This game's fun!
Ok, for my first tech-like (as an intern) I was employed by a government department to continue working on their web-app, which ran under the Sun ONE portal. Working in Sun ONE is a bit of a nightmare, I had never really used Solaris before, and nobody else at the company knew anything about programming. It was a great match-up.
So the first thing I did was write a little test.jsp file (a "hello world") type deal and throw it into the code directory, and try to access it on the server (this was a dev server, at least). Nothing, I could access the files around it, but not that particular server. Then I remembered somebody saying something about restarting the server software to make changes.
So I went on a bit of a quest to figure out how to restart the server. I found a program called something like "reloadserver" (it was probably nothing like that, this goes back too long to remember). So I ran it, and tried to access the test.jsp. Still no go. I go back to the main page. It's the default Sun ONE portal. Uh oh! In the console I go to the code directory. Empty. All the code written by the previous interns, over the past four months, gone.
Being my first job, and having a shy disposition anyways, I sort of hid for a couple weeks, afraid to tell anybody and hoping that they had backups. Finally, about 3 weeks in, I asked if they had a backup. "Of last night?" he said, "No, of when I started. The server blew up". Luckily they did, so all I'd lost is 3 weeks of my time with nothing (not even a Java Bean) to show for it.
Once it was restored, I figured out how to do it properly. It's still a painful process, and I recommend that everybody avoids coding extensions for Sun ONE, if you value your sanity.