I am getting fired. My only question is will they do it right now, or will they wait till the end of the day.
Knowing it won’t get any better if I delayed the inevitable, I went and got the service manager and brought him back to my stall.
When he rounded the corner all I could say was “I’m sorry, I fucked up. Whatever you have to do, I understand.”
He stood there and looked at the car for what seemed like 10 minutes (probably 10 seconds) I knew I was toast.
He turned and said, “I guess I forgot to tell you about that low ceiling didn’t I?”
“Well yes, but I screwed up.”
“OK, I’ll get the customer in a rental car and we will get it fixed.”
At this point I figured I was getting fired at the end of the day.
I didn’t get fired that evening, so the next morning I was sure it was going to happen at the end of the pay period.
So when I saw my service manager that morning, I started stumbling out another apology. He cut me off and said “You can’t go through life worrying about the past.” Then he got this silly smile and said “Of course if it ever happens again, I might not be so understanding.”
I promised and it didn’t.
After I moved to a regular stall, every time a new guy was assigned that stall I would stop by point up and tell them how that blue paint mark got there.
At a Fortune 50 megacorp in the 90s where I was a young support tech…
Email MSExchange/MSMail networks were far less robust back in the day, and sane user behaviors weren’t the norm. A “reply all” distribution list storm completely killed the entire company network for 2 full days. As it shakily got restored through the rest of the week, reply-all aftershocks still rippled through the company bring down the network for hours at a time. It took probably 2 full weeks before it settled down and the network gurus rearchitected.
I was at one of the small subsidiaries (~1000 employees) and about 3 days into it we deliberately “went black” and cut ourselves off from the corporate network storm, physically pulling cables from the closets, falling back to fax and mail for critical-only business, spending tons of money on private hand courier services around the city. Otherwise, pensioners didn’t get their checks, lawyers didn’t get their memos, investors didn’t place their orders, etc. We gradually patched back in to corporate a few cubicle bays at a time until things settled.
Bedlam3?
I once saw a crane operated badly that resulted in the object being lifted dropping and splitting open.
Oh yeah, it was a Tactical Nuclear Missile. Pretty sure I and a lot of others managed the mile in 3 minutes.
Why didn’t they just burn the shreds and reprint the checks?
This gives me an idea. Just send out a follow email and say the previous one has a virus. Nobody will open that
This wasn’t Half Life 3 was it??? They didn’t screw up Half Life 3 did they!??! :eek:
A tale I tell frequently at work:
Early 2000. I was the data migration person when we implemented a system for a smallish client. My migration routines were all written in Oracle PL/SQL, and I had a script that would run them all in sequence.
The raw data was loaded into a set of tables, and the routines would run to do the reformatting etc. into the real database tables. To test the whole thing, soup to nuts, I had a separate script that would do deletes / truncates to reset my working area. It even had commands to disable indexes and constraints to speed up the process.
The client had an Oracle DBA, but he quit the week after we went live. They hired away our DBA, and they were working on training one of their staff to take over as his assistant.
My last day on the project, a few weeks after go-love, I was in that person’s office, chatting and saying goodbye, along with the DBA. The trainee did something on her keyboard, I happened to glance at her screen, and the next thing anyone saw was me wild-eyed, shrieking “OMG KILL IT KILL IT KILL IT STOP IT NOW!!!”
You see, for reasons unknown, she’d been looking at my testing script. And she had selected and copied the whole thing, presumably by accident. And she pasted it into an interactive SQL window. Which was connected to the production database. And she was logged in with admin privileges.
By my quick reaction, she only deleted about 2/3 of the production database. Right, that’s helpful.
Bear in mind, with “truncate” there is no rollback (with a delete, you can roll back).
The DBA was cool as a cucumber. He said “Don’t worry, we can restore it from the database logs”.
The lesson from this all: do NOT log in with any greater privileges than you absolutely have to have to do the immediate job.
I used to work at a retail graphics firm running large digital flatbed printers. The entire flatbed would slide in and out and the print heads would move perpendicular, the whole thing worked a little like a giant inkjet printer.
The printers had an optical scanner that would measure the thickness of the substrate you were printing on and move the print heads slightly above that, as they had to be close so that the printing wasn’t fuzzy. But when you printed on clear material, like acrylic, the optical thing wouldn’t work (it would just shine through the material instead of bouncing back), so it had to be measured by hand with a micrometer, and the measurement input into the controls of the printer.
A guy I worked with somehow measured wrong, or put a new piece on that was thicker than the stuff that he was running previously…and a 4’ x 8’ sheet of thick acrylic bashed into the print heads, which started hemmoraging ink.
I think they were $9k each to replace…there were 16 heads (one for each color, CMYK), but luckily only a couple were trashed before the printer shut itself down.
I don’t know if I’ve ever seen someone go so pale.
I worked in in an area that had a ~50" monitor displaying the incoming call queue. Emphasis on “had”, it disappeared somewhere between hanging on the wall of our old building and moving to the new building.
All these backup stories are making me literally sick. I used to work at a small startup and one of my jobs was running tape backups and mailing off the tapes to Iron Mountain. Except all I really knew how to do was follow the script I was given, and cross my fingers. If our data had gone bad and we had to restore from tape backup god knows if it ever would have worked. I always wondered if we were just spending lots of money sending blank tapes to Iron Mountain, or if the process was really working or not.
Silliest thing I ever saw was the old “reply-all” storm taking down the email server. Yep, someone spams the entire company by accident, followed quickly by lots of reply-all “why did I get this message?”, and then lots of reply-all “don’t reply-all!”, and more reply-all “why are people replying-all? Stop it!” We got back our email the next day.
I often wondered what would happen if I just sent a friendly email to Bill Gates or Steve Ballmer, who were listed clearly on the company email. Nothing abusive, just a friendly “Hey, how’s it going?” Like, would I be fired? I suppose that sort of thing must happen a lot, in a company with thousands and thousands of people there are bound to be a hundreds of dipshits. I managed to contain my curiosity. But it was like a big red button with a sign saying “do not push this button”.
We were sailing in the Indian Ocean, doing ‘Officer of the watch’ training.
This means we had a line of ships, and the rearmost one would zig zag up through the column until they became the lead vessel.
We zagged instead of zigged, there is the result
http://www.ambuscade.org.uk/Amb_Collision01-1.htm
What’s even worse, it happened right at tea break time too, nearly spilled my drink.
When we went into Bombay for repairs, things got worse, we lost a diver, the ship came down on the keel blocks, and crushed his airlines.
Crane collapsed at the other end of the dock and landed on a load of local workers, killed around 20-30 , hard to count the actual number being as they were all cut to bits.
Damn, casdave, that’s off the charts.