I spent a decade working in insolvency.
When we were going into a business that had failed the question was "Are the idiots, criminals or both?"
One highlight:
A boat sales / marine business goes bust. When we arrive with the paper work and seize the place there are about a dozen new boats on the lot worth several million. We change the locks on the gates.
Arrive the next day, the gates have been busted open and several million in boats are now missing. We look up the addresses of the owners (one of them lives on acreage) and drive to their property...from the road we can see the boats stashed there. Really smart guys.
So we call the police. Someone inside notices use there and decides to flee with one of the boats, it is huge but they think they can get away.
We then have the slowest car chase in history as we calmly follow this guy towing a boat on a trailer down the road while talking to the cops to meet us.
A milder story than some here:
Someone had accidentally sent an email to the whole company of 44,000 or so employees. Cue a bunch of emails -replying all- asking why they were receiving the email… followed by another wave of emails asking people to stop replying all.
Was a great popcorn moment, and made me laugh every time a new email came in.
An isolated shingle spit nature reserve. We'd lost mains power in a storm some while back and were running on a generator. Fuel deliveries were hard to arrange. We'd finally got one. We were pretty much running on fumes and another storm was coming in. We really needed this delivery.
To collect the fuel, I had to take the Unimog along a dump track and across 5 miles of loose shingle - including one low causeway stretch through a lagoon that was prone to wash out during storms. We'd rebuilt it a LOT over the years. On the way up, there was plenty of water around there, but it was still solid.
I get up to the top ok and get the tank full - 2000L of red diesel - but the wind is pretty strong by the time I have. Half way back, I drop down off the seawall and reach the causeway section. The water is just about topping over. If I don't go immediately, I won't get through at all and we will be out of fuel for days - maybe weeks. So I put my foot down and get through that section only to find that 200 meters on, another section already has washed out. Oh shit.
I back up a little but sure enough the first section has also washed through now. I now have the vehicle and a full load of fuel marooned on a short section of causeway that is slowly washing out. Oh double shit. Probably more than double. Calling it in on the radio, everyone else agrees and starts preparing for a pollution incident.
In the end I find the firmest spot that I can in that short stretch and leave the Moggie there. Picking my route and my moment carefully I can get off that 'island' on foot - no hope with the truck - BUT due to the layout of the lagoons only to the seaward ridge, where the waves are now crashing over into the lagoon with alarming force. I then spend one of the longest half-hours I can remember freezing cold and drenched, scrambling yard by yard along the back side of that ridge and flattening myself and hoping each time a big wave hits.
The firm bit of causeway survived and there was no washed away Unimog or pollution in the end - and I didn't drown either - but much more by luck than judgement.
These days I am in a position where I am responsible for writing risk assessments and methods statements for procedures like this. It was another world back then.
I worked at a sandwich shop and had given my two weeks notice a few days earlier. My manager came to me and asked me to clean up the bathroom...alright. I could smell it before I even opened the door.
I told my manager I'd clean it if he'd still give me the employee discount after I was gone. "Done". That's when I knew it was really bad.
When I opened the door I discovered someone had ass-blasted the bathroom. I'm not talking about blowing up the toilet, they did that too, but they had dropped their drawers and point-blank diarhea shotgunned the pipes under the sink.
My manager didn't honor the employee discount after I was gone, either.
I used to work at a car dealership. One day I had to use a bay in a different building because my usual workplace was occupied. The other building had a lift that I hadn't used before.
Anyways, I drove the car onto the lift, got out and placed the arms of the lift under the jacking points like I had done a thousand times before. I raised the lift a little and checked if the placement was still correct. It looked good, so I raised the car to a medium height. When I looked again, I realized that this lift had a central platform that was also raised and was set about 20 centimeters higher than the four arms that usually lift the car.
This 90.000 Euro SUV was basically balancing on a 180x50cm piece of metal right in the center. I managed to lower it down safely but my pulse goes up just thinking about that day.
Sharing my story for posterity.
I used to work at a medical center for old folks with varying disabilities. It was a great job all things considered, just didn't pay very well and the scheduling was a mess.
