It’s the late 90s and I was working in IT for a small (200 employees) company.
One of my tasks was performing daily data backups, which ran for about four hours and started after everyone else had left for the day.
We had an intercom system in the building, where if you picked up your phone and dialed a specific extension, you could page someone, or make announcements so everyone could hear.
One night I was in the process of running Ethernet cable from switches on the second floor down to individual terminals on the first floor, so there was a lot walking around the building.
I like to have music when I’m working, but I didn’t have an MP3 player at the time, so I thought… “I have music on my PC and no one is around. Why don’t I just…”, and I went around and cranked the volume knob on every ceiling intercom speaker in the whole building. Then I dialed into the intercom from the phone in my office, put the handset up as close as I could to my PC speakers, and boom, music throughout the building.
Cut to a few hours later, it’s late, I’m tired, the backup is finished, so I close down the system, hit the lights, lock the doors, and go home.
The next day, I come in, not thinking about anything from the night before, and get to work. About 11:00am, the owner’s secretary got on the intercom to page someone… and blew everyone out of their seats. There was an almost collective, “What the fuck!!!” from everyone, and an “Ohhh, shiiit” from me, because of course I immediately knew what happened.
I ran around like a madman, turning the volume down on all of the speakers that I had forgotten the night before, while saying, “No idea… Yeah it’s crazy… No no, it’s fixed now…”
No one ever found out exactly why the volume was so loud that morning.
Spot welded a screwdriver to the metal sidewall when I slipped trying to discharge a capacitor. At least I thought to wear gloves.
Pretty awesome you put your music on the entire building ngl. Glad you didn’t get caught too.
I can’t really remember anything comparable of my own, but enjoyed the read. ty OP.
Mid '90s, was doing something on the company’s NT 4.0 PDC. The thing about NT 4.0, when the screen locked it would show the “Press Ctrl-Alt-Del to log in” screen, but if you hit a key or moved the mouse quick enough it wouldn’t actually lock and wake up again. So, as I’m sitting there waiting for the server to do something the login screen shows up. I’m in the zone, so I lightning quick give it the three-finger salute, type in the password (usa1, security wasn’t super-high) and hit enter. Another thing about NT 4.0, if you hit Ctrl-Alt-Del when the machine was not locked you’d get a box similar to XP’s, with options to lock the computer, log off, shut down, etc. Now, you’ll notice one of the options, shut down, starts with the letter “S”. And the key to press to select that option is also “S”. And you’ll further notice that the password I typed in also has an “S”. But all is good, it asks you to confirm before it actually shuts down, right? Except the shortcut to accept that option is Enter, which I hit after entering the password. So yeah, I shut down the company’s PDC. Fortunately it was late in the day and most people had already left so the impact was minor. But I was doing some pants crapping for about five minutes while the machine came back up.
The longest 5 minutes of your life.
I don’t have any non-destructive ones. I have plenty of destructive ones if you are fascinated, however.
I am pre-fascinated
So I work IT and I am damn good at it, relatively speaking.
Recently, I had a caller contact me about an issue they were having with their laptop of it not allowing them to use some tool or something? I forget the specifics. But I checked the laptop and saw it had an uptime of like a month and a half. So I thought, oh just give it a reboot.
I sent a command “RESET COMPUTER” and as it turns out that was a fucking factory reset! So she then lost absolutely everything off her laptop. I got off with no real issue as all my boss did was give me a stern talking to, but no write up or pay dock or demotion or whatever, but holy shit that coworker? She was pissed at me.
I made it up to her by taking her out for drinks and letting her spend all my money, sobbing.
Not your problem. She could have lost everything to an unfortunate drop of her laptop on her way to a meeting room five minutes later anyways. There should be backups of the device. Or all work needs to be saved/synced to a network drive regularly and it should be made clear to everyone that one doesn’t save important data locally.
It was a surprise test of her business continuation planning.
That’s also on the IT department for not implementing a backup solution for users (or upper management not listening to IT that a solution is needed).
If a work laptop dies and the work files are lost, that sounds like a work problem.
I was working on prescribed fire as in controlled wildfire to support ecosystem function. The wind changed in expectedly. The fire jumped containment. We switch into actual firefighting mode for a solid 1/2 hour. Then the wind switches back to predictions. Problem solved. Mop up of the slopover still takes hours and it gets dark.
As we get back to the truck, keys are dropped and kicked in an attempt to catch them. There is tall grass everywhere. We search for an hour in the dark after an exhausting day for our only way to go home. Keys are found. We work at dawn the next day. Not my worst day in the office, just the least predictable.
Always carry a magnet with you.
I work in installations where vegetation is allowed to grow nearly wild, except for the mandatory twice a year cut and I’ve had a situation like the one you describe, with a very important key falling out of a pocket.
We also usually carry a large magnet around, to pull open iron covers. It’s about 15cm wide and 2cm thick. It can pull.
The key just vanishes into the plants covering the ground. We fetch the magnet, point it into the general direction of where we think we heard the key fall and cross our fingers. We were rewarded with a very satisfying metalic ding after a few passes.
Then it was the hassle of prying the key from the magnet.
Next time put the magnet in a plastic bag.
Next time, I’ll chain the key to my belt.
And if you’re using an emergency vehicle in a potential emergency situation, leave the keys in the vehicle. No chains, no magnets. Just a truck ready to move. It is the standard operating procedure for good reason.
That’s good advice. I’ll keep that in mind. It’s not my case, fortunately, but regardless.
