What's your worse workplace mistake?

[Leros]

Originally posted by: ModerateRepZero
hmm probably my worst might've been working the opening shift, and forgetting to turn on the refrigeration unit where all the toppings/ chicken wings etc. are stored in the preparation/makeline area for ~7 hours . thank goodness all the food gets run thru the oven, and I didn't hear anyone complain about food poisoning...

Things don't spoil in 7 hours.

 

[spidey07]

Very large core router for tier 1 ISP, I needed a quick way to see the packets going thru it without going to other tools. You debug the ip packets moving through it, problem with that is those routing functions are sent to the processor to route instead of the hardware. You protect against this by ONLY DEBUGING CERTAIN PACKETS YOU WANT, otherwise every single packet is switched by processor and a 100s of gigabits per second on every interface you'll kill the router instantly if you do not limit it to a well known and low throughput conversation.

"debug ip packet detail <CR>"

I forgot to put the access list on there in my haste. As soon as I hit the enter key I was fucked, still able to see the command that I had just entered. I was even more fucked when I hit it a few more times and no response. Core router in Chicago = four paws in the air dead. Alive enough to still announce, but dead enough to not actually move much traffic so redundancy didn't kick in.

 

[Howard]

Left a few repair parts on the floor of the maintenance shop. The shop was then cleaned up for a plant tour, with the result of the parts going missing. The parts were worth about $950.

 

[troytime]

accidently did an update without a where clause on the live site and knocked the site down for 35 minutes
thought i was going to get fired after they told me how much $$$ those 35 minutes lost us

 

[narzy]

Was repairing an underground fiber break at a large amusement park in California. We had checked the utility maps, had locates come and mark everything out, worked with facilities who assured us that we were cleared to work there. Start running the trench digger and cutting our line down to the conduit to replace the break when all of the sudden we hear a very loud hissing sound and a large amount of dirt flying from the ground.

Turns out the maps, locates, and facilities were very wrong in their assertion that nothing was in our way and we hit a 12 inch gas line...had to evacuate 1/7th of the park and about blew ourselves up. A week goes by and I get fired for being the new guy there when it happened.

 

[Chronoshock]

Originally posted by: troytime
accidently did an update without a where clause on the live site and knocked the site down for 35 minutes
thought i was going to get fired after they told me how much $$$ those 35 minutes lost us

updates and deletes without wheres are always fun times
I've only done it once, wiped out 900,000 rows, but it was a dev table and there was a backup from 30 minutes ago.
I remember thinking hmm I only wanted to delete 3 rows, why is this taking almost a minute... maybe the dev servers are being slow.

 

[ahenkel]

worked at frys' showed up work on cubensis, so I'm tripping and spend part of the day doing the robot on a box of printer paper. Surprisingly i didn't get fired for that though.

 

[RKS]

I forgot to label my frozen lunch and someone ate it.

Beside that we are very vigilant about statute of limitations and keeping clients happy. My boss told me it's better to give a BJ than to get a reprimand.

 

[spidey07]

This is a really good question that I use at going away dinners. Everybody has them no matter what level - "what's the biggest screw up you did?"

It's not a roast unless you roast them and laugh about it.

 

[Darthvoy]

authorized a 45,000 payment to a contractor when the signatures we completely different. I was shitting bricks for a while... luckily nothing became of it.

 

[RocksteadyDotNet]

Broke the tape backup on 700 servers.

 

[nageov3t]

the way my data center is setup, we have 2 x Cisco 6513's in the first rack of every row and then trunk cables running from the 6513's to patch panels in the individual server racks... one day, we had a block of 12 ports on one of the 6513 blades suddenly drop. quickest solution was to move that trunk cable to a different blade, which I went ahead and did, and worked with networking to have all the vlan information copied over to the correct corresponding ports. once that was done, everything was still down and for the life of me, I couldn't figure out wtf was wrong.

I was going nuts trying to troubleshoot it until I realized that I moved the right patch cable but on the wrong switch miracle of miracles, it turned out that every connection on the trunk cable was load balanced and the clients affected never even noticed the outage. it could have been very, very bad if I not only caused extended downtime for 12 servers but also took another 12 down while working on it due to sheer stupidity.

 

[DannyBoy]

Telling various bosses I've had to go f**k themselves but then not telling my last boss to go f**k herself.

 

[DannyBoy]

Actually there was one time I managed to completely cock up one of our source repo's a while ago which somehow went unnoticed for a couple of weeks - the end result being that when the database actually finally crashed 2 weeks of backups were totally screwed as well. Took a week to fix.

Other than that I've not made many mistakes technically.

