I can feel what your testicles felt like when you realized what had happened.



 

Yeah, I've been in on one of those.  

if you go by operational effect, killing the $375K brine chiller when I left the drain valve on the control air compressor cracked open.  Thought I had closed it all the way, still had 1/4 turn left in it.    (In my defense, maintenance KNEW it was bad before they installed it, I just helped it along.  )

Pure cost-wise, breaking the downstage on a $17 million Minuteman III wins.  

Over the years, I've discovered my superpower is random chaos generation.  Lots of fun when you work with nukes.  

"reset system 4" on a financial institution's phone system. Global institution with over 10,000 IP phones spread around the world and about 200 trunk groups.

I played stupid. "I don't know what happened". They wanted a root cause analysis. I blamed it on gremlins and FM (f*cking Magic). No joke.

I was volunteered to engineer the local broadcast for a huge live Garth Brooks concert happening elsewhere while the rest of the station had meetings across town.  Estimate of 150,000 to 200,000 listeners, huge ad sales, huge sponsors, huge publicity.

Simple process though, I'd end my show, run some commercials, cut into the news feed then start the generic music for the pre-concert.  While the 60 second generic music is playing, I would run to the basement to swap a crystal in our satellite equipment from our normal news feed frequency to the concert feed frequency as was demonstrated to me by the station engineers assistant.

Day of show everything is going fine, get the crystal swapped and I'm back to the booth with 15 seconds to spare.  I'm listening to the banter of the concert satellite engineers as they're handling last second details on their end before they go live.  They start the count down and I'm ready to switch from my generic music to their broadcast.

3, 2, 1, ____________________  NOTHING.

 CRAP!!  Fiddle with the board, nothing.  Run down to the basement, fiddle with the crystal, run back up stairs, no signal.  Did this 3 times, start panicking.  Call satellite engineers.  While trouble shooting with them, boss calls, "We're here across town listening and there's no show, WTF!!??  What have you done!!!???  WHERESGARTHBROOKS??"

Panting and sucking air I explain what's up, boss says they'll be back in moments.  I'm on the phone with the satellite engineers trying to find a solution but nothing works.

The boss, our station engineer and every other swinging dick comes waltzing into the station giving me a death stare as I seem to have fucked up their meeting.  I've run up and down the stairs so many times I'm turning blue.  Keep in mind, I'm still doing my show as dead air is a fate worse than death and an ongoing generic music track is nearly as bad.  

Bounding up and down stairs, 3 steps at a time, suck air, open mic, spit out a sentence, cut the mic, suck more air, choke out another sentence, cut mic, tears running down my face as I'm not getting enough air but I still sound great on air.    At some point another DJ steps in to do a break for me, I guess I looked like I was gonna die.

The boss and station engineer figure out the problem, the crystal, a small electronic doodad about the size of a quarter with two wire pins protruding from the edge, had a loose/broken pin and would only make proper contact if held a certain way.  Duct tape literally saved the day.  

I cut into the 2 hour show about 15-17 minutes late.  All the staff is pissed at me and leave to go home.  Boss says we'll talk tomorrow.  I'm figuring I'm so fired I don't even need to waste the gas to come in again.

In any event, I squeezed in all the sponsors, ads, freebies, tickets and all the other crap that goes along with it without having an aneurysm.  

Next day I head in for the talk.  The whole building is giving the stink eye.  I'm looking for office supplies to snag on my way out after my firing(kidding).  But, as luck would have it, the engineer confesses to knowing about the faulty crystal but neglected to inform his assistant about the need for the wedge they use as a door stop to be shoved into the $50,000 satellite receiver to hold the faulty crystal.  

I was still chewed out but kept my job,,, and was volunteered to do the New Years Eve count down broadcast.    

When I was 18 , I worked for a boat dealership/Marina. A new customer drives his boat up to the gas dock way faster than the posted 5 MPH speed limit.  He barely avoids crashing and complains the brand new boat won't slow idle, the engine is racing. I decide he can't clog up my gas dock and he has to move the boat back to his slip. He refused to drive it anymore and asked me to move it. We pile in and sure enough the boat is really stuck at high idle, away we go towards his slip at about 15 mph. Once we're close to where we have to back in, I shift into reverse and the boat flies backwards towards the large boat next to his slip, RAMMING SPEED !. Customer jumps on back of his boat to push off as I shift into forward. I can still picture him hanging off the rail of the other boat, feet in the water, yelling...
I kept my job as I don't think the customer's explanation made much sense to the boss
DanG

Accepting a position as an engineer for Toyota.

reminds me of when my old man killed LBJ's dog by accident

I totally knew that.

Awkward....

