I used to work of an intern somewhere. This story is so embarrassing (to me at least) that I won’t say where. I was 16 years old at the time, and my boss had given me a disk so that I could make corrections with the data. I put the disk in the computer and to open up the file I press the disk icon button on the toolbar menu. Yes, I saved a blank page over the file. I panicked and played dumb. I told my boss that she had given me a blank file and she believed me.
Good thing the file was saved on her computer. Still a very idiotic experience that I hate looking back on.
New branch bank being constructed, and a trailer is located next to the site to start building a customer base. I’m sent there to repair/adjust contacts on the sliding entry door, while training a new hire on alarm systems. The old contacts were set too close, and struck one another until the plastic broke, so I want to set the part on the sliding door about an 1/8" further back. The door frame is thin aluminum, so to save a trip outside to fetch a drill, I take a scratch awl, and with a hammer, wham wham-instant hole. Install screw #1. Wham wham-the 4 x 7 tempered glass door shatters. :eek: My running dialog with the trainee stops. I look at him after a few seconds and say, “And if this happens to you, you’ll know you’ve fucked up.”
Well, I had an “almost” that scared the bejesus out of me.
Working for the film studio, one day they cut a cashier’s check for just under $4,000,000 and they wanted a copy for their records. I made the copy and gave it to the attorney.
About two hours later, my skin ran cold and the little hairs on my body stood at attention. I realized I had left the check on the photocopy machine!
I ran down the hall and flew into the copy room.
There was the check, still on the copy machine!
It was a miracle as normally about 50 people used that machine every day. Now, granted, it would have taken some major balls on the part of someone to try to cash it even if they had found it - but it would have been my last day at work if I had had to explain I “lost” it.
Once, back when Pentium processors were still under 100 MHz at the max, I was fiddling around inside a computer I was repairing. I noticed that one of the internal device power connectors had a wire coming loose, but didn’t think much of it. Well, the wire (one of the live ones, not a ground) came loose as I was powering it up. The bare wire touched the motherboard. There was a spark, a “poof”, and a small puff of smoke. Motherboard and processor (a fairly new Pentium) were both totally fried. So, my employer was out several hundred dollars to that person.
Working for an attorney, I was trying to “figure out” the Access database. I had never been exposed to Access before the job, but it seemed kinda cool to me, so I was fiddling around in the tables and looking at the underlying code, and stuff.
And I broke it. It was actually a very fateful thing though, because it began my foray into the world of technology. I ended up teaching myself enough to fix the database, and found out that I was very good at it.
Which eventually led to me getting a job as a Help Desk Administrator. A month after I started, I was looking for a file on the network, and clicked the wrong one. What I didn’t realize was that it was a nasty file called Links.vbs - an email virus. There I am, the help desk administrator, unleashing a virus on the company. The worst part was, the virus sent out email to everyone in my address book (which of course, was the entire company) saying “For great XXX links, click here!” To everyone from the president on down. So of course, if the person clicked on the link, they regenerated the process from their own pc. My phone started ringing off the hook with variations on “Why did you just send me this filthy email??”
What was amusing, in the long run, was that because the virus didn’t spoof email addresses, it was easy to see who had actually clicked on the “OK” button (amazingly enough, “Cancel” actually worked!) and redistributed the virus. And it was many of the higher-ups. Including my boss! :eek: The general reply I got over the next few days was “Well, we figured it was from you, so it had to be ok!” I mean, who looks at email from the help desk and thinks it’s a virus?
Luckily it was a great company, and I only caught goodnatured ribbing over the whole deal.
Way back when DOS ruled the world and a 286 was a killer machine, I got transferred to a new department in the bank. This department used PC’s extensively. I was cleaning files off a floppy disc and was using DOS wildcards to make the job go faster. On one particular disc all the files I wanted to delete happened to start with the letter “o” but had various extensions, so I typed “del o*.*”. Just as I hit the “enter” key I realized that I was still in the root directory. I watched as every file beginning with the letter “o” was deleted from the hard drive. Did I mention that my department oversaw the collection of overdrawn accounts? All on files named “od1994”, “od1995”, “od1996”, etc. I wiped out 5 years worth of overdraft records in one fell swoop.
Only 1 thing saved my job: my boss, who knew better, had not been backing up the files. He couldn’t very well explain to his boss why I got fired for my mistake cramp without admitting his. We managed to find a copy of Norton Disk Doctor, learned how to use it, and saved about 90% of the files. I never lived that one down.
15 years ago I was working for our municipality’s park’s department. Our job was to mow and trim the parks and cemetaries that were operated by the city. So there would be a team of 3 of us that would haul around a trailer that had our large front deck mower, a push mower, and 3 gas powered string trimmers to each park we were assigned.
