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!”

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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.