Your biggest mistake?



  • I've searched and didn't see this posted before, but was wondering what people consider to be their biggest IT mistake?

    Mine is when I was asked by a visitor what the UPS in a rack was for. I explained and then stupidly decided to give a demonstration by pulling the feed out...except I janked out one of the 16A outlets. I heard the noise of half of the rack spinning down and then went white. I had to quickly end the tour and then bring back up all the servers I had just powered down.

     Nothing lost except my pride, luckily, but not my finest hour!



  • I bought Vista.



  • I attempted to help PJH with a problem he was having.



  • I said I'd help the bearded loner off my IT degree course to write an Amiga point-and-click adventure game.


  • Garbage Person

     Entering the industry in the first place. I missed my true calling. I only discovered it after I'd graduated and started working - and my ability to be taken seriously (and pay for the education it would require) in that alternative had passed me by.

    I love writing software, but doing it professionally... Irritates me.  So I'm stuck doing something I love doing in my free time professionally, and something I'd love to do for work in my free time.

     

    Fuck. I guess two near-misses are better than most people ever get on the career satisfaction scale.



  • @Weng said:

     Entering the industry in the first place. I missed my true calling. I only discovered it after I'd graduated and started working - and my ability to be taken seriously (and pay for the education it would require) in that alternative had passed me by.
     

    +1

     

    What true calling is that?

    Goatfucking?



  • @dhromed said:

    What true calling is that?

    I'm guessing "sci-fi writer." He's mentioned that before. Or racing. But sci-fi writer is more interesting.


  • Garbage Person

    @blakeyrat said:

    @dhromed said:
    What true calling is that?

    I'm guessing "sci-fi writer." He's mentioned that before. Or racing. But sci-fi writer is more interesting.

    Neither, actually. I do write and I'll see if I can't make some cash at it eventually. There isn't a practical age limit on entry-to-field over there thank the gods.

    I do race cars. There is a very high barrier to entry over there (if you haven't been racing karts since age 5, you can forget about a professional career - though this is changing slowly) but that's not what I'm talking about.

     

    And no, I'm not going to tell you what I [i]am[/i] talking about. A little mystery is good for you. Operationally, you may assume 'goatfucker'.



  • Man I barely have the initiative and competence for a single profession.



  • @Weng said:

    Operationally, you may assume 'goatfucker'.
     

    Goatfucker will be my new default designation for whenever I don't know what someone does.

    This will surely make me a loved and admired person.



  •  This would have been 1988.

    Offsite at a vendor's office with a classroom full of people being introduced to the new product we were all supposed to start installing.  Live terminal in front of each of us so we could try the examples, look at the screens and whatnot.  Back home, I should mention, we were all still using VM/CMS.

    Presenter from the vendor company shows us how to log on and a few other basic commands, including send_message.  I mention to someone at the next desk over that if you want to send the message to yourself, just specify the recipient in the command as * since that's how it's done in CMS.  He enters:

      send_message * im talking to myself, good thing i never listen

    and presses the Enter key.

    Several seconds pass and the message still hasn't appeared in his status line.  This is about the time I realize that * on the vendor's system means "everybody who's logged in" and not "myself" as it does in CMS.

    Not just everybody in the vendor's classroom, but everybody in the vendor's entire office.

    Some of the quicker thinking vendor employees sent back appropriate responses.

     


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    I once forget to commit my last change before making a deployment. The uncommited change was just one line.

    @This is pseudocode so don't complain said:

    [b][Serializable][/b]
    public class SomeDumbassDataStructureThatWillOccasionallyBeUsed
     extends SomeClassIThoughWasAlreadyMarkedSerializableIsNot

     It turns out "occasionally" means "after a credit card transaction has been processed, but before the user is given their confirmation".  So one particular user made a credit card transaction, and got an Exception screen. So they hit Back and Submit again. And again and again, and so on for $10k.

     Also, this one time I tried to fuck a goat, except it turns out it was neither a goat, nor fucking.