We were at this one park and my 2 work colleagues were out doing their jobs. I had just finished my mowing job and was asked to move the truck and the trailer over to the other end of the park where we all would eventually end up. So I loaded my mower into the trailer, jumped into the truck and began to pull forward when I heard the trailer make a loud crashing sound. I quickly look into the back mirror just in time to see the left side of the trailer bouncing over something.
At this point I get a large sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach as I start thinking, “Please, oh PLEASE don’t tell me I just ran over what I think I ran over!”
Yes, I had forgotten to move my string trimmer out of the way of the trailer and it had been run over. It was totally destroyed too. It had pieces that had broken off. Gas was leaking heavily out of the plastic tank that had cracked and the small 2 cycle engine on it was barely hanging onto the frame.
My work colleagues were shocked. When my boss found out he acted cool and told me not to worry about it as they had funds to get another string trimmer but for the rest of the season, I was not put on a mowing crew. Instead I was put on all sorts of weird jobs that basically involved working by myself.
Imagine a $300,000,000 airplane, the very first one, only one day prior to it’s triumphant rollout from the factory. The future of the company could very well be at stake. One of my jobs is called a rear spar shake. The rear spar is the aft part of the airplane wing forward of the flaps. It is full of electrical wiring and hydraulic tubing. A wire bundle has been routed to close to a flap drive motor and my job it to obtain the drawing and specification clearances. To do this I must remove the string tie used to hold the wire bundles together. I grab my dikes, make a quick clip and to my horror, I have cut 3 wires in addition to the string tie. And these were not ordinary wires, they were flight control wires. To insure airplane integrity, these wires are ran without the benefit of connectors or splices and engineering says “replace the wires”. All 140 feet. It took 6 of us about 12 hours to remove and reinstall the wires and all the other parts required for replacement. Boeing 777 #1 rolled out on time.
And racer72 also makes it easier for a flyingphobic like myself to get on a plane. They could just as easily “secretly” scotch taped the wires together and pretended like it didn’t happen. I thank you for the story, but most of all, for your integrity!
About thirteen years ago, I was adding a cash discount component to our invoicing system. Another programmer with more experience and I had started this project; we worked on it together for a little while, and then he went off to another position. After that I carried on the work by myself.
I don’t remember the exact details of the screwup, but I somehow didn’t plan for a certain contingency, resulting a few invoices having a line or two too many. Figures didn’t line up to their proper positions on the form, making a run of thousands of invoices useless. I know you’re probably asking yourself, why didn’t I use page breaks so at least most of the invoices would have been OK, and then just identify the common thread of the bad ones, so I could re-run just those? Again, I don’t remember the details, but there was some reason I couldn’t use pagebreaks. Instead, my program had to keep track of the line numbers all the way through. I survived the debacle and stayed with the company for several more years, but I don’t think my rep there ever fully recovered. Paradoxically, it’s also there that I did some of the work I’m still proudest of.
Last year, I thought we had Columbus Day off. The office was closed on that day the year before. I just didn’t come in that day. The office called my home and I was out. My boss finally reached me on my cell phone at about 4:00–and I was a bit tipsy (I was at a neighbor’s barbeque that had started at noon).
Lucky for me, I’ve been there long enough and have a good enough reputation that most people thought it was funny. However, this past Columbus Day was brutal. I probably got at least 50 people jokingly asking me if they could expect to see me in the office. And I got 50 more people earlier this week asking if I felt like coming in on Veterans Day.
a) The Tale of the Custom Plug-in File — I’m a FileMaker database geek and for a while I worked at a company that resold the same vertical-market database to several similar garment-district companies. Customizations to accomodate a given company’s specific workflow were accomplished through a custom “add-on” architecture: the base database had one default add-on file which could be swapped out for a real one which might be a single stand-alone file or might interconnect with a dozen custom files in more complex cases.
So one company wants a custom add-on whereby data from another system would be imported via ODBC and then piped into our system. I would usually write this as a single add-on file containing their fields with their fields names plus our fields with our field names and an import-and-parse script. Problem was, they made it sound like their data dump would be in some hideously nonstandard format rather than conventional row-and-column, something like recordID\fieldname:value; nextfieldname:value;
extrecordID\ fieldname:value. So I figured I’d need at least one other parsing file but until I had some sample data didn’t really know what architecture I was going to need. So I create one temporary file, “Dummy.fp5”, and assume it to have their fields with their fieldnames in it in normal table form but without making any other assumptions. Later, when they provide me with several data dumps to play with, I replace it with a pair of parsing and lookup files, finish the scripting, and send it off to them.
