What the most embarrassing technical mistake you ever made?

PurpleIT

LarryDaMan wrote: »

After working an overnight shift and then staying 6 more hours to troubleshoot, I went home. Like an epiphany while in the car, it popped into my head that I had confused system ID numbers and had loaded the wrong crypto...twice. I discreetly called a friendly co-worker at the site and asked him to re-load and he got to be the hero and thankfully he made-up an alternate fix to spare me some embarrassment.

Isn't it amazing how that works? I recently put in an 18 hour day and gave up in frustration when I had an issue that is too embarrassing even for this thread. I emptied my head, started the two hour drive back home and within 10 minutes I knew what the problem was. I didn't turn around and fix it since I had to return to that site a couple of days later (and it was still weeks from going live). There is something very freeing about admitting defeat that allows me to clear my head and find the solution without even trying.

W Stewart

One that they would never let me live down at my last job. A customer wanted an updated version of flash on their point of sales system and I had a hard time telling people know even though it wasn't really what the point of sales were designed for. I couldn't install the most recent version without upgrading glibc. I couldn't find an updated version for fedora 4 so I was gonna give up until a helpful friend sent me a CentOS rpm. It wouldn't install so I decided to force the install and hosed the system. I also tried to remove the CenOS glibc thinking it would revert to the old one not realizing that glibc had been completely removed. We had to send up a new hard drive for that customer. Nowadays I make a point to try to know as much as I can about everything so I know exactly why something breaks.

tbgree00

My most embarrassing blunder was moving a NIC cable to a port tagged with the wrong vlan and messing up VDI for an entire server. VMotion to the rescue but that was one sleep deprived night that went even longer than it needed to. I fessed up to it and was told it wasn't a big deal but it keeps being brought up so I think it really will come against me at review time.

PurpleIT

tbgree00 wrote: »

My most embarrassing blunder was moving a NIC cable to a port tagged with the wrong vlan and messing up VDI for an entire server. VMotion to the rescue but that was one sleep deprived night that went even longer than it needed to. I fessed up to it and was told it wasn't a big deal but it keeps being brought up so I think it really will come against me at review time.

That's where you have to turn it into a joke yourself. If you do that it disarms their ability to use it against you... at least partially.

By making it a joke you go along with you are saying, "Yeah, I know, but we all make mistakes and I won't make this one again".

paul78

After reading a recent thread about PBXs, it reminded me of a faux pas from over a decade ago. We had just setup a newly acquired phone system (actually a used phone system). We decided to integrate some of our new system monitoring software so that it would make a call out if we detected a problem with our Internet facing web sites and some overnight production batch jobs.

Testing went as planned and no issues for a few days.

But in the end, I decided that we would disable the PBX integration and integrate the monitoring software into our some pagers that we acquired instead.

About 2-3 months later, I received a call from AT&T. Apparently they had received a complaint from a local consumer telecommunications board (or whatever was the local telco regulator at the time) that we were making annoyance phone calls in the middle of the night to someone's home.

Turned out that we typo-ed the area code and we hadn't actually disable the PBX integration. Instead, every time we had a maintenance window (about twice a week), the monitoring system would make a phone call to a wrong number.

We ended sending the person a nice gift basket and a gift card.

Ammar Ameer

Bought a Brand new PC .It was working at the shop I bought it .But after I'm bringing that power was not coming .Not even The CPU fan working .I tried hard replacing parts, checking the power source.Then took it back to the place I bought .ouch ! it was working fine there .came back home and pluged it to see the same problem continuing .Then I unpluged the power and unpluged the monitor signal cable .Powered on and waited 45 secs .Waah ! working fine from that point till now ... Still dont realize what was the problem .Didn't even changed the monitor ,assuming it was the problem .Was the during the funniest time I ever had with a PC .

JustFred

A few years ago, i messed up a back up test for the company i worked for, something that was indirectly my fault, needless to say i learned a valuable lesson that day and got of with a warning. I left a few years later and so did my boss at the time, we are still good friends and meet for drinks every now and then.

Snow.bros

I once droped a modem on top of the rack in a server room in front of a client but the modem did not actually brake or get damaged i was very lucky that day. The whole experience made me feel very stupid because i did that in front of a client.

TheNewITGuy

Took down the entire data center for 8 minutes. I was staging the new ASA for failover and i decided to preconfigure it- I installed it, did 'failover' on it and did 'failover' on the other so that the configs sync'd up.. well they sync'd the wrong way and took down production... ALWAYS HAVE A WINDOW!

Decided to upgrade the IOS in the middle of the day on a switch which was in an HSRP group.. figured i'd fail it over and upgrade it.. well we didnt have redundant connections from the switch I was taking down to the core for the sonicwall.. ugh... yeah... 7.5 minutes of down time while the switch came back up. It's amazing! how fast customers call in ... all 10 of em

Ran debug ip nat and maxed out the CPU

I've made LOTS of mistakes.

I'm a cow boy... on steel horse I ride.....