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What is the Worst Tech Mistake You Ever Made?
"In the interest of full disclosure, this is mine:
I was working at a Fortune 50 bank as a consultant. I was due to go on vacation for a week and the company did not have webmail. I decided that I would try forwarding emails to my corporate account. (I know this was a bad idea, and probably against several corporate policies.) I set it up so that any email that came in would forward to my consulting company's account. My mistake was I also left Delivery Receipt on. This was not Microsoft, it was Lotus Notes. The system began forwarding the incoming mail to my account. But then it would get a Delivery Receipt, which in turn would be forwarded to my account, which would generate another delivery receipt, ad infinitum. When I got back from vacation they claimed I had brought down the email system for 4 hours. This incident caused the bank to stop allowing consultants to set up email rules. What's your story?"
staking mine and my family's needs in a technical career!
I think the articles implication of "the more we learn, the less we think" is wrong.
Bad plan. Now, the next time you log into a new machine you'll think that rm will be safe and will wipe out an entire directory tree again.
If you want to have a safe alias, use a different name! For example del would be appropriate. If you're not good enough to use rm correctly, then an old DOS command seems appropriate...
(comic book guy voice)
By far, my worst tech mistake was dropping out of college to take a full time job as an outsourced computer admin. Not having my degree has kept me from being competitive for better jobs with larger companies.
I love job now, but I don't have much room to grow, being as I'm the top IT guy in a 70-person company that's family owned (and I'm not in the family). I'm working on finishing my degree now so that when the time comes to move on, I'll be able to find jobs that have room for growth.
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What the heck are these files doing on E: on this machine? Fsck! Ok... let's delete them...
Sudden realization that it wasn't local after all.. it was our main server for the ISP we ran, 25 miles away!
Hopped in car, had to reinstall, got it back up and running about 2 sweat filled hours later.
Moral: Always be mindful of WHERE the command is running.
--Mike--
It sounds like you did exactly what you were supposed to do. Isn't part of the point of a training exercise that the danger is real and freak accidents like that can happen? Maybe the real mistake was not having an emergency backup communication system (and the same would apply for a real conflict situation).
You know, while that had bad consequences, it also isn't something that I'd call your mistake. Your CO asked you to kill the network, you did so. The issue that came up wasn't a technical one specific to the issue, so you weren't in a position where I'd expect you to be able to advise your CO using specialty information. This wasn't something unethical, where you might have taken another course of action, or illegal, where you should have refused to follow an order. You did exactly what your orders stipulated that you do.
Frankly, from the post, I doubt that the person dying could have been saved if the radio had been active.
Furthermore, unless the Army has rules requiring that personnel on training exercises have a comm system always up, I'm not sure that even your CO made a poor decision. There is such a thing as tragedy -- where everyone really did do the right thing, and someone still gets hurt as a result.
It's kind of like deciding to drive down Main Street in a town instead of Lambert Street and hitting and killing a kid that ran out into the street. Yes, had you taken the other road, the kid would have been alive. However, you can't be expected to or be *able* to always make the decision that produces the best outcome, or you'd be the best gambler in the world. The only thing that you can do is what seems the most sensible thing given the information that you have at the time. You did that, and nobody could ask for more.
May we never see th
This sucks, but you did what you were told. And it is not your fault the tank flipped. Better simulate a loss in comms and have your men learn that they can send plain text over their radio, than lose 10 men in wartime.
Still, I'd feel horrible. But I wouldn't hold you responsible.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Ever since then, my prompt has had my current directory in it. That experience certainly made me more careful.
.au file on his advisor's workstation instead of his own make me very glad that I keep working directory *and* host names in my prompt. :-)
Between this story, and the story about the guy playing the beavis and butthead
Ita erat quando hic adveni.