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.
Worked in an ESA lab with cleanroom. My work had to do with plants, their composition etc.
Naturally I had to dry some plants before throwing them into the analyser, but my designated oven was occupied.
Fear not, I thought, there is another oven over there. I put my samples in and call it a day.
Come over the next day, kinda late, lab chief looks at me and is only like “ummm, you should head over to the offices and see big boss”…go over, boss guy very angry. Turns out, the other oven in the lab was reserved for ExoMars parts. Like, they disinfect the shit out of it for weeks, like, take it apart, haul every screw to the cleanroom, clean it, autoclave it, clean it again and repeat that a billion times over, certify it and clean it again. So I kinda destroyed the work of months, maybe I alone was responsible for one of the many launch delays (probably not, but I’ve never been told).
Arrogant young me in my first job basically just was like “maybe put a sign on it next time, lol”, boss guy pauses and says “maybe you’re right”. So we reclean the shit out of the oven and put a sign on it. My “punishment” was to spend a lot of time in the clean room to clean some ExoMars parts. I thought “cool, stuff I had in my hands is going to land on Mars”.
Fast forward some years, Russia invades Ukraine, the pipes I cleaned will never go to Mars 😢.
You were absolutely right… Two ovens in a room, 1 for plant use and 1 that needs to be super clean for a specific purpose? A sign would have been the bare minimum, that should have been part of your lab training too.
Years ago I was working as a pharmacist in a very busy pharmacy in a city center. This was during the opioid epidemic in America and being a high volume store, had a lot of regulatory oversight on our controlled substance dispensing.
One Friday evening a young kid came in with a prescription that he said was for his grandmother. It was for a lot of oxycodone from a city two hours away. He had two girls with him when he dropped off the prescription and had never filled with us before, and wanted to pay cash. We had a policy that we didn’t fill prescriptions for maintenance controlled substances for new patients >100mi from our address. We only got so much of each controlled substance so we adopted the policy so we’d have enough for our regular patients. I told him we couldn’t fill it. He started to get angry and mouth off but left.
Cut to Monday which was my next shift and there is a folder with the DEA logo on the front of it in front of my terminal. I ask what it is to someone who worked the weekend and they said an agent dropped it off. I open it and the only thing inside is a business card slotted into those slits you sometimes see on the face of one of the pockets. I call the number and after some introductions the agent asks me if I was the one who denied the prescription on Friday. I confirm and the guys says that it was part of a multi-jurisdiction sting operation to catch a mid-level dealer who was buying scripts from people. He told me I wasted a bunch of their time and next time to just fill it. I told him it’s emphatically my job to not do that and that I didn’t appreciate him using my store since we had a bunch of other issues that local police weren’t dealing without him adding to it but he just hung up. Whatever.
My heart dropped when I saw that folder though and I’m sure that is what he wanted when he did it.He asked you why you didn’t help someone else commit a crime and you just let that shit go?
You should have been up his supervisor’s ass, with a reporter on your left and a lawyer on your right.
Not saying anything is why these fucking Nazi pigs get to keep being Nazi pigs.
I get the sentiment, but it’s not that simple. The kid picking up someone else’s script isn’t a crime. Me denying or filling the script is a professional discretion. Also the company I was working at would not have supported me.
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…
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.
Not at work but in High School.
It was the 90s and computers at school had just become a thing. Our school offered a typing class which seemed pretty chill so I signed up for that. I think I was the only guy in the class.
Anyway, I started talking to this girl who sat across from me and we ended up just sending emails back and forth to each other all through class, using our school emails. This went on for weeks. The messages started to get kinda flirty and then eventually they got more than flirty.
So I’m sitting in another class one day, maths or something, and a teacher comes in and asks if I can go with her. She takes me to the principle’s office and sits me down. In walks the principle with typing girl and she sits her down next to me. The principle then dumps a massive pile of paper on the desk and asks us to explain… we of course have no idea what she’s talking about. I pick up a sheet and start reading and my heart drops. It’s our entire email chain, weeks of cringe and filth. They must have been monitoring our emails, right? Wrong.
So we get a bollocking, threatened with suspension, the whole deal, but it wasn’t until we were sent on our way that we started to realise what had actually happened and the gravity of the situation. Over the next few hours some really weird shit started happening. I’d be walking through school and kids I didn’t even know would just start pointing at me, shouting out random things. Even my teachers were being super weird. Everything just felt really off and then my mate filled me in.
Now, to this day, I still don’t know how this happened. I genuinely think that our school email system was set up wrong but somehow, when replying to one of typing girl’s messages, I had forwarded our whole email chain to every person at our school. Every kid. Every teacher. Thousands of them.
It was humiliating.
I was forever known as that guy. Typing girl never talked to me again.
TLDR: I accidentally forwarded weeks worth of dirty emails to our entire school and held on to my virginity.
“Shutdown -P now” in the wrong terminal window and shut down the production server on the other side of the country instead of the test server on my desk. No one noticed but I had to call the IT guy on site to turn it on.
Yanked a cable in an electrical cabinet we were installing and blacked out the entire workshop at the 500 level in the mine. Had to go to the electrician and ask for the key to the transformer station and turn it back on.
In March of 2017 we were running several unpatched server 2012 systems with just about every port open to the internet. Uptimes of 500ish days kind of servers.
Took a couple weeks to patch everything and lock it down. Mega glad I did because May in 2017 was an interesting month for IT.
Also, community plug !talesfromtechsupport@lemmy.world exists please share stories.
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, she was a coworker but in a different department, 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.
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 🙃
Spot welded a screwdriver to the metal sidewall when I slipped trying to discharge a capacitor. At least I thought to wear gloves.
Haha that’s great! I cant think of one off the top of my head but I’m sure I have plenty.
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 was asked to provide technical on-site support at an event, because I knew the underlying server system under the software that project management had found to run this customer event.
They had also hired a bunch of laptops with wifi and a router for this, which was rather expensive back then (you could have bought a small car for that rent fee alone!), so a lot was hanging on this to be a success.
Of course, I knew about nothing what this job was about until I sat in the car with the project manager on our way to the first event. My reaction was: But that software cannot do what you just told me! Oh shit, indeed.
When we arrived in the evening before the first event, the server, wifi, and one of the laptops was set up before anything else, and I went to work writing a rudimetary software from scratch that would do what the customer wanted, and finally hit the bed around sunrise.
The event was a big success in all venues on the trip. The customer was extremely happy with the acceptence of the setup by the audience and the results they got.
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”).