I'm the art director at a t-shirt company and we were asked to come up with tee designs for a local shooting range/training facility.  I thought it would be a great idea to take all the artists (mostly afraid/ignorant of guns) over for a tour and to hear the owners talk about what they do.  From my perspective it turned out great, the artists all had a good time and learned a lot but what was supposed to be a 30 minute trip turned into 2 hours at the end of a Friday afternoon.  I got REAMED the following Monday by my boss AND the owner of the company for not asking permission first and for having my entire department off premises for 2 hours at what they considered to be a dangerous environment.  First time I've been written up in almost 15 years of working here.  I honestly didn't think it would be a big deal as we were literally a block away, and I had told the production staff (the guys who might actually need us for something) where we were going, but man it was BAD.  Maddest I've ever had a boss at me, ever.

I work at a motorcycle shop, i had sold a bike and was going to deliver it the next day, i was driving the bike off the front porch of the shop and laid it down making a left hand turn and just watched it slide across the parking lot. Luckily no customers were in the parking lot and i have a awesome boss.

Went to work sick.  Out of town job meeting, the day after Christmas, running a high fever, meeting was a disaster, and I lost the job.  It taught me a useful lesson.

was it a BLSR?  or unprotected?  my worst was back in about 1999 I was working on the top of a DACS and meant to snip some lacing twine but accidentally cut through a T3 going to ATT Wireless (contained a number of T-1s going to their cell sites) .  The DACS and SONET muxes for this particular circuit were not on a D&C setup so yeah, it went down.

Same site, later my boss and I were working on a FT2000 OC48 node and that BLSR was slap full, 72 STS-1s on that ring.  Well it failed into protect mode and he wanted to pull the fiber of the broken side to see if he could clean it and make it work right, problem was he pulled the fiber for the wrong side.  As soon as we heard the FT's relay CLICK and the red LED pop on he just plugged it back in and gave me look and no one ever said another word.

At same companies D&C alternate site, which also happened to the main cable distro for the whole city, was monitoring a cleaning guy who was buffering the floor in the data center.  he asked me where to plug the buffer in, and I told him to use that orange plug on the wall.  appanrently UPS systems dont really like inductive loads.  this coupled with some other error that no one knew about, cause the entire power system to fail (even though AC mains were OK).  Down goes all the CableTV AND also all the CLEC telco gear


And later, used to on a redback SMS-1800 router if you sho run the box would crash due to the extreme config length of manually configuring 5000 PVCs on it.  I may or may not have done that once or twice.

ETA:  oh yeah as a college student working in the computer center, my responsibilites were to shut hte mainframes down each night.  One night the standard procedure wouldnt take the IBM sys 38 down do I pulled the stop handle.  they didnt like that too much

I just remembered a couple of other "Career limiting moves".

Very early in my career, I used to work for this small IT shop/reseller that had a "service department" (folks bring their PC's in to the shop and have them fixed) and a separate engineering department that designed and did the troubleshooting on anything network related, for area businesses and government. On April Fools, the day I was promoted to the engineering department, I had a little fun with my old service department's section of our website. I made a subtle change to our company motto/tagline. It read:

"If we can't fix it, we'll make damn sure no one else can either".

I thought it was pretty funny at the time. The owners...not so much. Still didn't get fired, amazingly enough. This was before my earlier story, where I crippled a small company by botching a drive replacement in a RAID array. I guess they really liked me, otherwise.

And during another episode of "Jokes that seemed really funny at the time", I was doing a month long project on-site for a local hospital - I was implementing a new call center. As part of the project, you have to either hire some voice talent to record the prompts, or (if you're lucky) just use somebody who already works there, if they've got the chops. Well, the customer really liked one of the women that worked there, and she agreed to do their prompts. Fine and dandy.

One of the things I noticed though, was that this woman had quite the "bedroom voice". It was almost like listening to porn. The customer's IT department and I joked about it a little bit to ourselves, but me (being an idiot) had to take it a step further. So without telling anyone, I took her voice prompts and laid them over a bed of music. Not just any music mind you, I'm talking about the gnarliest "Bow, chicka wow wow" porn music I could get my hands on. The idea was to put them on the "development" side of the project (I always keep backdoor unpublished numbers to use for testing) for the lulz, but...I accidently made them accessible from production. And I didn't realize what I had done for like an hour.

So when patients in southeastern Ohio called the hospital, they were greeted with...well...a nice lady doing the normal "Press 1 for this, 2 for that, 3 for the other thing" laid over a bed of porn music. That little fuckup ran up the chain at my company, all the way to the President of the company. They were...pissed.

And I didn't get fired.

