Worst Computer Disaster You Have Caused or Experienced

My top three:

1) Installing a server for a client at a office with ~300 users, I stood up after putting the machine in the rack, and my shoulder activated the large red emergency shutdown button on the wall. No one was around with the key to the reset fusebox, either. It eventually opened with a few well-placed punches, Fonzi-style. I was humiliated until they told me, "The guy installing the AC did the same thing last week." Hey, maybe it's time to put a freaking COVER over the button.

2) I mixed up two databases and pulled email addresses for a mass mailing from a database of people we were contractually obligated to NEVER contact. (~10,000 folks) Oops. That got me in trouble.

3) By forgetting a where clause on a query, I accidentally reset all the passwords on our production databse. This was solved by restoring the table in question from the previous night's backup. And turning off the Evil that is autocommit.
 
When I was . . . ten or eleven, I think, I decided that my dad's computer would be better off with a more up to date version of DOS.

First step - rename the DOS directory . . .
 
One of my former colleagues updated the database via SQL. It should have updated just for one person. However something was missing from the where clause. As a result, large payments nearly went out for many people all to one bank account.
 
Back in the mid 70's, I worked for a small company that used DEC computers. They were too cheap to use DEC PERIPHERALS, however, and bought whatever they could get for cheap. We had three EEs on staff to keep it all cobbled together. One of them was making a "daisy chain" cable for the disk controller's power supply, and got distracted somewhere along the way, using different colors for ground on each end of the cable. This was, I believe, a 440 volt, 3 phase cable. The resulting "initial deployment" of said cable was quite a pyrotechnic display! Subsequent examination of the carnage showed circuit boards that had literally had the centers of the chips blown out of them, caps that had launched off one board and lodged in the next, etc. The truely amazing thing was that our parent company had recently sent two techs to repair school for this type of disk drive, and they were able, over time, to get the drives put back together and operational.
 
For many years now, the IT department of my husband's company have been recommending British Telecom when asked which Broadband provider homeworkers should use. As a result, around 90% of their homeworkers use BT Broadband with a BT Voyager modem.

A few months ago the IT dept invested in a new VPN, at significant cost, and installed it in all laptops. When my husband brought his laptop home and tried to access his company network, it wouldn't work. After several frustrating calls to IT they admitted that the new VPN was not compatible with BT modems.

It simply hadn't occured to them to check before buying. Now hundreds of key employees can't access their emails or company systems. IT's solution? They've bought Blackberrys for all those affected staff, with a running cost of approx. £40 per month EACH.

Insane!
 
Not my mistake per se, but a huge one nevertheless. I was a witness to it and intimately involved in cleaning up the mess.

Sometime in the early 90's I had a consulting gig at a Title Insurance company for which some junior exec had a brainstorm one day to ask me to create a whole bunch of standard real estate forms in Clipper with their company's name and address pre-populating the appropriate fields, so real estate attorneys would just print out the forms and their company would get all the business. I dutifully created the forms and handed them on a floppy to an admin who made 1000 or so copies and mailed them to every real estate attorney's office in North Carolina. Right after the final mailings we saw that her computer was infected with the "STONED" virus. A check of the few floppies that weren't yet sent, and sure enough, they were all infected.

They started getting angry calls - from ATTORNEYS, no less. We hired an army of temps to drive to every real estate attorney's office in the state, sweet-talk the receptionist to find out if they received and were using the diskettes, and if so, offer to disinfect every computer and floppy in their office. These were the days before centralized anti-virus SW so it meant going through every single diskette, running a scan, and cleaning it.
 
Took side panel off pc to install something. Left it off because it helped keep it cool and I had lost the fiddly little screws.

Stuck my toe in the fan.
 
I once tried to change hard drives while the computer was on. I got a spark and smoke but the HD was fine, just had to replace the power supply.
 
An IBM mainframe I worked on as a newbie ran the VM operating system (Virtual Machine) with 3 MVS images running on top of it. From the master console you could add virtual printers, drives etc by putting the console into a special state. Nobody had told me that if you wait too long (such as if you trying to decide what your notes mean) that the guest MVS images would time out and would need to be IPLed.
 
When I worked on IBM Mainframes in the late 80's & early 90's, my shift leader told me of a site that needed to lower their new mainframe to the basement via the liftshaft.

Needless to say the story ended with it slipping through the harness and plummeting to the bottom...
 
Ahahaha. A company I used to work for has just transferred a server hosting an online store to a new machine. They tested it very carefully before switching off the old one. That was on Monday morning. It has taken them until today to realise that they didn't tell their firewall about the change. Apparently they were wondering why their warehouse had gone so quiet.
 
A PSU fried two hard drives and two optical drives and then, ashamed of itself, commited suicide as well. It's a good thing it didn't burn down the house.
 
Getting drunk one night and suddenly believing i could mess with the Registry...

Then, half way thru deleting, editing...etc, i decided that it was time for bed and that i would remember the changes i made in the morning...

Oh dear...


Also...Changing an assload of passwords when drunk, then not writing the changes down 'cos i fully believed i would remember them, and the next morning wondering why i can't access any forums, online banking....etc...



Also....Leaving my son on the PC whilst i went to the store, and upon returning, discovered he had visited a 'free games' website. This website had prompted him to turn off the firewall, anti-virus and any spyware blockers before downloading these 'fantastic' freeware games....Which he did...several times...



De_I'm still great_Bunk
 
I wasn't so much involved int his one as finding it.

Over a decade ago I was working for a hardware repair firm. One of my calls was to a company that made a dictionary. They were running Windows for Workgroups, kind of a poor mans network before networking was big.

I fixed their problem and did my regualr routine which included a virus scan. I found a virus, cleaned it and let them know. The guy turned kind of white, thanked me and I went on my merry way.

A month later I was reading through one of my industry rags and the company got an "Atta boy" (some reward this mag gave out in its weekly column) for "How to handle a mistake". The virus I had discovered was on the computer they used for their dictionary, and they had sent out several hundred copies of the program. The infected program.

Much like the earlier story they contacted each user and sent them a free antivirus program (Norton or whatever was popular back then). I felt a bit robbed since I had discovered it and was hoping my company would get some free publicity.
 
My friend was trying to makea homebrew device for the "discolitez" winamp plugin.

Basically, it was supposed to send a signal out the parallel port which would trigger a relay to flash a light on and off. Unfortionately, a crossed wire sent 110vac into the parallel port and smoked the motherboard.

He called the company he bought it from and played dumb, saying it just stopped working and he didn't know why. They gave him a free replacement.
 
One time. a long time ago when I was new at Unix sysadmin, I wrote a cron job to delete any core file which hadn't been accessed in the last three days, in order to save disk space, and set it up on the department's file server. Pretty easy, really:

find . -type f -name core | xargs rm -f

Unfortunately, I neglected to add the "-name core" clause. So the first night it ran, it deleted *every* file which hadn't been accessed for 3 days. Oops. The worst thing was, no-one had restored a file in the last three days, so the restore program was one of those which got deleted, greatly complicating the recovery process.
 
epepke said:
There are a couple. One is when the disk controller on the Plato system went bad, and it was the same controller that did the tape backups. A couple of years' work was lost.
Click to expand...

Hey, was that the Plato system out of University of Michigan where the computer terminals had touch screen? I played with those about 20 years ago in my Dad's office at the weather service when I was in HS.
 
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