  • @dhromed said:

    @Weng said:

     Entering the industry in the first place. I missed my true calling. I only discovered it after I'd graduated and started working - and my ability to be taken seriously (and pay for the education it would require) in that alternative had passed me by.
     

    +1

     

    What true calling is that?

    Goatfucking?

    What's yous?

     

    I don't regret one bit having entered this industry, as programming is something I'm naturally attracted to and truly enjoy doing.

    Except I have too much accumulated stress and have reached a point where I no longer have the patience to withstand the daily grind. This is why I'm taking some indeterminate time away and trying to figure out if if there's another less stressful vocation out there for me.

     



  • @Zecc said:

    What's yous?
     

    Drawing, man.

    @Zecc said:

    This is why I'm taking some indeterminate time away

    How do you solve the money problem?

     



  • @Zecc said:

    I don't regret one bit having entered this industry, as programming is something I'm naturally attracted to and truly enjoy doing.
    You all care about my story, right?  Yeah I thought so.

    I echo what Zecc said, if only I could actually program more.  I'm on a BI project which has admittedly expanded my horizons and right now I'm in kind of a sprint where I'm actually looking at code a lot, but most months fly by without me even firing up eclipse.

    Could be worse, for sure, which is why I don't complain much, except for some of the stupidity I have to deal with here.

    As for biggest mistake?  Professionally, I'd say it's missing a face to face interview (overslept), freaking out, and later in the day accepting a way underpaid (seriously, you would cry if you knew what I was being paid at that job) job to work in someone's basement.



  • @dhromed said:

    How do you solve the money problem?
    I don't have many expenses. More importantly, I haven't had many expenses for a while.

    So even though I'm currenlty losing money, I've got enough to keep me confortable for some time.

    In the meantime, I'm starting an audio/video post-production course in a couple of months. I applied for an unpaid internship at the school, in exchange for not having to pay for classes. I'm still waiting for their response, but I feel confident after the interview we had.



  • Not as terrible thing it could have been. We had some SAP application in testing that was reading stuff from one folder. However, it had stopped working. All of our SAP admins were still on vacation for few weeks, so I ended up being the one who got this case. I ended up calling our main admin and he told to restart the server. I did and sent message to client. I think it was Thursday. I forgot about it afterwards.

    Then came Monday and the client calls and tells it's still not working and actually some other SAP applications had also stopped working. I took remote desktop to the server and it worked with no problems. I told him I will try to investigate. I asked one of my co-workers. "Did you make sure the light went from red to yellow to red?" I was like "wtf" and he opened connnection to the server. Then opened the SAP server console and started actual SAP service.

    Fortunally that was just our more or less testing SAP which was used by like 2 people, so the damage was pretty minimal. Our CTO did end up mentioning it during one meeting tho and asked some opinions how to prevent it in the future. It was pretty unanimous opinion that this kind of services need to come up automatically when server starts. No idea if it was ever implamented tho, I never had to touch our SAP servers after that & I wasn't part of any SAP related project.


  • Garbage Person

    @Buzer said:

    Our CTO did end up mentioning it during one meeting tho and asked some opinions how to prevent it in the future. It was pretty unanimous opinion that this kind of services need to come up automatically when server starts.
    And all your SAP admins need to not be on vacation at the same time. 



  • @Buzer said:

    Our CTO did end up mentioning it during one meeting tho and asked some opinions how to prevent it in the future.
    Weng stole my comment and I'm stealing it back.

    [A]ll your SAP admins need to not be on vacation at the same time. 

    Seriously, were they all out getting married to each other?  How does that happen?



  • @belgariontheking said:

    [A]ll your SAP admins need to not be on vacation at the same time. 

    Seriously, were they all out getting married to each other?  How does that happen?

     

    They probably can't figure out why the entire development staff disappears each year right about the time of Comicon.

     



  • My biggest mistake was dumping her body on the river.