Anyway, one day I'm cleaning tables on the dining room when I hear on my walkie talkie that one of the new people need help with a guy in the bathroom. Usually "they need help" means "something has gone awry, please unfuck the situation" and, since I was the supervisor on shift, my job frequently involved untucking a situation.
I arrive outside the bathroom door and the new employee tells me that she walked into a situation that she wasn't prepared for. I figured it was some poop, or the guy fell asleep on the toilet or something.
I walk in and the walls were all painted with poop. The sink was painted with poop. The floor was painted with poop. The paper towel dispenser had poop all over the front of it.
The poor guy had gone to the bathroom, got confused and tried to remember what toilet paper was. He saw me and knew I was there to help, but he was nonverbal. His way of saying thank you was to gently take his hand and rest it under your chin.
He did so, but his hand was also still covered on poop.
I'm used to poop. It's a normal job hazard in that line of work. But something about having to clean myself and every surface in the room from caked poop while somebody else gave the poor guy a shower...that kind of story sticks with you. To this day I can't look at finger paints without feeling a little queasy.
I work in live sports TV.
Champions League Final (European Football). Kind of a big deal. Doing a money shot camera behind the goals. 4 minutes in, one of the cameras goes dead. I try all the fixes I can remotely, while all the while the director wants the camera back up and getting quite heated about it. The only thing left to try is to replug the remote head. That part is, unfortunately, 10m past the ad boards, on the grass.
I waited for play to be down the other end (and gave the security guy a heads up what I was about to do!). Jumped the ad boards, and replugged everything. At that moment, there's a roar from the crowd, as there is a break down the wing. I am VERY much NOT supposed to be on the grass! My brain tries to freeze, luckily, 100 million years of instincts kick in to save my arse. Next thing I know, I'm finishing a sort of head first leap/ airborne commando roll, over the ad boards to tuck in behind them.
The camera restarted just before a shot on goal. The operator captured it perfectly. Much to the directors relief/delight. I also, somehow managed to avoid being on any of the camera shots. I'm still not quite sure how.
Two nights ago I had a random meeting with the CEO, who I have a really good relationship with, added to my calendar. Thought nothing of it.
I entered the zoom call and said ‘so am I getting fired?’
The answer was yes.
Awkward silence ensued for a minute until they started telling me about the severance package.
Side note: I can try to negotiate that severance a bit right?
Older gentleman walked into the lobby of our office. None of us knew who he was or had seen him before. He looked confused and lost. Someone went over to ask if they could help him. He tried to but didn't respond. Then fell over. Hit his head on a table on the way down. Was dead before the pandemics arrived.
We were all in shock. Poor guy was starting into a stroke when he walked in. Maybe even walked into our office to try getting help. But it was already too late.
My first salaried job was also my first proper IT job and I was a "junior technician" ... the only other member of IT staff was my supervisor who had been a secretary that got a 1 week sysadmin course and knew very little.
The server room was a complete rat's nest and I resolved to sort it out. It was all going very well until I tripped over the loose SCSI 3 cable between the AIX server and it's raid array. While it was in use.
It took me 2 days to restore everything from tape. My supervisor was completely useless.
A few months later I was "made redundant", leaving behind me everything working perfectly and a super tidy server room. I got calls from the company asking for help for the following 6 months, which I politely declined.
Not my oh shit moment but certainly someone's. Working in a call centre they sent out an example of a fraud email that was being sent out with our logo. It asked for all your personal information and credit card information.
Several individuals replied with all their details filled in. 3 of them replied all (entire call centre) with their details filled in.
I have a small PC I use for exposing a private PC to the wider web via nginx proxy. It had two accounts on it: mine, and one I called "remote" with some basic password I set up to forward the proxy connection.
One day, this machine started making 100% CPU noises, for several hours. Wtf? I check the processes and a Tor node had been setup and was transmitting gigabytes to some Russian IP.
My brain goes into panic mode, I kill the process, wipe the remote user, and eventually pull the Ethernet plug.