Come in next morning to 3 frantic voicemail messages and 3 similar emails, someone important over there is hopping mad and my own boss isn’t too pleased. I get on the phone and Timbuktu to their workstation to see what’s bugging them and in short order I’m staring at this screen:
…and for ten minutes I manage to keep a straight face while trying to convince an insecure computer-illiterate financial officer that he was not being insulted!
b) The Great Snopes Email Virus Spam Reply SNAFU — Everyone used to get these stupid things, right? “Forward this to everyone you know! Don’t open any email with the subject line ‘How to Give a Cat a Colonic’ 'cuz it’s really a virus and it’ll erase your hard drive”. So I’m working as a FileMaker geek in the IT Department of the New York office of a humongously big advertising company (BBDO, actually) which has offices all over the world and is furthermore just a tiny part of a bigger parent company (Omnicom) that owns them the way PepsiCo owns Pizza Hut. I get yet another one of these stupid emails and do what I’d been in the habit of doing: reply to sender with a link to the relevant Snopes web page. Umm, well, OK, so I escalated it a bit over time, so by this point I was writing back a little screed something like this:
Yes, I did do a Reply to All. Yes, it had gone out addressed to the global address for everyone in the entire Omnicom corporate universe. Yes, it had been sent out by a high-ranking Omnicom Associate Vice President to whom the CEO of BBDO theoretically reported. Yes, I essentially called my boss’s boss’s boss’s boss’s boss a blithering idiot in front of an international audience.
Oddly enough, I did not get fired, although I got one hell of a butt-chewing behind closed doors.
Ouch! Everyone has seen someone suffer from having the old “reply to all” terror bite them in the ass, but I’d say AHunter3 takes the cake for this one. How many people would you say received this email?
Several years ago and freshly out of art school, I went to work for a small design/production company. On one particular project, I was given a Billboard Design one of my coworkers had done. My job at the time was to make sure all the colors were correct and of the same consistancy. Make sure all blacks have the same CMYK value etc… Well, I forgot to check the black lettering and it was just 100% black, not the 80% Cyan, 80% Magenta, 40% yellow, 85% Black we usually did. To make matters worse, this was a multi piece set, 22 in all that would be printed out over the course of the week from this one design. Got to number 5 before I noticed the black was wrong which by that time we were on day 2. The hardest part was going up to my boss and having to tell that spaz what I did. Hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.
Ok, my two best screw up stories got people hurt. Not even sure I should be telling these here…
Risking revealing my secret True Life Identity, I’ll tell the stories. During high school, I worked at a Chicago area store that was a bicycle shop in the summer and a downhill ski shop in the winter. Honestly it was the perfect job for anyone at that age. I have a horrible screw up for each season!
Summer: The ‘bread and butter’ of a bike shop is the tune-up. I was a pretty competent mechanic but at 15 years old, there’s always a few tricks to learn. I learned a good one in that certain older, crummier bike with crimped sheet metal forks have these little brackets called ‘wheel hangers’ that go under the wheel nuts and literally hold the hub, and thus the entire wheel, to the fork. During one tune up, I thought the ‘wheel hangers’ looked a little rusty and replaced them with regular washers. Later, the customer picked up the bike and business proceeded as usual. A few days later, the guy came in furious. It seems his daughter was riding the bike and the front wheel came off. She flipped over the bars and was, uh, made bloody. I think the boss gave him a brand new bike to make things right. gulp
Winter: Part of annual downhill ski maintenance is binding testing. You put the ski and boot on a jig and use a torque wrench to verifiy that the bindings release within prescribed limits. There’s a bit of a code to turning the customer’s height , weight, age and skiing ability into the correct binding setting. I completed hundreds, maybe thousands of binding tests. My time was up. I completed a series of binding checks and clocked out for the day. A few weeks later, one customer came back from his trip to Vail, Colorado. Seems people over 65 years old have a different setting. Seems his bindings have been incorrectly set and he hurt his knee. Seems I was the one who set and tested his bindings. Eep! He was convinced not to sue only because the boss gave him “several tens of thousands” to pay for his hospital bills. Heh.
That was when I was a young man, a child maybe. I’ve since become a more careful employee. I’l be graduating in May with an engineering degree…anyone??
I helped design an ad to go in HS newspapers. Despite our repeated statements in that office that you had to get three people to read something outloud before it might be actually correct, we didn’t do it. We got back boxes of a coupon ad that was already expired.
I was there all night running the cards through a computer printer to make the date "extended.