  • @belgariontheking said:

    Seriously, were they all out getting married to each other?  How does that happen?

    The vacations at public sector in Finland can be very long (10 weeks 4 days if you have been there for 15 years and change vacation money to vacation time. Even longer if you have saved previous years vacations or chose free time over money for overtime work) and since everyone generally would to use their vacations around same time (end of June, July & August), the result tends to be that there's generally a week or two per year when there's no one around for some specific thing.



  • I accidentally cut my high school's T1 line with a pair of wire cutters. Then I tried to twist the wires back together to repair the damage and found out the hard way that T1 lines have decent voltage.

    To be fair I was cutting all the zip ties holding the wiring to random stuff inside a wiring closet with the intention of tidying it up, and it was dark and the T1 line was wrapped around a bundle of Cat5 cables and holding them together.


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @fatdog said:

    My biggest mistake was dumping her body [b]on[/b] the river.
     

     Yeah, you should have waited for the ice to thaw first. n00b



  • @Lorne Kates said:

    @fatdog said:

    My biggest mistake was dumping her body on the river.
     

     Yeah, you should have waited for the ice to thaw first. n00b

    Ha Ha... good one! Ha Ha Ha.. it's even funnier because I made a mistake writting a post (on/in?) my third language... ha ha

    :|


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @fatdog said:

    @Lorne Kates said:

    @fatdog said:

    My biggest mistake was dumping her body on the river.
     

     Yeah, you should have waited for the ice to thaw first. n00b

    Ha Ha... good one! Ha Ha Ha.. it's even funnier because I made a mistake writting a post (on/in?) my third language... ha ha

    :|

     

    Meh. People will probably just assume the body is a sleep ice fisher. You've got a three month head start.



  • @Cursorkeys said:

    was wondering what people consider to be their biggest IT mistake?
     

    Continuously underestimating how long shit will take me.



  • @dhromed said:

    Continuously underestimating how long shit will take me.

    I sugest a measuring tape and if possible a different hobbie, I mean, shitting is good but how long is it seems kind of pointless



  • @dhromed said:

    @Cursorkeys said:
    was wondering what people consider to be their biggest IT mistake?
     

    Continuously underestimating how long shit will take me.

    Amen to that. I'm also a continued victim of Hofstadter's law.

    Btw, what happened to your signature? Did you install a turtle fence?

     


  • ♿ (Parody)

    Dilbert.com



  • @Zecc said:

    Btw, what happened to your signature? Did you install a turtle fence?
     

    Irregularly, I randomly modify the existing image with arbitrary effects in Photoshop.

     

    On this monitor, though, I have less screen space, so I hide sigs with Stylish in order to make the page more content-dense.



  • @da Doctah said:

    send_message * im talking to myself, good thing i never listen

    and presses the Enter key.

    Several seconds pass and the message still hasn't appeared in his status line.  This is about the time I realize that * on the vendor's system means "everybody who's logged in" and not "myself" as it does in CMS.

    I seem to remember something similar at my uni lab: can't remember if it was NT4 or 2000. I was looking through C:, as you do, and I found some .cmd files in a "McAfee" folder. Being young and stupid I double clicked on one of them. Instantly I heard every computer in the room beep and a message pop on the screen: "K103-XX is infected with a virus!" Oh shit! Quickly I opened that file in notepad and it was pretty much just "net send * %COMPUTERNAME% is infected with a virus!" Luckily it was after the admins had gone home so all I got was some other student asking "Who's on K103-XX? You've got a virus". I just left and nothing happened, except net send later being locked down.



  • @Lorne Kates said:

    @fatdog said:

    My biggest mistake was dumping her body on the river.
     

     Yeah, you should have waited for the ice to thaw first. n00b

     

    Must have been a surprise for the other poker players!

     



  • Mine would be not having graduated thus far. Got a few more college month ahead before I finally do. Could've done so four years ago, if I cared more about it back then. Sometimes I wonder how many opportunities I may have missed (though I don't regret taking my time to get that damm diploma).

