Probably just more SDMB members in tech related fields than working in the trades.
Many years ago I was a computer programmer/sysadmin/tech support for a county-wide E911 agency. I have more war stories from there than any other job, and the stories are breath-taking.
It was a very small center although their workload was NOT small. They dispatched the police and fire for a large city, a handful of small towns and the county sheriff. The center was crammed into one tiny windowless room in the basement of the old county admin building. The servers were actually in a separate room, a properly fitted computer room with HVAC, plenty of electrical, generator and a raised floor. For whatever reason, the powers that be (PTB) decided that the dispatcher’s room did not need to be on a generator. The center was also not in the list of mission-critical downtown buildings during the summer power brownouts (i.e. the list of places that did not have their power cut so that more people could have air conditioning). There were several occasions when the dispatchers worked in blackout conditions, using flashlights and their personal cell phones to keep in touch with the cops and firehouses. They couldn’t take calls from the public, though, obviously because the 911 calls only came into their now-dead consoles. There’s not much more creepy than the buzz of a busy dispatch center suddenly going black and silent.
There was the time when construction workers accidentally cut a gas line that ran under the street in front of the building and firemen from the nearest station had to come and force all the dispatcher to evacuate.
There was the time we had a plumbing leak in the floor above the computer room, discovered on a Monday morning by accident when I walked in to get some reports off the printer. I could smell the humidity in the normally dry room so peeked under one of the floor tiles to see around 6 inches of water. The systems were all still running while all their cables lay submerged. After we got the leak fixed and the room dried out, we pried up all the floor tiles to evaluate the cable damage. I found one high voltage power outlet that had been submerged, still working, but had grown quite the chemical “beard”.
And the best IT screwup was something that my coworker did completely by accident at at no fault of his own. We were running on DEC Vaxes and all VMS commands and utilities back then recognized a Ctrl-C as a command abort (important detail). It’s also important to understand that the dispatch system operated on near-real time, timestamping everything down to the second. It maintained a rotation of transaction history files on a daily, monthly and yearly basis.
We were getting ready for Y2K. Coworker asked me to show him the command to change the time on the machines, so I did. Instead of sending the command (because we didn’t want to actually do it yet), he hit Ctrl-C. Instead of aborting, the system actually executed the command. We looked at each other in disbelief and then sent another command to set the time back to what it really was. In the space of those 5 seconds, the system had closed many transaction files, checkpointed, created new transaction files and then promptly shat itself when the time reverted back to what it now thought was the past. I evaluated the damage and realized we had to call in the guru programmer from the system vendor to repair some files that actually got corrupted (we couldn’t just restore from backup).
Not my work, but my husband’s - he was plant engineer at a wire mill.
One night, a guy was moving a 3-ton coil of steel rod with a forklift when his ballcap came off. He turned to look for it and immediately drove into one of the pillars supporting the roof of the building. Think large factory floor full of very expensive machinery, not to mention the night crew at work.
I believe it was around 2AM when the phone rang and my husband had to dress and head to the plant. They had to stop production, clear the building, and bring in a crew that specialized in keeping roofs from falling in. They had to erect a temporary support to secure the roof before they could begin repairs. And until that was in place, no product went out the door.
It was a couple of decades ago, but I’m pretty sure the forklift drive was shown the door. I don’t know how much production was lost, but I know the repair ran over a million dollars. All because of a ball cap…
Similar to this, there is a utility to manage all of the HP printers in an organization that allows you to create profiles, update firmware, just generally puts all the admin stuff at a single workstation. Someone tried to push firmware updates out to the test lab but managed to select the enterprise group instead. So about a thousand printers went down in the middle of the night in a hospital network.
Then someone did it again about 8 months later… :smack: THEN policies were put into place to keep it from happening again. :smack::smack:
We sold deeply discounted 5hp engines under an EPA program. Later found out the engines we sold did not meet EPA standards.
Once there was an issue with draining the roof above our server room. The water was drained into a pipe that went through our server room. Maintenance came down and opened the cleanout plug. No water. Then he went back to the roof to clear the drain from there.
Without putting the plug back in.
Good news: He cleared the clog.
Bad news … .
A roof-full of water flowed neatly into the server room, where it could do the most good.:smack:
The sysadmin got out without being electrocuted. Luckily, everything was on a raised floor, but the power and switches below them were fried and it took a week before we were completely up and running.
My company distributes drugs. We had a FedEx trailer left on the lot over the weekend. Millions in loss, because of temperature compliance. FedEx just forgot to pick up one trailer, and no one noticed it was still parked at the dock. It’s now the procedure when doing nightly close to walk the dock and make sure all the trailers are gone.
StG
A UPS-like shipping center/facility.
Where to begin? There are so many to pick from even if you exclude out-and-out accidents like someone being hit by a forklift.
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4,000 airfreight packages destined for Texas were shipped from California to Pittsburgh by mistake. The average box costs under a buck to move; these, because of the error, cost $25-$40 to move and we did have to go UPS to do it in the time allowed by Seattle.
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Daily we are invoiced 3-25 “packages” that turn out to be huge containers full of what we call “small sort” – padded envelopes. Lots of padded envelopes. Maybe 200-500 per bag or box. The 25 usually happens when the volume is expected to be light and the managers send most of us home ----- and then the rest are stuck there for 2-3 extra hours.
I think I had a girlfriend fob me off once. I could be wrong.
I used to produce a children’s vaccine against a class III pathogen.
My examples weren’t real good. Yeah, techies are common here and IT just breeds war stories.
But what of the doctors, nurses, truck drivers, financial advisors, salespeople, small business owners, factory workers, etc? I see a few of those have started chiming in. Good.
Speaking of financial advisors I’m reminded of a good story that’s almost true.