I wish I hadn't wiped the user directory as I wanted to know what was being sent and where. Nonetheless the logs showed that several Russian IPs had been attempting an SSH brute force for literally months and one finally guessed "remote" and weak password I set for it.
I have decades of experience on Unix system, and I cringe having made such a rookie mistake.
Lesson learned: change the default SSH port to a transient port, have one dedicated SSH user with a non-standard username, and use auth-key entry only.
I still wonder what was being sent over that Tor node, and why it required all the CPU cores. My best guess is crypto mining, or it was used for a DDOS attack net somewhere.
Worked at a hotel. Our phone system required you to dial 9 to reach an outside line on every phone except one: the fax machine, which was set up to dial that 9 automatically when you started dialing.
It would take a second to start making dialing sounds while it dialed that 9 in silence. Our AGM would dial the 1 before the area code, not hear any immediate sounds, and then press the 1 again. Then dial the rest of the number.
So as far as the switchboard I used to direct calls was concerned, someone just dialed 911. So it made the "holy fuck someone's dying" alarm, our local 911 dispatcher got to hear a fax machine screeching its handshake tones, and I got to go into "oh shit a guest is having a stroke" mode, only to find out that no, my manager didn't read the sign posted over the fax machine because of this behavior. Again.
And then we would get a call from 911 asking what the emergency was and have to explain that it was dialed by mistake.
Of course, this was almost always during a rush.
Great thing about fax machines. They can be set up in such a way that if they don't get a fax handshake, they wait a few minutes and try dialing the number again.
Strap in friends, because this one is a wild ride.
I had stepped into the role of team lead of our IS dept with zero training on our HP mainframe system (early 90s).
The previous team lead wasn't very well liked and was basically punted out unceremoniously.
While I was still getting up to speed, we had an upgrade on the schedule to have three new hard drives added to the system.These were SCSI drives back then and required a bunch of pre-wiring and configuration before they could be used. Our contact engineer came out the day before installation to do all that work in preparation of coming back the next morning to get the drives online and integrated into the system.
Back at that time, drives came installed on little metal sleds that fit into the bays.
The CE came back the next day, shut down the system, did the final installations and powered back up. ... Nothing.
Two of the drives would mount but one wouldn't. Did some checking on wiring and tried again. Still nothing. Pull the drive sleds out and just reseat them in different positions on the bus. Now the one drive that originally didn't mount did and the other two didn't. What the hell.... Check the configs again, reboot again and, success. Everything finally came up as planned.We had configured the new drives to be a part of the main system volume, so data began migrating to the new devices right away. Because there was so much trouble getting things working, the CE hung around just to make sure everything stayed up and running.
About an hour later, the system came crashing down hard. The CE says, "Do you smell something burning?" Never a good phrase.
We pull the new drives out and then completely apart. One drive, the first one that wouldn't mount, had been installed on the sled a bit too low. Low enough for metal to metal contact, which shorted out the SCSI bus, bringing the system to its knees.Fixed that little problem, plug everything back in and ... nothing. The drives all mounted fine, but access to the data was completely fucked,
Whatever... Just scratch the drives and reload from backup, you say.That would work...if there were backups. Come to find out that the previous lead hadn't been making backups in about six months and no one knew. I was still so green at the time that I wasn't even aware how backups on this machine worked, let alone make any.
So we have no working system, no good data and no backups. Time to hop a train to Mexico.
We take the three new drives out of the system and reboot, crossing all fingers that we might get lucky. The OS actually booted, but that was it. The data was hopelessly gone.
The CE then started working the phone, calling every next-level support contact he had. After a few hours of pulling drives, changing settings, whimpering, plugging in drives, asking various deities for favors, we couldn't do any more.
The final possibility was to plug everything back in and let the support team dial in via the emergency 2400 baud support modem.
For the next 18 hours or so, HP support engineers used debug tools to access the data on the new drives and basically recreate it on the original drives.
Once they finished, they asked to make a set of backup tapes. This backup took about 12 hours to run. (Three times longer than normal as I found out later.)
