Your first Job/ biggest screw-up

hurricane1091

First IT job was XP to 7 migration contractor. Biggest mistake aside from taking that contract job is upgrading a PC to Windows 7 that was hooked up to a million dollar medical machine that was not compatible. I was told to do it though, so whatever.

kurosaki00

Had to do with IP Tables and flushing ...
Seriously, make back ups. They will save your life at some point.

Cyberscum

1st job:
INFOSEC

Big Screw up:
Got ahold of a vulnerability/pen scanner and "accidently" scanned/pen tested over 1000 computers/servers in "a foreign location."

...The location went partially down and thought they were a target of a DOS (I guess they were) and found out the IP source....Me

...did not get fired, but pretty damn close.

RHEL

1st job -- UNIX admin for a global aerospace company (250K employees). Very disorganized, low cost of living area where there rest of my team worked several hours away in Connecticut. Complex, very high tech network where I learned a lot and they paid for my master's degree. Sent me to AIX training.

2nd job -- UNIX engineer for a local resort/casino (6K employees). Much smaller environment, but was able to take the lead on projects more and specialize in IBM AIX. Decent perks, and they sent me to AIX training.

3rd job -- UNIX engineer for a regional non-profit health insurance company (7K employees). Massive IT department and budget. Has been a great learning experience and sent me to two AIX trainings last year.

Biggest mess up -- At my first job, I accidentally shut down a fairly important UNIX server. I fessed up and apologize. I was not scolded, but this led to my team nicknaming me "Halt."

At my current job, I was tracing some power cables in a server rack and accidentally knocked a loose power whip out, causing side A's power in the rack to go out. Luckily, we have redundant power and it did not cause a massive outage.

TechxWizard

First IT Job: Digital Support Specialist aka Custodian because all i did is clean up people crap and messes.
accidentally deleted 250GB of patient xrays. I forgot to backup the studies prior to wiping the machine (most companies are not liable for data loss)
I felt like a complete failure.
I used recuva to recover 95% of the xray. bosses were happy. i felt slightly better smh

Fulcrum45

I once upgraded the firmware to a router... causing it to reboot... in the middle of the day... at a call center with 200+ users. They lost calls mid- conversation, it was painfully obvious what I had done. Thinking I was scheduling it to run at 5pm (1700 hours) as opposed to 3pm (1500 hours). Saddest part is that I KNOW military time but had a serious lapse of cognizance or something

Their Systems manager surprisingly laughed it off, I think he was just glad it wasn't him. All the same he would have been the one to pursue it further had he wanted to but chose to just make fun of me instead. I really lucked out on that one.

Jon_Cisco

I have to many stories to even pick one. All I can say is admit your mistakes and they are usually fixable.

I have made many mistakes and I am sure I will make more. First I would say make sure you know what went wrong. Any mistake you don't learn from can be disastrous. Second I would say acknowledge the problem and move on. In my work mistakes are bound to happen but if I find people covering them up then it's a sure sign they need to be replaced before they really hurt the company.

Nafe92014

First Job: Worked full time for a 3 month summer position at a PC repair shop close to my hometown.

Second job: Worked 7 months getting experience at another local PC repair/sales shop.

Third job: Worked 3 months at a regional health authority based out of my local hospital. I was a Level II ICT Technician. I really enjoyed this position alot. This was the best job I've had in my career so far. Sadly, it was only a term position.

Fourth job: Geek Squad at Best Buy. (see below)

Biggest mistake: I was working on a returned HP all in one that was returned defective and was just finishing the data wipe when I reached around to unplug it. My elbow accidentally hit the stand and the entire thing hit the floor. My supervisor and I looked at it and didn't say anything. An hour later, my manager came in and I told him what happened. He didn't have a choice but to write me up because of it.

Then today, my supervisor and manager had a chat with me and said that I didn't mark on the sign in sheet that there was liquid damage on a clients laptop the previous evening (it was a long day). So now my manager thinks Im not suited for Geek Squad and thinks I may need further training. Needless to say, I told him there and then that I will be resigning once I am back in school in September for my my IT diploma. I do like working there, but some of their policies I don't agree with at all. That position is definitely not for everyone, especially me considering I made more and was more comfortable when I worked at the hospital and had my previous jobs.

Oh well, everyone makes mistakes. The one thing we all can do is learn from them.