 

[Schfifty Five]

Originally posted by: shortylickens
Hynix Semiconductor.
I worked in Photolithography.
After a monthly maintenance action on a machine that exposes wafers, I made some little little error while performing minor calibrations with a test wafer. After the procedure was done it apparantly had an offset of 1 or 10 or 100 microns, I forget which.
Anyway it was bad. The kind that make a microchip useless. About 20 or 21 casettes went through before a process tech caught the error. Luckily, Etch was running slow that night and none of them had been processed. If they had, we estimate that about One million, five hundred and seventy five thousand dollars worth of silicon would have been ruined.
As such, the time required to reprocess those wafers only cost us about one-hundred thousand.

In my defense I had been on the night shift for about 17 months and had never caught up on my sleep. I was making mistakes left and right. For that matter, so were most of the rest of the folks in the place. I simply dont do that well on a 12-hour night job. I had to learn that the hard way. Of course, I had already learned in the Navy I am useless when tired, but I always assumed that was because I never slept. Turns out that not all sleep is the same.
In Psychology class we learned that there are 5 stages of sleep, and you body cycles through stages 2,3,4, and 5 throughout the night. If you dont get plenty of each stage, you're mental alertness will fail you througout the day.
Apparently, since I was sleeping days and working nights, I was NEVER getting proper sleep, ever. Nor were most of my coworkers, but some of them were better than others at faking alertness.
Statistically in a group of 1200 people, only about 3 or 4 of them are truly nocturnal. The rest are normal people trying to get by.

bad photo pattern?

i used to work in a semiconductor company, dry etch though, don't know much about photo.

 

[GeekDrew]

something along the lines of 'UPDATE assessment SET tax_value = 0'

... it was very shortly thereafter followed by an "oh fuck", very loud laughter from the db owner (who was sitting right beside me), my heartbeat quickly increased, and as soon as the statement was done executing, i issued an immediate 'ROLLBACK TRANS'.

 

[KentState]

Working in IT for the past 12 years, I'm sure I've had my share of mistakes. The only one I can remember is not dividing the item price by 100 in the product feed to the website. All of our products on the site came up like $9999.00 or $5999.00. Not as bad as the poor guy that sent all of the product over to Amazon as $0.01.

 

[ric1287]

back in my Best Buy days, was my first week and was getting a CRT TV from the top shelf and dropped it from about 10 feet up. Good times

My summer in a paint warehouse: I wasn't trained to use any of the forklift type equipment but needed it to do any of my work. Got tired of asking the illegal mexicans to grab me stuff so said "fuck it" and hopped on one of them. First time: got caught by the boss and yelled at. Second time: took a wrong step and almost fell off the lift from about 15 feet up.

 

[olds]

Originally posted by: spidey07
Very large core router for tier 1 ISP, I needed a quick way to see the packets going thru it without going to other tools. You debug the ip packets moving through it, problem with that is those routing functions are sent to the processor to route instead of the hardware. You protect against this by ONLY DEBUGING CERTAIN PACKETS YOU WANT, otherwise every single packet is switched by processor and a 100s of gigabits per second on every interface you'll kill the router instantly if you do not limit it to a well known and low throughput conversation.

"debug ip packet detail <CR>"

I forgot to put the access list on there in my haste. As soon as I hit the enter key I was fucked, still able to see the command that I had just entered. I was even more fucked when I hit it a few more times and no response. Core router in Chicago = four paws in the air dead. Alive enough to still announce, but dead enough to not actually move much traffic so redundancy didn't kick in.

I don't have a clue what any of that means.

 

[thepd7]

Originally posted by: oldsmoboat

Originally posted by: spidey07
Very large core router for tier 1 ISP, I needed a quick way to see the packets going thru it without going to other tools. You debug the ip packets moving through it, problem with that is those routing functions are sent to the processor to route instead of the hardware. You protect against this by ONLY DEBUGING CERTAIN PACKETS YOU WANT, otherwise every single packet is switched by processor and a 100s of gigabits per second on every interface you'll kill the router instantly if you do not limit it to a well known and low throughput conversation.

"debug ip packet detail <CR>"

I forgot to put the access list on there in my haste. As soon as I hit the enter key I was fucked, still able to see the command that I had just entered. I was even more fucked when I hit it a few more times and no response. Core router in Chicago = four paws in the air dead. Alive enough to still announce, but dead enough to not actually move much traffic so redundancy didn't kick in.

I don't have a clue what any of that means.

n00b

 

[nervegrind3r]

Around lunch time,a sales associate was going around to other employees patting them on the back, and secretly putting vaseline on them when patting. I caught wind before he got to me, so I got on the loud speaker and said "mike, please report back to the a/v dept for customer assistance, and put the vaseline away". Two seconds later I get a call from the office, it just so happens the district sales area manager stopped by that day, and she didnt take kindly to my loud speaker message.

:

oh well