It was pretty funny, though. Now, many years later.  

it was in liberty hill, 1999

oh yeah, thats another one I did as a HS student at my first job.  rounded the corner way to fast with a huuuge stacked up pallet full of eggs.  was there all night cleaning up

nice, i guess if you KNOW theres not an alternate path that would normally allow you to do the no shut, then could you do reload in 2, then no shut in 1 then cancel the reload when it comes back?  Ive been off routers/switches a while now.

See the horizontal plate with the vertical legs holding the discs on the valve stem? Some how the calculations didn't work out on the first one and we machined to much off one of the legs. A $60,000 part, because well it's nuclear, and 2 hours of critical path outage time at about $60,000/hr. Oopsy. Made a great monitor stand though. Don't remember even getting scolded.

BTW those valve discs are 30" in diameter. The whole assembly with 12' stem is about 4500#. It's the internals of a Reactor loop isolation valve.

I'm glad I wasn't the only one ... is there an English-language version available?

He dropped a very large expensive computer off the loading dock of one of our esteemed federal agencies after being pissed off by a lazy federal worker.

Directional drilling we have hit lots of unmarked things, gas lines, power, fiber, water, sewer. Hand digging across utilities I have hit a gas service that was right below the sod and was blamed for it. Hand digging 18+ inches of frost around fiber/coax peds I have hit lines and was blamed. Dumb job with lots of shoveling when we should have been using a hydrovac.

Working in a dealership I preordered lots of parts for warranty to speed up the process before warranty approved it, stupid games where no one wins.

Didn't have a 3/4 inch torque wrench just a 3/4 impact putting wheels back on a peterbilt but warned the owner and driver that the wheels needed to be torqued. Got a call a couple days later the truck was about 200 miles away with a set of wheels that fell off.

phone support:

Customer: There is Fire!
Me:UNPLUG IT!

Hurt a guys feelings once.

Was working in an equipment room located on top of a hospital in New Orleans.

Had to heat shrink some connections.

Took standard precautions, covering the smoke detectors, only doing one at a time, etc.
Managed to set off the fire system, regardless.

Got the FM-200 system disarmed before it discharged, and silenced the audible alarm.

Had no idea it was tied into the entire facilities fire alarm system until the firetrucks started rolling up.

The whole hospital.

I always use "start transaction" when using UPDATE in production.  Usually I have to UPDATE a row or two, but an easy typo updates hundreds of rows.  Learned the hard way.  Then if number of updates is huge, time for ROLLBACK.

I ruined 10 instrument cassettes by forgetting to fill the drum of the sterilizer with water before starting the cycle.  The wrap on each cassette caught fire because there was heat but no steam, then melted all over everything.

0300, 1985, Groton, NSSF periscope shop, spilled an entire cup of coffee (cream & sugar) into a Type 18 Periscope head skeleton right after we had done final collimation, checkout and ready to retube it...

I was facilities manager at our HQ. Civilians were always complaining about the A/C; the thermostat was located in th A/C equipment room only accessable from the bldg exterior. So I go to check the t-stat settings, fan motor belts, etc. I get it to kick on which knocks a lot of dust and debris loose in the ducts (WW2 era bldg) which is sensed by the smoke detectors in the duct work, firetrucks roll in, HQ is evacuated, admiral and staff are not amused. I let the base FD in the equipment room to check out the system and they were nice enough to say that this usually happens when the system has not been on line for a while. Life goes on
My really big fuck up involved a good sized fuel spill...

"Someone" a contractor of sorts kinda, sorta, left something on a runway at an ANG airfield, that was NOT noticed during a FOD walk (pretty sure they didnt even do one!)

A G.E. F110 engine got destroyed... How much does one of those cost?

I need to remember that next time I accidentally start a fire.

This thread explains a lot.


But it's the most fun I've had reading in a long time.

Brought my companies entire SCADA system down to it's knees.  Clicked the wrong button twice, and lost all of the saved setpoints.  When this happens, I found out the system automagically sends out zeros to the previous registers.  Boy was I winner that day.

ran OPCRSH on a VAX 11/780 right in the middle of month end processing.

OPCRSH crashes the operating system. it's the last image run when shutting down VMS using the shutdown procedure. (This was around '79).
not only did they lose the transactions in process, they lost everything since the last backup, because the file got corrupted.

I was not very popular for a while...

"Measure Twice, Cut Once."

That about sums it up.

Punched a guy in the face.

He deserved it but I was only 21 years old at the time and had a wife and baby to support.  Usually it is grounds for immediate termination but since they liked me and hated him for being a loudmouth I was only reprimanded.  Jobs were hard to come by at that time and it was a very dumb thing to do.

Fucked my boss..........es daughter

First day of my clinicals in the ER for AEMT school.