Then we had to scratch the drives and do a reload. This was almost the scariest part because up until that time, there was still blind hope. Wiping the drives meant that we were about to lose everything.
We scratched the drives, reloaded from the backup and then rebooted.Success! Absolute fucking success. The engineers had restored the data perfectly. We could even find the record that happened to be in mid-write when the system went down. Tears were shed and backs were slapped. We then declared the entire HP support team to be literal gods.
40+ hours were spent in total fixing this problem and much beer was consumed afterwards.
I spent another five years in that position and we never had another serious incident. And you can be damn sure we had a rock solid backup rotation.
(Well, there actually was another problem involving a nightly backup and an inconveniently placed, and accidentally pressed, E-stop button, but that story isn't nearly as exciting.)
My better ones are too legally dubious to post, but I do have one about fairly mundane office drama.
A coworker once dropped some particularly angry comments about a manager in the work chat instead of our private one. I panic post some inane shit to try and hide it before hurriedly tabbing over to the private chat to tell her to delete it. Too late. Along with a very clearly 'upset but trying to be professional' reply, there are some ominous words spoken about how this proves the existence of our private chat and action will be taken if this is the kind of thing being said in it. But it's clock out time for our manager and on a Friday so it gets shelved until Monday with no action taken.
Our private chat wasn't exactly secure so there was fair chance our bosses would access to it. I spend the rest of my work hours that day scrubbing it of the most damaging things I had said while trying to leave enough unflattering stuff that it looked somewhat natural. It wasn't particularly spicy all told, it was mostly just "how to do x?" without sounding incompetent in front of people who dictate whether you get paid or not, but better safe than sorry. We're still sure that our coworker who dropped the bomb is going to get shit canned though.
Monday comes around and we're all waiting for the hammer to come down. Each moment that goes by we expect the retribution is going to be worse. Around midday I realize we've got a different manager than usual overseeing us, but the usual is still clocked in. I spot a bunch of higher ups have away messages saying they're in a meeting and have been for hours. Then in our work chat comes a "x is typing" from one of them, who very rarely says anything there. I message one of my coworkers putting my bet that this was it and to brace for punishment.
The typing message from this person goes on for a good 20 minutes. It's going to be a big one.
The message finally comes. Our coworker was fired.
...and so was everyone else except myself and one other person. They were getting laid off. The meeting I noticed wasn't about our punishment, it was an emergency meeting because an important contract hadn't gone through. Company got gutted.
I worked as a software dev, I had an intern to supervise. Everything was going well until he somehow got behind my back, tried some stuff on his own, and wiped out the whole database. Luckily we had backups, but I had to scramble to get it back and running as fast and possible, as I received dozens of calls or complaints almost instantly. For some reason, I was not allowed to modify permissions and accounts, and both me and the intern had superadmin privileges.
My first week on a new job I ran a DELETE query without (accidentally) selecting the WHERE clause. In Prod. I thought I was going to get fired on the spot, but my boss was a complete bro about it, and helped with data restore personally.
Everyone at that company was great both professionally and personally. It's the highlight of my 30+ year career.
This is actually my own Oh Shit story.
Early days of being a sysadmin and making changes on a major Linux server that we have in production. Running routine commands and changing permissions on a few directories and I make a typo. "sudo chmod 777 /etc/" instead of typing the rest of the directory tree I accidentally hit return.
It only ran for a fraction of a second before I hit CTRL + C to stop it but by then the damage had been done. I spent hours mirroring and fixing permissions by hand using a duplicate physical server. As a precaution we moved all production services off this machine and it was a good thing too as when we rebooted the server a few weeks later, it never booted again.
For those that don't know, chmod is used to set access permissions on files and folders, the 777 stands for "Read + Write + Execute" for the owner, group, and everyone else. The /etc directory contains many of the basic system configuration files for the entire operating system and many things have very strict permissions for security reasons. Without certain permissions in place those systems will refuse to load files or boot if not properly set.
Happy ending story, but it's still gross.
