This happened to me this weekend.
I was installing Homebridge on on Raspberry Pi. At one part of the installation, you need to create a “homebridge” directory in your “home” directory. I did cd / instead of cd ~ and accidentally created it in the “root” directory (Linux geeks can see where this is going). So, I typed rm -r home and then instead of hitting the tab key (which auto-completes the rest of the name), I hit return.
Oops.
So, I blew my home directory away.
Fortunately, I had copies of all of my important files, and was able to restore everything in an hour or so, but that was a pretty bad typo…
I was sure this thread was going to be about typing “imminent” instead of “immanent” and stuff like that (cf. the Adultery Bible). Which I am sure I must have done, but I do believe in proofreading and nothing ever came back to haunt me. Except for that minor typo in a published work I would rather not name
I too have suffered from the forgotten / and extra or missing ", -, and return, but in my case it only resulted in copying files to the wrong place just like in your story; I managed not to delete essential files during the cleanup.
In the local language the expression ‘Good evening’ is one word, Goodevening. The words ‘good’ and ‘Bad’ have one letter different, and the two letters are adjacent on the keyboard. I made the obvious mistake in an email to 20 or so people, some of which were 2-3 levels above me, in response to a pretty frustrating situation one of them had created.
I sent the email from home in the evening and didn’t realize till I went to the office next day and somebody told me.
Fortunately in view of the aforementioned situation people found it apt and funny and the words Badmorning, badevening etc were adopted for a while.
If you are in charge of public relations for a Catholic high school for girls (as I was at one time), you really really want to make sure you don’t omit the ‘l’ from ‘public.’ Ugh.
I was at work. (For those who don’t know, I used to work in a prison.) Because I worked for the government, we still used fax machines.
I was supposed to send a copy of some report to Albany. Normally, I’d ask a secretary to fax it. But it was after hours so I had to do it myself.
I had never used a fax machine before but somebody had taped a set of instructions on the side of the machine. So I followed the instructions and sent the fax. I thought.
I got a call back from the office about twenty minutes later saying they hadn’t received the fax. I went back and checked and it turns out the instructions taped to the side of the machine were a special program we used to sent out escape reports. It was preprogrammed to send out paperwork to dozens of prisons and police departments in a three state area.
I found the manual and sent the fax correctly.
I started getting phone calls from various police departments and prisons asking about the fax I had sent within an hour. They continued through the rest of my shift and the remainder of the weekend. I think we were still getting a few of them a week later.
The only good thing I can say about my mistake is that I had been sending a legitimate report. I hate to imagine how much more embarrassing it would have been if I had faxed something like a fantasy football draft.
I did something similar to the OP but worse. I was logged in as superuser on the shared server that my entire company was using for development. I was trying to remove a directory one level below the root; let’s say it was called /junk. I did “cd /junk” and “rm -r *”. However this didn’t remove everything because there were some files whose name started with a dot, so they were not caught by the * wildcard in the rm command. No problem, I then typed
rm -r .*
I waited.
I started wondering why it was taking so long.
Then I realized that “…” is a name that starts with a dot. Yes, my rm command had “recursed” into its parent directory, /, and was happily removing every file on the disk. I stopped it but not before significant damage had been done.
I did not do this and it was not exactly a typo but more like incompetence, but given the Unix command line errors above I’ll add this. I worked at a company where a DBA entered a SQL command into a production database that was an UPDATE statement without a WHERE clause. So instead of updating the one record intended, it updated every record in the database. He entered the command then went home. I believe he was not invited back.
Eh, this is nothing compared to programming errors, but it was embarrassing. I did not make the typo but I was the proofreader and this is one I didn’t catch. A reporter had written that a certain family “had their hands in the city’s plumbing industry” and the typist typed, "“had their HEADS…” (caps mine). As the proofreader I did not catch this, because all words were correctly spelled and I wasn’t reading it against the original copy.
I don’t know why the family was so upset about it. Heads, hands, they’re not so far apart.
But it led to conflict between the editorial side and the ad side, because of course this was a puff piece linked to a paid ad, which editorial did not think a legitimate newspaper should do, while the ad side seemed to think that all concerned had conspired to do this on purpose to make a point about the practice of running a nice little story if somebody bought enough advertising. It looked very suspicious as it was set by a typesetter who never made mistakes and proofed by a proofreader who was known to catch everything, but no, we didn’t.
And yet, it was the kind of thing that was just stupid enough that a retraction would have somehow made it look even more stupid because of drawing attention to it. Kind of a Streisand effect.
I had created the headcount report that was distributed throughout the organization. Only after about 6 months did I discover that I had made a typo in the header. It seems that I had omitted the crucial “o” in the title of the report. Curious, but no one reported the error to me. I’m also curious if anyone thought I might be referring to anyone in particular in a Freudian slip.
Well, technically it was WordPerfect’s fault. But I proof-read that congressional budget presentation umpteen times, as did everyone else in the office. None of us noticed that the spellchecker had changed “NAVSEA” to “NAUSEA” throughout.
Well, there was the typo that I made - and the lawyers missed - that resulted in us trashing a print run of 30,000. But we swore we’d never speak of it again.
Back when I was the sports editor of a little newspaper in California, I wrote a headline that was supposed to read “[Team X] wins on final shot.” We were about to put the paper to bed when one of my co-workers noticed that it was actually “final snot.” It’s nearly two decades later, and I still shudder to think how close that came to being published. That would have been pretty tough to get over. Keep in mind that this was the main story on the page, so not only would it have been an incredibly dumb mistake, but an incredibly dumb mistake rendered AS BIG AS POSSIBLE. I have to think that I would have earned a slot on Jay Leno’s “Headlines” segment for that one.
I didn’t do this one, but it’s stuck with me as quite a story. The set up is that our law firm had a litigator who was one of the first female partners in our metro area (and she went on to lead the state Supreme Court later). A (male) associate was working on a patent interference with her, and was writing a memo at the last moment. He printed two copies, handed one to his secretary to take to the partner, and sat down to reread the other one. At which point he noticed that in the subject of the memo, “The count of the interference,” he had left the “o” out of “count.”
He apparently broke speed records catching up with his secretary before she could hand her copy to the partner.
Typesetting a menu, I once typed Crap Salad and sent the proof to the restaurant. They got a kick out of it. Probably a Freudian slip, since the B and P are nowhere near each other.
But they sound and look (lower case) very similar, so depending on how your brain is wired, you might do that just for linguistic reasons. I used to make that “typo” when I hand-wrote all the time. I probably still do, I just don’t write as much by hand as I used to. Not specially “crap” for “crab”, but mixing up "p"s and "b"s in general.
