As a young child I got up early and decided that I would cut my own hair as a gift to my parents.

The big problem was the small mirror in the kitchen was too high so I was jumping, snip, jump, snip, etc.

When complete I went up to wake them to show them their “gift”.

I still remember the look on my mother’s face. I couldn’t understand why she was horrified hahaha.

I didn’t make it, but I let it happen to teach a stupid company a lesson.

Worked as a Change Manager for a manufacturing company. They built stuff destined for landfills and you probably have one of their appliances in your home.

To set the stage, my job prior to this was as a Problem Manager/ Major Incident Manager for a large insurance company. On major incident I worked was the when a Pure Storage technician came in to replace a failed drive. A bug in the Storage O/S allowed an active drive to be shown as deactivated and safe for replacement. This did not happen all the time, only during a certain set of circumstances. I don’t remember the details of that though.

My fellow IT professionals know full well what that means. That array supported a Tier 1 app and the whole thing went down hard. Not just hard, but it corrupted the database that required a multi-hour restore to fix. I also ran the Problem record on that one and knew everything about the who, what, and why of that outage.

Fast forward a year and I accepted the contract to be the Change Manager for this manufacturer. In comes a change request to replace a failed drive in a Pure Storage Array, except this time instead of paying for a service contract, this company cheaped out and did all the service in house. Which I didn’t know Pure Storage allowed you to do, this was 6 years ago, but this company somehow managed it. The storage guy was a bit of prick and hated the whole Change process. Which I get to be honest, but if you want to play in an enterprise environment you need to follow procedures. So he submitted his change with little to no detail and only one director on the CAB had any familiarity with storage systems. So I started asking technical questions, which generally is inappropriate of a Change Manager as that’s not the job. When I asked what the O/S version was, I got heavy push back that it wasn’t relevant. When I attempted to state WHY I was asking, I was told the change was approved and to move on. As replacing a failed drive in such a large array is generally regarded as low risk. My boss actually reprimanded me for taking so much time and extending CAB longer than it should have been.

I asked her (my boss) who was on call for Major Incidents the time of the change and… It was HER. LOL

So if you’ve guessed that the Storage team of this company were idiots and the O/S version their Pure Storage Array was running on still had the bug, you are a winner winner chicken dinner. They also had the fantastic luck to run into the circumstances as well.

Cue another Major Incident that my boss had to manage. It took over a day to resolve and all the while several production lines were sitting silent. Hundreds of thousands of dollars of loss in production. If not millions.

When someone with almost 30 years (at that time, I’m over 30 years now) tells you that something can happen, because they’ve seen it before… FUCKING LISTEN TO THEM.

I didn’t have anything to do with the Problem Process at that company, but I did sit in on it and you’re damn straight if I didn’t deliver the biggest I fucking told you so in the history of that company. The company also bought a support contract from Pure, I made sure that was a task on the Problem Record.

As to the biggest mess I made personally… I was 2 or 3 and had the bright idea of smothering myself in an entire jar of peanut butter. My oldest brother was baby sitting me at the time and our mother made him clean me up. Apparently the smell of peanut butter and water was so bad that my brother, even 53 years later, cannot stand peanut butter at all.

Forgot passwords, including a Bitwarden master password.

Locked my 3 credit bureaus, and I think the passwords to the accounts were in that vault.

Still locked out of the credit thing… been procrastinating with trying to get them unlocked…

Ever interfered with mobile carrier in a state capital city? Yea… We did. I’ll grab the link to the story.

I accidentally set a model home on fire when I was 12 while trying to burn bugs with a magnifying glass. Not a toy model, but like the house they show buyers to get a sense of the layout of the house they would have built.

I need to set the scene first: Me, about 12-13 years ago, on the surface looking like a respectable career and family man, pillar of the community…Behind the scenes slowly falling apart, trapped in an abusive marriage, a job I hated more and more each day, and told that I had to keep the happy face on for the sake of everyone else.

And one day I just fucking imploded. Left for work one morning like normal, halfway there I threw my phone out the window and decided I was done. I remember driving and driving, stopping a few times for food or just to get out of the car and meander…but I had no real direction, started to panic about the possibility of going back to hell or staying lost out here. I blacked out.