I’ve had the opposite nearly happening to me once. The vehicles we normally use are normal cars. And there is a stupid tendency for new cars to don’t have the option to turn off the autolock function. I was almost locked outside a car, with the key in the ignition. There was no immediate or potential danger in the situation but it was stupid nonetheless.
First thing that comes to mind is driving semi in Saskatchewan once I came across an older slower moving car (a Chrysler K car) full of people on the highway. I pulled out to pass them, and as I was passing the car I saw in the mirror that they started to wander into my lane. I ended up putting half the truck into the ditch to avoid them getting under my trailer. I had 9 tires on the grass before they realized what they were doing and swerved back into their lane. They had wandered far enough over that they were completely in the oncoming lane at that point, leaving me nothing but shoulder and ditch.
I was fully loaded (around 80,000 lbs) If I hadn’t watched my mirrors as closely as I did and they got under my trailer they would have been nothing but a smear on the road.
Edit: Another time When I was 18 I was working at the Wpg international airport. A baby had died in a house fire up north and it was sent down to Winnipeg for an autopsy. I guess the people working up there had run out of cargo tags so they had put a regular baggage tag on the bag the body was in, and neglected to tell anyone. My job was to unload aircraft, so seeing a regular baggage tag I just tossed it onto the cart and it went to where you pick up your luggage. It was there for about 40 minutes before an ambulance showed up asking for it, and none of us had any clue about it. Thankfully nobody snagged it because they would have been in for one hell of a surprise.
For your first story, I’m having trouble picturing it. How many lanes were in that road? Was it a “one lane each direction” deal, so when you “pulled out to pass them” you crossed a dashed yellow line into the oncoming lane?
What a terrifying situation. I’ve seen some bad drivers, but that driver must have been on another level.
I have no words for your second story. Such a tragic situation that could’ve wound up even worse in so many fucked up ways.
Yup it was just a regular “one lane each direction” road, just outside Yorkton Sask. I don’t know for sure, but I think they were probably drunk or stoned out of their tree. Either way they were not paying attention to what they were doing.
The second one I felt pretty bad about, although it wasn’t my fault. Even my supervisor told me he would have done the same thing because it was tagged as regular baggage. When I was unloading the plane I had tossed it down onto the baggage cart and it made a thud noise… I had just assumed it was just someone’s shoes or something, not a burnt kid in there. It had come from way up north so It’s understandable I guess that they didn’t have the proper means of marking it, but at the very least a heads up would have been nice.
not me, someone else.
someone deployed a change to the development AWS account at work before a holiday that caused a lambda to execute over 60 million times in a week.
not bad until you find out that the lambda was responsible for creating EC2 instances.
And then?
not only was the dev summarily dismissed, the monitoring team that was responsible for escalation was sternly talked to by the CFO. evidently there were alarms going off that entire week but nobody did anything about it because “it’s in dev, it’s always noisy.”
they actually worked it out with AWS and was able to get the bill reduced but it was still more than $500k (at least that’s all my boss would let me know).
I used to work at a big cable company whose name rhymes with bombast. One day I (M) found myself in a meeting with a bunch of female vice-presidents (Bombast has thousands of vice-presidents). The presenter couldn’t get her laptop to connect to the big TV so I pulled out one of my gadgets and got her set up. She said “wow, you’re pretty handy to have around.” My brain decided that it would be a clever thing indeed to say “well, I’m pretty well-endowed in the dongle department” but when I started to say it my brain realized how completely insane a comment it was. So my brain cut me off and I ended up just saying “well, I’m pretty well-endowed” which was not exactly any better.
To their credit everybody ignored this except for one woman who actually guffawed briefly. I wasn’t fired immediately so there’s that.
To be fair telling someone “wow, you’re pretty handy to have around” is opening the door for all kinds of inappropriate comments…
For me, it’s occasionally making a code update to a website that has evident and immediate visual glitches. But, I always make these updates on a staging platform before pushing them live, so it ends up being a funny thing in the end. I actually have a folder of my “bloopers” that I keep for my amusement.
Not anything destructive (to the Company) per se, but seeing a meeting with a senior and a member of HR suddenly pop up on my calendar after weeks of waiting in limbo to be placed on a new project was definitely an OH SHIT moment.
Yep, I was made redundant 🙃
Not physically destructive but someone wrote a script that was supposed to clean up unused phone extensions and decided to run it in production without testing it. It wiped out all the phones.
We probably spent a week or two fixing and testing thousands of phones and the person who ran the unvetted script was fired, but nothing was physically destroyed.
Fortunately not as serious as other comments. For context, I have autism, and I frequently stim by making random noises.
One day I was at a global online meeting with very important people. I thought I was muted, so I said “MEOW”.
Suddenly everybody goes quiet and somebody says “did anybody say ‘meow’?”
I quickly turned off my microphone, and fortunately nobody mentioned that again.
Added a bug that would delete data from a form but only when they reopened it and didn’t paginate all the way through to the end of the form. Took ages to discover and a big job to review all the potentially missing data.
Disabled the incorrect password so that it would allow login no matter what password you use. (Original system wasn’t mine and I completely agree with “don’t roll your own security”).
Got creative at work, i was managing my crews .profiles so we could share aliases and such. I got to clever and did a symlink so we all had the same exact one. Then i tested a change that made logins fail.
Luckly it was just the admins during downtime but we had to have the account team make a temp account lol
Your post reminded me of a video I saw once where someone did something like this with the fire alarms throughout the building, except there was no fallout. It was just cool to see the speakers in the alarms getting repurposed to play music.