I do workplace safety and hazardous material handling (instructions, plans, regulation, etc), for all sorts of facilities, from dirty ground to lab waste.
Hospitals have a number of types of dangerous waste, among them stuff that get disinfected in bags in an autoclave (oven) and stuff that shouldn't be in a bag, like needles, scalpel blades etc.
I was giving some on-site instructions, which included how to dispose of things. So I tell the people to never assume someone does everything right, because we've all thrown trash in the wrong bag at some point, and you don't want to find out someone left a scalpel in the autoclave bag by jamming it into the hole and pulling a needle from your hand.
My eye drifts slightly left, to one of my students current assisting another worker doing literally that, stuffing a second bag into the autoclave and then shouting "OW, fuck", before dripping blood on the ground.
Now, nobody knows what's in the bag. Some moron threw sharps in with the bio waste, who knows where it's from. For all I know, they just caught zombie-ebola, and it's my fault for talking slightly too slow.
Thankfully, after some antibiotic and fervent prayer, everything turned out to be OK.
All those times someone accidentally printed a hundred blank pages out of the printer because they went to the very bottom of Microsoft Excel while messing around and unknowingly inserted the space bar in the bottom bar before printing.
I know most of these stories are going to be IT or food service, so I'll chime in with mine to change it up.
TLDR: We caused some explosions on a transformer because someone didn't read test results.
I work for a power utility. One night, we were energizing a new transformer. It fed a single strip mall complex with a major grocery chain on it, so that's why it was at night, as we couldn't affect the service while they were open.
Anyways, we go to energize, close the primary switches and one of the lightning arrestors blows up. And I mean blows up, like an M80 just went off. Lit up the sky bright as day for a couple moments at 1 in the morning. The protection opened the switches and everybody is panicking, making sure nobody was hurt.
Well after everybody settled down, the arrestor was replaced, they decide to throw it in again. Switches come closed, and explosion #2 happens. A second arrestor blows spectacularly. I tried to convince the one supervisor on site to go for a third time, because why not, but he didn't want to do it again. Whatever.
A few days go by and we find out what the issue was. This transformer was supposed to be a 115kV to 13.2kV. Come to find out there was an internal tap selection that was set for 67kV for the primary, and not 115kV. So what was happening was the voltage was only being stepped down half as much as needed so there was like 28kV or so on the secondary instead of 13.2kV and that was over the lightning arrestors ratings, hence why they were blowing up. So the transformer had to have its oil drained, guys had to go inside it and physically rewire it to the correct ratio.
We had a third party company do the acceptance testing on this transformer, and our engineering department just saw all the green checkmarks but didn't pay attention to the values for the test results. Nobody expected to run into this because we don't have any of this type of transformer in our system, but that's certainly no excuse.
Moral of the story: read your acceptance test results carefully.
(Not my story, but a coworker)
This person started working for a large retailer. On their first week, they contributed a fix to a filtering system that inadvertently disabled the "adult" filter.
The team got paged, an error review took place, and we went through the impact of the error - a ~10% increase in sales worldwide, and the best sales outside of the holiday period.
On one hand, extremely damaging for the company. On the other, on his first week he delivered impact that exceeded the whole team's goal for the year.
That person is now in senior management at a huge tech company.
I worked at a pizza chain and there was a hurricane. Thankfully we only got heavy rain but I was a delivery driver and almost every other place was closed. I opened with someone and we stayed for like 10 hours straight. By the time we had to leave, we were dead tired and there would be only 2 people left working and they had dozens of orders left and they had to do delivery, cook, AND ANSWER CUSTOMERS. No, the job didn't pay enough.
Several years ago, when I was more just the unofficial office geek, our email was acting up. Though we had Internet access as normal. At the time, email (Exchange) was hosted on-prem on our server. Anything server related, I'd contact our MSP to handle it. Which usually meant they'd simply reboot the server. Easy enough, but I was kinda afraid and hesitant to touch the server unless the MSP explicitly asked/told me to do something.