Big ol black girl comes in with a severe asthma attack. Had her on a nasal cannula hooked to the wall mounted O2. Head Nurse told me to disconnect the O2 since we were going to move her to a different room.

Having never used a wall mounted O2 unit, I turned the knob to FULL POWER instead of turning it to OFF.

Her face inflated at an alarming rate and a rather disturbing fart sound resulted from her lips and cheeks flapping violently.

The nurse laughed her ass off, the patient and her mother were not amused.

Also soaked a guy's brand new 5.11 pants in blood that day because I forgot to occlude the vein when doing an IV.

It was a rough first day.

Reloaded the wrong router taking down 30K+ customers internet and voice for about 12 mins or so....





Was sitting in the lab, using secureCRT to telnet into a lab router and putting new code on it... Also, had like 14 other tabs open, I mst have switched tabs, got distracted and forgot, then relaoded...  When the boxs LEDs in front of me did not start blinking and showing activity after a few seconds I was like WTF....  Then, it hit me...  Really close to getting written up on that one, but the boss took the beating and saved my ass...

 

Accidentally sent my boss a text intended for someone else.

Fortunately it was mildly awkward but nothing horrific like "my boss is a cunthat". Still a few minutes of panic after I realized what I had done.

The biggest mistake that I can't seem to overcome is forgetting that management doesn't really want to hear about problems in the field. While I'm generally pretty decent about picking my battles I occasionally forget that HQ doesn't really care and try to fight city hall. Usually results in corporate vortex of stupid erupting all over me.  

Oh,  I've  had to fix plenty of mistakes that folks like you make! ;)

Posted Via AR15.Com Mobile

+1

There were a couple of times I was put into a no-win situation and trusted that my boss would take care of me and knew what he was doing.  Well, I was right about half of it because he knew was he was doing.  I got to be the scapegoat.  And when I wasn't a good little scapegoat and bucked back at him, he did everything to make my life miserable.  Found a much better job later on.  He's a POS and even his family can't stand him.  

Bought a shitload of hardware.  A whole new environment.

Forgot to include about $1.3M in software.  

I mean, the entire team missed it, we had a collective "Oh shit" realization...but that's just the BS everyone said, it was my responsibility.

Fortunately, the money was in the budget, I just didn't spend it, so all I did was crush the hopes and dreams of everyone who kept seeing big bucks available to spend.  

Not me but some guys in my company burnt up an M1.

We were in the field at Riley when these guys decided to set off some fireworks.  Well the grass caught fire and they decided to drive over it with the tank to put it out.

They caught the engine compartment on fire through the access plates somehow and the Halon system didn't put it out.  Whole tank went up.

Big brass in copters flew in for that one.

I recently hit my boss in the head with a pair of steaming hot food tongs. I work part time at a pizza joint. She went redhead for about 30 mins

Sounds like they did everyone a favor by letting them know of a serious defect.

I never heard what came out of the investigation.  I do remember oil would leak through the final drive access plates to the outside of the tank.

I was trying to get a moving assembly line operational at a facility where I worked.  Multiple safety switches, defaults, relays, etc.  Im not an electrician.  Had our on site contractors check the system points, they cleared it.  I make sure all of the emergency stop buttons are off (not depressed) and clear the line of production workers.  Myself and two other engineers stationed along the line to watch for any issues/movement/etc.  I throw the switch on the control box as instructed by the contractors and watch...and watch...and watch.  Its a slow line, 1" per minute of travel carrying thousands of pounds of equipment.  Still isnt moving.  Engineer at the middle of the line walks toward me and control panel.  Everything should be working according to the readout.  Just as the other enigneer gets to me I notice a burning smell and smoke eminating from the control panel.  Policy dictates that I should shut down the line, call the emergency number, and wait for security and fire response.

I threw the control panel door wide open, saw the fire, and extinguished it myself!

Shouldve been reprimanded for not following policy.  Wasnt reprimanded.
Shouldve probably alerted these services prior to attempting to turn on a moving assembly line that hadnt run in 5 years.  Didnt alert them.
Shouldve had the contractors on site to supervise the operation.  Didnt have them on my cell phone to even call.

I was young and dumb and learned a lot.  In the end, the line wasnt moving prior to the electrical panel fire, so it didnt matter that it still wasnt moving.  Contractors had to rewire the entire control panel (some kind of electrical short occurred).  The line moves today, but only after I moved on from that facility..

Will post once the statute of limitations runs out.

My dad got an M60 (tank) stuck up a tree in Germany once...no I didn't misstype that.


I once "accidentally" spent $30k on some upgrades to AV equipment that I was not authorized to do.  Bricked a rather expensive Libert UPS as well when it first came in, but it got replaced under warranty even though it was my fault.