    That, and falling in love for a girl who was majoring in law at the same college. Lawyers are the devil incarnate. That gave me one hell of an unproductive year.



  • I misprojected some dataset growth at a customer site and brought one of their database servers down hard.

    Luckily, this was a testing environment specifically to validate the dataset growth of an import before doing it in production, so a good laugh was had by all.



  • @Renan said:

    Mine would be not having graduated thus far. Got a few more college month ahead before I finally do. Could've done so four years ago, if I cared more about it back then. Sometimes I wonder how many opportunities I may have missed (though I don't regret taking my time to get that damm diploma).

    That, and falling in love for a girl who was majoring in law at the same college. Lawyers are the devil incarnate. That gave me one hell of an unproductive year.

    So girl not fall in love you with, then?


  • Garbage Person

     Nagesh! You're back! I thought a SEAL team had dropped in on your house and shot you or something.



  • @Weng said:

     Nagesh! You're back! I thought a SEAL team had dropped in on your house and shot you or something.

    That doesn't happen in real life.  Only in hyped media and videogames

     


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @serguey123 said:

    @Weng said:

    Nagesh! You're back! I thought a SEAL team had dropped in on your house and shot you or something.

    That doesn't happen in real life.  Only in hyped media and videogames

    It's true! The real SEALs can tell the difference between India and Pakistan.



  • @Weng said:

     Nagesh! You're back! I thought a SEAL team had dropped in on your house and shot you or something.

    thinking is hazardus to health!



  • @Nagesh said:

    @Weng said:

     Nagesh! You're back! I thought a SEAL team had dropped in on your house and shot you or something.

    thinking is hazardus to health!

    True! That's why I avoid it at all costs.



  • @boomzilla said:

    @serguey123 said:

    @Weng said:

    Nagesh! You're back! I thought a SEAL team had dropped in on your house and shot you or something.
    That doesn't happen in real life.  Only in hyped media and videogames
    It's true! The real SEALs can tell the difference between India and Pakistan.[<FONT color=#698d73>Also North and South America</FONT>]

    Lol


  • Garbage Person

    @serguey123 said:

    That doesn't happen in real life.  Only in hyped media and videogames
    And... you know, in real life. Jesus, how the hell could you miss THAT joke? Or is your flag-waving inner patriot too sensitive to "9/11 jokes" to believe someone could make one?



  • I used to work at a company which made radio therapy machines for cancer treatment, they produced x-ray photon or electron beams at energies up to 26 MeV, all the safety interlocks were off while we investigated a problem and I managed to radiate my immediate boss in the face with an electron beam at 26 MeV for about 1/4 of a second before I managed to shut the thing down again, I don't think he even realised what had happen, but it had me shaking for a bit.



  • @Weng said:

    @serguey123 said:

    That doesn't happen in real life.  Only in hyped media and videogames
    And... you know, in real life. Jesus, how the hell could you miss THAT joke? Or is your flag-waving inner patriot too sensitive to "9/11 jokes" to believe someone could make one?

    I'm not from the US so... 9/11 means nothing to me (if you take the slash you get 911) also, what that has to do with the whole SEAL team bit?  I don't recall any conection, but then again I don't follow the news on stuff I don't care about.  Also for the most part I don't consider myself a patriot because for the most part nations are a meaningless concept to me.



  • @serguey123 said:

    @Weng said:

    @serguey123 said:

    That doesn't happen in real life.  Only in hyped media and videogames
    And... you know, in real life. Jesus, how the hell could you miss THAT joke? Or is your flag-waving inner patriot too sensitive to "9/11 jokes" to believe someone could make one?

    I'm not from the US so... 9/11 means nothing to me (if you take the slash you get 911) also, what that has to do with the whole SEAL team bit?  I don't recall any conection, but then again I don't follow the news on stuff I don't care about.  Also for the most part I don't consider myself a patriot because for the most part nations are a meaningless concept to me.