For <reasons> about 30 of us USAF pilots left the service from one base all in the space of a month or so. Many, including me, went to the airlines. One guy did not; he wanted to be a stock broker.
His very first day on the job at Merrill Lynch was Black Monday (1987) - Wikipedia. So when we all got together for a hale and farewell lunch a few days later we ribbed him mercilessly about pushing the wrong button or kicking out the plug. He denied everything. Though he would, wouldn’t he? 
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Sounds like an interesting story. Maybe you could explain a bit?
Nothing happened. We had an entire department dedicated to preventing screw-ups. Spent more effort on that than the production. I’m not in IT is what I was saying.
A few years after that, I was managing a business delivering various services to other businesses. One of the clients was a food producer shipping raw food to a number of places around the world. One of the services we provided was certifying their employees as non-contagious when they had been visiting certain countries, some of which supplied part of the work force. Once, one of the physicians was a bit quick at signing off two men returning from a small village in one of these countries.
And then the tests came back. And we had to scramble to stop them from getting to work. Both of them had tested positive for a certain pathogen. Well known colloquial name. Starts with Black. Ends with Death.
Oh no !
Unintended invasion of a not particularly friendly country. Luckily someone who knew better just happened to be in the same area and noticed as the column went blissfully unaware across the border. That kept the incursion brief and more importantly unnoticed. Since it was never reported, for the rest I am Sergeant Schulz - “I know nothing. Nothing!!!”
When I was supervisor in a company providing just in sequence logistics support to GM, expansion basically led to the eventual shut down our location. Things were just fine till corporate was extremely aggressive bidding on a new chunk of business. It had an extremely short lead time which included a sub-assembly piece to add time on our end. It also had a tiny margin that barely added to our bottom line so of course the company tried to do everything on the cheap. It got really ugly. After I quit, the company went through several years of bleeding money at our location. That included fines under the contract, probationary status under the contract that cost extra to comply with, more management turnover, and having to build an entirely new facility. Our competitor that eventually bought the shiny almost new building when they took over my old employer’s contracts was probably happy though. 
I’m a chemical engineer, so I deal with plumbing… and stuff. Colorful stories? Well, there was the time that maintenance was in a reactor doing an inspection, and when they were done forgot to take their ladder back out and no one noticed. We made and pumped a batch: no more ladder. It was a BIG pump.
There was the time one of my old bosses accidentally switched vacuum to the manifold set up to fill drums, and sucked in a row of drums one by one, much like crushing 55gal soda cans, with a big BANG! each time. That was also the place where the people using a packed column filled with starch accidentally opened up an air line from the bottom, thereby blowing the entire packed column contents out the top while the rest of us were in a meeting. When we went to see what the commotion was, we found them all blinking at us in confusion, covered head to toe in white powder, like something out of an I Love Lucy Episode.
I’ve worked at a plant that had lots of forklift “fun”: Forklift drivers transporting gas cylinders through the plant that they forgot to secure, which fell off, knocked the valve stem off, and promptly took off like a torpedo. A coworker that regularly speared drums with the forks while tootling around our drum lot, and kept getting the forklift stuck by trying to go offroading into the chet. We finally told him he wasn’t to use the forklift except in an emergency.
I once visited a plant the day after someone let an autoclave overpressure; I was curious why there were squiggly outlines spraypainted on the road throughout the plant, like some sort of Cubist crime scene. Turns out that was where the shrapnel had landed… three blocks away, and having cleared a three story building in the way. There was a really long outline where the autoclave agitator had wrapped itself around a pole and taken the entire thing down. No one injured, though.
More recent “fun”, we had a power outage early one morning while a process I work on was in the middle of the reaction step. Ordinary procedure is for the reactor vent to switch tot he flare, as the exotherm can drive off a lot of solvents if there’s no cooling. Indeed, stuck in traffic that morning, I noticed that the flare flame was huge, and blue. However, no one knew that someone had convinced maintenance to put a drain leg on the flare feed line, without going through the Management of Change process. And that drain was left open. So all the solvents vented from the reaction, condensed on the way to the flare, and promptly drained into the sewers. Which flow out of the plant right at the point where the sparking power line had been knocked down by lightning (cause of the power outage). Apparently, sewer lids started blasting off, one by one, with eruptions of blue flame, up and down the street.
I work at a law firm, and our office manager was the type who dearly loved to cut costs. He loved our new IT guy, because new IT guy was getting products and service a lot cheaper than the previous guy.
Then it turned out that IT guy and his family had been forming fake companies and and the companies were “delivering” non-existent products and services. IT guy was fired, we sued him, and he lost. Office Manager stayed on until his retirement a couple of weeks ago.
I wasn’t directly involved with losing it, but I did have to tell a famous, gold-medal-winning athlete that her photo signed by the whole soccer team was missing from the frame shop.
I heard they eventually found it, but I had long since quit for unrelated issues.
You totally win the thread. Bravo!
I work in a very important medical devices facility that serves the entire U.S. and much of the world with very fast shipments of medically important things. We thought we did a good job of protecting against critical power and data line failures because we have redundant lines of everything coming into the building and those even use different providers.
Never underestimate the power of stupid. A bucket truck was doing some construction work down the street at an unrelated facility when the driver decided he really needed to be somewhere else quickly. He rushed down the street with the bucket still UP, snagged every single utility line, sheered off a telephone pole that almost hit one of my coworkers eating lunch when it fell and forced us to close our facility until all the damage could be repaired with crews working around the clock.
A standard terrorist attack would probably have been less effective at fucking things up than just one idiot in a large truck. It was such a dumb thing to do that I was actually impressed. I was doubly impressed that he didn’t even slow down when he took down the first set of lines and just wiped out the next ones too foiling all of our contingency planning.