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.
Not mine, but another’s. She stating in her Foghorn Leghorn voice “I want to say “I can’t hear you over your hair. It’s too bright!!” to her”. As I round the corner in my short Spiked Blazing Orange hair. How embarrassing for someone.
I was working as a short order cook back in the 80s. One night after closing we were having a few beers as a farewell to a co-worker. We wanted some music so we taped our walkman earbuds to the intercom microphone. Came in the next day, our busiest day of the week and found out we had blown the amplifier.
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 🙃
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.
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!”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.
ELI-non-IT this “oh shit” moment?
Wikipedia has a search feature. Not many people use it, but Wikipedia is huge, so enough people do. Back then, a couple dozen full text searches a second. And maybe 100 quick prefix searches.
Anyway, one thing I made for it was a way to search the wiki text with regular expressions. It’s useful for maintainers.
Wikitext is the funny markup language Wikipedia uses. If you know html or md it’s like that, but it can kind of “call” other pages. Whatever. Doesn’t matter. It’s text. And people have strong opinions about it.
You can see it by clicking “edit” (sometimes looks like a pencil) and then clicking “edit without logging in” then “source editing”. Those lovely boxes at the top for a person are made with something like
{{Infobox person | name = Douglas Adams | birth_place = [[Cambridge]], England }}Imagine you have 1000 articles that use
birthplaceinstead ofbirth_place. Both work, but it’s driving you and all your editor friends crazy there are two ways to do it. This is believable. Trust me.You want to find every page that has an
{{Infobox personfollowed bybirthplace. Then fix them. The nerds who came before us invented a language to ask that question called “regular expressions”. The one for this looks like\{\{Infobox\wperson.+birthplace. Maybe. Nerds will know regular expressions are bad for this. But nerds will also know that regular expressions being bad has never stopped anyone from using them anyway.One way to run these regular expressions is to convert them into an https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nondeterministic_finite_automaton . You build these in memory and they are not big. But you can’t really run them directly. They are pretty and fairly easy to read once you get used to them. But you can’t easily ask “does this match this text”. At least, not with the tools I had.
I could only run https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deterministic_finite_automaton . It’s deterministic! Much nicer. And you can go from a nondeterministic one to a deterministic one. Easy. Our forenerds solved the problem. You use a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powerset_construction .
The trouble is, it can make very very very big deterministic finite automata. Like, if there are 3 states in the nfa you can get and 8 state dfa. 4 is 16. 5 is 32. In the worst case. Usually you get much better. But a fairly big but not super frightening regular expression can turn into a big nfa. And the dfa would need more states then there are grains of sand on earth. Too big for computer.
So, user asked for this regular expression. The search servers tried to convert it, and filled up their memory and died. They ran Out Of Memory. OOM. The usual thing is you copy the full memory so you can look later and start the server again.
But that can take time. And sometimes people are confused and haven’t set up the restart to be automatic. And they can’t find you. So search stays broken for a while.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