    So what you're saying is that you're unqualified to make commentary about what happens in real life?

     


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @serguey123 said:

    @Weng said:

    @serguey123 said:

    That doesn't happen in real life.  Only in hyped media and videogames
    And... you know, in real life. Jesus, how the hell could you miss THAT joke? Or is your flag-waving inner patriot too sensitive to "9/11 jokes" to believe someone could make one?

    I'm not from the US so... 9/11 means nothing to me (if you take the slash you get 911) also, what that has to do with the whole SEAL team bit?  I don't recall any conection, but then again I don't follow the news on stuff I don't care about.  Also for the most part I don't consider myself a patriot because for the most part nations are a meaningless concept to me.

    I can see that it might not be so important to you, but does the name Osama bin Laden mean anything to you? This ultimately has less to do with nations, per se, than with civilizations.


  • @serguey123 said:

    I'm not from the US so... 9/11 means nothing to me (if you take the slash you get 911) also, what that has to do with the whole SEAL team bit?

    I'm from the west coast of the US so (and feel free to hate me, fellow Americans), I'd be lying if I said 9/11 meant much to me. I don't know anybody in that entire half of the country, and as far as I'm concerned New York is more foreign to me than, say, New Zealand.

    But... what issue are you having with the SEAL Team 6? They captured Osama Bin Laden, you don't find that noteworthy? They lied to the Pakistani government about the time of the operation so they could pull it off without local authorities interfering, you don't find that noteworthy? They are some of the most bad ass motherfuckers to ever walk the Earth, you don't find that noteworthy?

    I guess not a lot of news of the outside world gets past the North Korean border.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    I'm from the west coast of the US so (and feel free to hate me, fellow Americans), I'd be lying if I said 9/11 meant much to me. I don't know anybody in that entire half of the country, and as far as I'm concerned New York is more foreign to me than, say, New Zealand.

     

    Interesting.

    I'm from the East Coast, yet Pearl Harbor means a lot to me,as does The 1983 Beirut Barracks Bombing, also the Oklahoma City Bombing, etc.



  • @frits said:

    @serguey123 said:

    @Weng said:

    @serguey123 said:

    That doesn't happen in real life.  Only in hyped media and videogames
    And... you know, in real life. Jesus, how the hell could you miss THAT joke? Or is your flag-waving inner patriot too sensitive to "9/11 jokes" to believe someone could make one?

    I'm not from the US so... 9/11 means nothing to me (if you take the slash you get 911) also, what that has to do with the whole SEAL team bit?  I don't recall any conection, but then again I don't follow the news on stuff I don't care about.  Also for the most part I don't consider myself a patriot because for the most part nations are a meaningless concept to me.

    So what you're saying is that you're unqualified to make commentary about stuff you don't care about?

    YES 

    FTFY

     

    @boomzilla said:

    I can see that it might not be so important to you, but does the name <FONT color=#698d73>Osama bin Laden</FONT> mean anything to you?

    Some random dude that killed some people from the US, so what? 

    @boomzilla said:

     This ultimately has less to do with nations, per se, than with civilizations.

    WTF are you talking about?

    @blakeyrat said:

    But... what issue are you having with the SEAL Team 6? They captured Osama Bin Laden, you don't find that noteworthy?

    No, they are trained soldiers, isn't that what they are supposed to do?

    @blakeyrat said:

    They lied to the Pakistani government about the time of the operation so they could pull it off without local authorities interfering, you don't find that noteworthy?

    No, they interfered with a foreign government sovereignty, I find that appalling.

    @blakeyrat said:

     They are some of the most bad ass motherfuckers to ever walk the Earth, you don't find that noteworthy?

    The badasses from the Hollywood movies look cooler

    @blakeyrat said:

    I guess not a lot of news of the outside world gets past the North Korean border.

    My point is relevance, how is this newsworthy to me?  Terrorism doesn't target poor countries, and even if they did there is nothing to destroy and people are dying anyways


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