Apparently my car ran out of gas and I ditched it. I was told when they (they being the cops) found me I was several states away, couldn’t remember my name, was talking nonsense, and was covered in my own filth. I was involuntarily committed and when my wife tried to visit me I tried to attack her, told her I wanted her dead, that she better never come near me again. That was the last I ever saw of her or our kids. My dad had no idea how to handle this so he just decided to treat me like I was dead and sold off most of what I owned, and at the time I was too inside out to care. I was in and out of psych wards for the better part of three years.

So yeah, destroyed a family, a home, my career and reputation, and caused a ruckus in a sleepy little rural shit town. I did get better…much better, and I’m happier and more together than I’ve ever been, but that’s the boring part of the story.

I flooded a dormitory once, but I blame building maintenance for tricking me into it.

I wake up and head to the bathroom. Turn on the shower, nothing happens. Try the sink, still no water. No advance notice to the residents, but the water must have been shut off for some reason. I have a class to go to, so I turn everything “off”, get dressed, and leave. I’d forgotten that one of the sink knobs was threaded the opposite way from the standard convention, so that one was full on when the water was restored. Came back to the dorm after lunch and realized exactly what I’d done as soon as I entered the hallway and saw the maintenance man running his shop-vac outside my room. It overflowed the sink drain, and the bathroom floor drain, flowed through the dorm room, and was in the process of flooding the hallway.

Camp, in the 80s. 2 counselors ran through the mess hall with water balloons chasing each other. In a split second I found myself running up to a table with a couple of ice-cream buckets full of water for dirty silverware. Grabbed one and flung the water at a counselor.

I pulled it a bit because as soon as the soapy water left the bucket, I saw the silverware already inside.

Totally embarrassed and apologetic! Water and silverware all over the place.

Not sure what came over me, but for some reason I felt like I needed to join, I guess.

Was working at a kitchen as a dish washer. Had this little cart to pick up plates etc. from the restaurant side. Was just returning the cart, fully loaded into the kitchen, to the dish spot and bumped the wheel into something, or it jammed. Tons of plates and food scraps on the floor…

Managed to topple a big oil drum of waste oil in my dad’s garage. I was 5 or so, and I was wearing a brand new winter outfit. It was light blue.

My dad was doing something, and was talking to someone who had stopped by. And this being on a moderately large farm, I always found something to do. The visitor asked where I was at. Upon hearing “around here somewhere”, they were concerned that I was kind of unsupervised. “There’s not a whole lot of bad stuff he can do” my dad said, just around the time when they herd the sound of something large falling over, combined with my excited cheer. I was a crafty little shit, and I somehow understood the concept of leverage.

My brand new winter clothes weren’t blue after that.

Well, I did a huge chalk drawing on a sheet of tiling backer board for an art contest once over a decade ago and ended up looking like a smurf by the end of it.

The fact that chalk is as messy as it is is a huge part of why it’s so fun to play with, chalk is basically like dry fingerpaints, at least if you forego the blending stump.

But yeah, the biggest messes I’ve made in recent years are any time I’ve gotten my chalk out to play with basically

I was lab assistant at school. I had to make up a fruit fly medium for a class’ genetics experiments. I mixed it up in a 2 liter beaker and put it on heat. It was pyrex. It broke and the medium spread all over the floor. There were fruit flies buzzing around the classroom for the next month no matter how often they washed the floors.

Mine is probably the same both physically and metaphorically!

Almost cut my finger off with my dad’s table saw when I was four. Ran through the house screaming and spurting blood everywhere.

factory I worked at, I snapped a bearing rod on an injection machine.

it was made of steel, about 16 inches in diameter, about 18ft long, and cost around $1.5 million to replace.

complete accident, required a mandatory one week off (no pay) while they investigated if it was due to negligence or just routine wear and tear.

it took them six months to get a new one and cost the company close to $100 million on lost revenue on top of the cost of the part.

Accidentally wrote a 2GB ‘nohup.out’ file when I forgot I had a script running as nohup in the background without redirecting STDOUT and STDERR to /dev/null.

Basically, I forgot to prevent saving the output of my program to a file, and it created a massive file because of it.

2GB might not seem like much, but this was on a server with ~5GB free space left. Could have been worse had I not caught it sooner.