Whats your biggest IT mistake

BlakeRichardson
Kind of a big deal
Kind of a big deal

Whats your biggest IT mistake

It's getting close to the end of the week so why not have some fun. I thought it would be interesting and funny if we shared a screw up that you have made at some point in your IT career. I'll start the ball rollign with two examples.

 

 

1. This is a current project I am working on, we are upgrading on of our large rack mounted NAS devices to a newer model with brand new larger capacity drives. I am on a tight deadline as I need the data transferred from the old unit and have everything back working again within a week. My screw up is the hardware just arrived but I forgot to order the rack mount kits for both the primary and expansion units so now I have to setup the units on top of their shipping boxes while i wait for the rack mount kits to arrive.

 

 

2. This story was right at the start of my IT career, I was fresh out of school and working for a small local company. The bosses friend has just purchase a new laptop, I was tasked with cloning the data from the old laptop to the new one. The customer was a perfectionist and this had to be done without any problems. Long story short my boss didn't trust that I would get this right so he went ahead and erased the disk on the new machine so I couldn't screw things up, as it turns out the laptops were both Apple PowerBook G4 that looked identical. I had to break the new to my boss later in the day that he had erased the data off the wrong laptop and the customers data was gone, after hours of trying to recover everything I was able to get back 80% of the customer data. 

 

 

Looking forward to what stories everyone else has to share.

1 REPLY 1
PhilipDAth
Kind of a big deal
Kind of a big deal

Decades ago I did software development. I was working alone at about 2am, and had to go into the computer room for some reason.  The room seemed unusually warm to me, and I could see  thermostat on the wall.  So I turned it down.

 

It turns out this thermostat was the emergency power down in case something fails and the room gets excessively hot.

 

It simply killed the power, like switching the light switch off.

 

 

The company ended up loosing an entire day of production data, and the company had penalty clauses for not supplying data within a set time.

I had to explain to the CEO the next morning what had happened.

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