Reading through the comments, I remembered my first day on my second ever job, where we were instructed to turn off computers and power strips too, at the end of the day. When I turned mine off at the end of the day, I found out other power strips were using mine, so I turned off other people’s machines. Unfortunately, the guy that gave us the instructions was first to leave in the evening and hadn’t have his machine turned off that way.

Also remembered that I once broke production server (maybe it didn’t get to production, can’t remember) by adding a single line of log, I didn’t notice that what I was logging was computationally intense, so it halted everything eventually, but it was barely reviewed because it’s just one log line

Tooks out search on Wikipedia. I exposed a path that can perform an unconstrained Powerset Construction concurrently on 7 servers. It filled up memory and died. User retried. While cluster OOMing.

I put the localization files in the wrong folder. Thankfully, we hadn’t pushed anything to prod yet, but we were trying to figure out why everything kept crashing even though our checking tool was giving the all-clear.

It was checking everything except the localization folders.

I worked for the railways, in commuter trains. My job was to harass innocent passengers by walking back and forth and enabling them to buy a ticket should they need one. And at certain routes also check the tickets of every new passenger.

It was nice using a dialect from eastern Finland, the Savo dialect for that. It has a tendency to change plain vowels for diphtongs. It adds a kind of a “wee-wow” twang to the language. For example the word for “closet” is “kaappi” in standard Finnish, “kuappi” in the dialect spoken in Savo. The “aa” is just a long “a”, sound. Pretty much the same as the “a” in the English word “car”. And “ua” is pretty much like “oi” in “choir”. Imagine pronouncing the word “car” with the “a” replaced with the “oi” sound of “choir” and you might get an idea of how that crazy dialect likes to mangle every damn word. And the “ar” in “garlic” would be pronounced with the same change as well. Etc.

And maybe at this point it’s worth mentioning that I still had a fully male gender expression at that point.

So, we have just left the station of Haarajoki. In the Savo dialect that would be “Huaarajokj”.
I enter the part of the wagon through its end door. I start shouting “Haarajoki passengers, tickets please!”, but. But.

As it happens, “huaara” is how they would pronounce also the word “huora” over in Savo. And that happens to mean “whore”. Luckily I noticed. So, I managed to stop myself from uttering anything further. Unfortunately, I only managed to stop after having already said the first half of that word, “huaarajokj”: Yes, “huaara”.

In other words, I entered the passenger wagon through the end door in the railway worker’s uniform, immediately bellowing “WHORE!”, and then shutting up.

Definitely an “oh shit” moment!

After that:
Me: “Hm. This station is not terribly compatible with the Savo dialect, apparently.”
A female passenger: “You should have continued to the end, would have gone much less badly”.
Me: “Yup!”

I’ll tell you my biggest destructive moment was getting a single phase 440v/50hz motor from Europe for some equipment (I’m in the states) and it had the worst nameplate I’ve ever seen on the motor of whether to remove the capacitor across the two phases or not. Turns out the cap got left in only on 220v. We put 480v/60hz on it, which is within 10% so it’s fine but the cap should have gotten removed. Stupidly I only hooked up to like a 30A twist-lock connection off the wall for testing before it got installed rather than the 6A it needed in the panel. The cap burned itself out, started a small fire, caught all this soundproofing insulation crap on fire. Couldn’t get another motor for months. Big whoops

Spot welded a screwdriver to the metal sidewall when I slipped trying to discharge a capacitor. At least I thought to wear gloves.

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.

At an online gaming company back in the late 90s, I deleted a file folder whose name was my first name. I had been there about a month and figured I must have created that folder for some dumb reason while I was ramping up. Turned out it was created by a previous software dev who happened to have the same first name as me, and it contained the production software. Essentially I blew away a good part of the external website.

Fortunately somebody found another copy and restored everything, named it something sane and put it in a sane place with access control.

Admittedly it was sloppy of me to delete a folder without at least looking inside it, but I really didn’t feel too bad about it because standards at this place were so low - they had no concept of source control, dev/test/prod environments, or much else. Everything they did was cowboy.

Accidental reply-to-all set on mailman list, of 8,000 users.

Only minor at about 16 minutes and 11 replies shared.

Still had a little bit of cold-sweats, and dolly-zoomed my surroundings.

Tower cleared me to position and hold (back before it was called line up and wait), then cleared a 737 to land on the runway I was sitting on.

Now it was day VFR conditions and my little ship was painted bright red and white, I wasn’t exactly camouflaged, but I called the tower with my entire tail number and position. RALEIGH TOWER, NOVEMBER ONE TWO THREE ALPHA BRAVO HOLDING POSITION FIVE RIGHT.

Made a great lesson for my student, the tower WILL forget about you and clear a jet 500 times your mass to land on you.

The big annual release was coming soon and I was leading a small group of testers with after hours testing of a feature that was my responsibility to cover. It was already around 8pm and we’d been working for hours. Someone came and informed us that a specific device was incorrectly configured, thus invalidating all of the tests we’d run thus far. It was mine. What an asshole.

I told everyone to give me their devices and go home. I stayed until 2-3am running all of the tests myself. My manager video called me a couple of times and he had a good sense of humor about it, I think because I took responsibility for it and didn’t burden others with my mistake. I really felt terrible but after I got the report in before the deadline later that morning, no one ever gave me a hard time about it and it just was like it never happened.

Not trying to deflect or make excuses and owning a mistake is like a super power. An imprortant lesson that has basically never failed me when I’ve screwed up at work.

Had a content filter server I had built. Dansguardian.

Installed some new packages, which I had wgot (joking) at / as root. Fuck, I was a dumbass kid.

After I installed the packages, I created the folder /installs and then: holy shit, mv is naturally recursive?!

mv * /installs

Well, let’s ls to see if the root directory is clean.

ls not found.

Um… ok, this is a call center, seems to still be working as everything is still in RAM, but as it is working as a proxy for content filtering, you could lose the company MILLIONS, so think fast!

I rebuilt another server, swapped it with ninja speed, fixed the other server, and swapped it back with ninja speed.

And everyone asked me if I was ok. “Nothing. I mean, yeah, good.”

edit: mv is recursive by default, in contrast to cp, which requires -R. Scary lesson to learn on the job.

edit 2: just in case someone doesn’t understand this, I moved the entire operating system into a subfolder /installs in a production environment…

If the computer had rebooted, no one would have internet at all, as DNS would fail. Fortune 500 company. Ah damn, that was some stress.

“Hey, is everything working alright?”

“Yeah.”

“Hey is everything still working? Everything good?”

“Yes, why do you keep asking that?”

No raisin.

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.

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

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 😢.