Decade or so ago, logging into a work computer and suddenly the screen is just tiled with the word "virus", but a bit janky looking like it was a screenshot of the word that was enlarged and tiled with no thought to whether the right side of the image lined up with the left and such - it was a very 90s cheesy movie like depiction of what happens to your comp when you get a virus, like you'd expect the next scene to be some shady hacker on the other end exclaiming "I'm in!"

Then again, I don't know jack fuck about viruses, and the machine is behaving super weird, so I unplugged the internet cable from the back, and called my manager over. He had a similar "...is this for fuckin real?" reaction that I did. Mind you, this is a hospital, so if one of our computers is fucked, this is a big deal for potentially leaking patient info, so even though it had that kind of slapstick appearance, no one was fucking around with it: so, manager pushed it up the chain, and after a few mins a fucking SWAT team of IT guys comes in and starts doing their own assessment.

After some deliberation, they start troubleshooting - keystrokes and whatnot don't seem to be responsive. One of them eventually reaches back behind the monitor and 'poof' the screen pops back to the normal login screen.

So, that facility had a fancy custom login screen, which was some generic desktop background type scenery and a wall of text that none of us ever put any thought into. One of the snipits on that wall of text was instructions on what to do if you suspect your machine has virus (which was basically what I did - leave it running, unplug it from the internet, and call IT... hooray, I'm not completely stupid!). What ended up being the cause of the "virus" tiling was the fucking VGA cable slowing worming its way out of the back of the monitor - when I got to it, that thing was hanging on by a thread, and touching the desk it was on was just enough of a bump to make it cross that line between having enough of a connection to do its job vs not. That micrometer of pull of on that cable wasn't enough to completely cut its signal, but it wasn't enough to produce a normal display either: it just picked a random spot on the screen, and filled the monitor with that repeating image. The spot it just happened to do this to was the word "virus" in the custom login text explaining what to do if you think you have a virus, lol.

TLDR, got my management chain from my dept to the top dogs running the hospital, and the entire fucking IT department to swarm to my unit over a potential data breach that ended up being a wiggly VGA cable.

Whoops.

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.

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.

It wasn't at work, but I think someone will find it funny regardless.

During my time at university I had a web development exam for which we had to do a group project, you guessed it, making a website. This included having a bunch of different input fields, and the requirement was to properly validate each one and provide clear feedback to the user.

While adding some inputs I was focused on having all the checks in place correctly, and so I decided to put some placeholder text for the errors and do a pass later changing them with more informative ones. Which I did, but I forgot about one.

So, presentation day comes along, the professor is looking at our website, asking us to show him that we had all the checks in place and correct. He asks me to input an invalid date in a calendar widget, which I happily do, knowing I 100% had all the required checks in place. The verification runs and fails, showing the error popup I set up, which read something along the lines of:

"date's fucked, mate"

Shit. My placeholder message. Which I obviously forgot to change. I was mortified. Luckily the professor chuckled and said that technically the check worked so that was fine.

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 😢.

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.

So for a game I published, there are male/female characters with what I called undermeshes, which is basically underwear that's painted onto the skin texture. By design, there is no "nudity", as the underwear is the most exposed you can get.

At the time, there were two torso 'top' textures, both created from a base design. One was a sports bra looking thing for women, and just a bare (notably not hairy) chest for men.

Things were getting crunchy and I had a few NPCs that I was trying to dress differently for a town to make them distinctive. There was an unused semi-low-cut dress asset so I put that on a single NPC, but it looked funky with the sports bra.

So I assigned the male torso top texture to the lady so the bra wasn't showing, made sure nothing scandalous was visible, and moved on.

Game gets released.

Weeks later, I'm troubleshooting a quest dialogue bug, and recalled this particular NPC has different lines (and animations!) if you're a specific sex/race.

I swap races and do the whole quest again, only to (re)discover that the reason the dress was unused was because it wasn't 100% properly set up. So when the NPC moved about with the different animations, the dress didn't move with her, making her temporarily very topless and with the bare male texture, showing a lot more than she was supposed to be able to.

In short, this is quite bad and could have resulted in a not-too-happy e-mail from Valve if someone else found it.

Fortunately (AFAIK) I'm the only one who caught it but it was a cold chill followed by an absolute panic hotfix.

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.

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.

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.

I don't have any non-destructive ones. I have plenty of destructive ones if you are fascinated, however.

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.

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.

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 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!"

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Haha that's great! I cant think of one off the top of my head but I'm sure I have plenty.

I once took down a production server with a script that was an unintentional resource thief. The "oh sh-t" was watching the script grind to a halt... and then the phone started ringing.

Borderline on the non-destructive there because the server recovered fine after a reboot and nothing was lost except uptime. Sometimes a server would choke anyway, and the company assumed it was that, but that time it was my fault.

I had to answer more than the one call regarding that, feeling sick to my stomach, so I didn't escape unpunished.

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.

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").

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 🙃

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

I did the very classic "sw t al v 320" which effectively isolated an entire floor.