I reported it to our MSP, expecting a quick response, but nothing. Not even acknowledgment of the issue. This was already going on for like an hour, so I decided to take matters into my own hands. I went to the server, turned on the monitor...and it was black. Well, shit. Couldn't even do a proper shutdown. So I emailed again, waited a bit, and again no response.
Well, if the server was being unresponsive, I figured a hard shutdown and reboot would be fine. I knew that's what the MSP would (ask me to) do. What difference was them telling me to do it versus just me doing it on my own? I was going to fix email! I was going to be the hero! So I did it.
Server booted up, but after getting past the BIOS and other checks...it went back to black screen again. No Windows login. That's not so terrible, since that was the status quo. Except now, people were also saying Internet all of a sudden stopped working. Oh shit.
Little did I know that the sever was acting as our DNS. So I essentially took down everything: email, Internet, even some server access (network drives, DBs). I was in a cold sweat now since we were pretty much dead in the water. I of course reached out AGAIN to the MSP, but AGAIN nothing. Wtf...
So I told my co-workers and bosses, expecting to get in some trouble for making things worse. Surprisingly, no one cared. A couple people decided to go home and work. Some people took super long lunches or chitchatted. Our receptionist was playing games on her computer. Our CEO had his feet up on his desk and was scrolling Facebook on his phone. Another C-suite decided to call it an early day.
Eventually, at basically the end of the day, the MSP reached out. They sent some remote commands to the server and it all started working again. Apparently, they were dealing with an actual catastrophe elsewhere: one of their clients' offices had burned down so they were focused on BCDR over there all day.
So yeah, I took down our server for half a day. And no one cared, except me.
Setting up a GNU Mailman mailing-list with the 'reply-to-all' setting still set to on (as per the defaults).
It was intended to be a distribution list.
The list had 8,000 recipients.
.
I found out what an ohnosecond is, as the blood chilled a little in my veins.
Turned out not too bad, 6 innocuous replies were sent out to everyone. It was fully open for about 25 minutes before I set 'reply-to-all' to off. Could have been much worse.
Will never ever forget to do that with a mailing-list again.
I broke the home page of a big tech (FAANG) company.
I added a call to an API created by another team. I did an initial test with 2% of production traffic + 50% of employee traffic, and it worked fine. After a day or two, I rolled out to 100% of users, and it broke the home page. It was broken for around 3 minutes until the deployment oncall found the killswitch I put in the code and turned it off. They noticed the issue quicker than I did.
What I didn't realise was that only some of the methods of this class had Memcache caching. The method I was calling did not. It turns out it was running a database query on a DB with a single shard and only 4 replicas, that wasn't designed for production traffic. As soon as my code rolled out to 100% of users. the DBs immediately fell over from tens of thousands of simultaneous connections.
Always use feature flags for risky work! It would have been broken for a lot longer if I didn't add one and they had to re-deploy the site. The site was continuously pushed all day, but building and deploying could take 45+ mins.
I once pushed a git commit with youtube link as the commit message. Nothing terrible, some completely random video. Still, it looked really weird in the commit history. Turns out you can edit this if you have access to the server and I did have access to the server.
One time in the same company I found a random youtube link in the middle of a java class. Yes, it was still compiling. No I didn't commit it.
no work related but am overfill sink with water changer because forgot to remove drain cover
is flood
am get in trouble also ._.
Now that i think about my first job was fucking wild.
My buddy was in a forklift taking some stock down and i was spotting, basically just hanging out and making sure no one got in the way. A few minutes after the normal time it'd take he thinks something is wrong and calls me to take a look (from afar) to see how fucked we are; the answer was very, the pallet was barely holding together at all, but i couldn't see a damn thing from my position. Before i could get back to spotting we heard a loud crack and the world went still, i imagine for much longer by him, and not a second later we had hundreds of pounds of foul smelling mulch everywhere.
I had a lot more there too; babysitting an old man that looked on the verge of death with no management anywhere to be found, moving hundreds of pounds at a time by hand, dealing with the best conspiracy theorist ever.
I've been bored everywhere else I've ever worked.
