I worked for an online money exchange company. On one occasion I made a wrong operation: I chose the wrong bank and although the account did belong to the client, it was blocked and there was no possibility (supposedly) of reactivating it. I ended up making the company lose the equivalent of 3 times my salary (the equivalent in, say, Dollars is not much, but here in Venezuela it was more money than I ever had in my whole life). After paying half of the debt (since the other half was charged to my supervisor, even though I proposed that I would assume the entire debt) I resigned immediately, I did not want to deal with the stress of making such a mistake again and that it would get worse.
We were told from the beginning that any mistakes we made would have to be paid for, and that the work was "informal" (unregistered), so my ex-employers, in their words, "could do whatever they wanted with us". That and the fact that in general the whole business was poorly run from the beginning were among the reasons for my resignation.
"But why did you take such a job in the first place?" Simple, I "needed" the money.
In most western countries any unintentional mistake made by the employee is considered a cost of doing business… after all, if such a mistake is doable, there is a problem in the business processes that needs correction.
Now don’t get me wrong, many shady business owners will still try to pin things on employees and take it out of their pay. But that is illegal here.
Had a VM that batch processed files but some reason a couple of the files comming in was causing the procedure to crash and Gigs of files to get clogged.
I was moving big chunks of those into the host tmp Dir (only place I knew was ok to throw rand stuff) to try and catch the offending files. TMP was actually a RAM disk, so I filled all availability memory and crash the HOST system (including multiple other critical VMs) and lost weeks of data (because you know I put it in a RAM disk ...).
The one I still feel guilt over was a time when i found out someone had left an animal trap loaded when they left for vacation. There was a live raccoon in it. I know I shouldn't've carelessly opened it, but I should've done something. Even killing it would've been kinder. I carry that one with me, to remind me to act when I can. I'm still bad at it, but I try.
The other day I told a customer I could smell gas in her apartment, and even though I feel like a dumbass because it wasn't a leak (probably lingering smell from them moving an appliance and hitting it on and off by accident), I don't regret mentioning it. Sometimes I just am going to be an obnoxious jackass about that stuff.
For the 2nd one, better safe than sorry. You would feel like more of a dumbass if you heard a story in the news about a gas leak fire, or some other form of damage/injury/death.
I recently had a gas leak scare. Originally thought it was plumbing. They checked for gas leaks with a tool and found nothing. No obvious plumbing problems. We called the fire department the next time we smelled it to be safe. No gas leak but a bad car battery being charged was releasing a sulfur smell and about to catch fire.
Was working in a deli department of a grocery store. I think it was my second or third week there, and i was slicing balogna for a customer. Went to peel some of the casing off and got the tip of my thumb instead. Still think the lady who unkindly yanked my stitches out at the urgent care caused the lil flap to come off.
It was 2009 and I'm actually impressed i got some tactile feeling back through the scar. I swear it fucks with the touch screen though.
I worked in a deli without protective gloves and am lucky I have all my fingers.
You know how the end of the meat or cheese would sometimes not fall through the slicer? Well, one time it just got stuck. I absentmindedly reaching in and flicked it out. With the blade on. It's a good damn miracle I didn't hit it.
Worked, after hours from home, on a Windows Server and fixed and issue with the Database on there. After doing so i thought I'd go to bed and shut down the machine... only I hadn't yet left the RDP connection and shut the server down by Accident. Had to drive to work and start the server up again.
And there are ways of having that entry removed from the list of options entirely, and not just shifted to the drop-down menu. Makes it harder to physically shut down, but its absence can be a WTF big enough for you to realize which machine you are working on.
I don’t bother doing that to VMs, which can be trivially restarted, but their Hyper-V hosts? You betchya I do it to those.
At 7 years of age I was collecting the grass coming out of my neighbours lawnmower. I was tossing it in the air at my dog who was having great fun jumping into the air catching it.
Cue my neighbour running over my foot with his lawnmower. I didn't feel much pain as it shredded straight through my runner and skin.
I was rushed to hospital and somehow they saved my toe. It took about five years for me to regain feeling in it.
Alt tabbed once too many times, clicked drop database and yes. Deleted the live authentication DB for America's Army: Operation video game.
Missed the word "add" in "switchport vlan add" on a switch, overwriting the list instead of appending to it. Took out the only connection between two datacenters we were in the process of migrating between. Took me 14 minutes to run to the datacenter, plug in a console cable and fix it.
Similar to your #2, but less serious, I once wrote a script to power down virtual machines for a data center move. It was a nice piece of work too, grouping them in batches, sending shutdown commands to the guest OS, falling back to forcing a power off through the hypervisor after a configurable timeout...
I don't recall the specifics of the problem or the virtual infrastructure I was working with, but in short I didn't have sanity checks on what was being shut down. Ended up force shutting off the hypervisor/virtual infrastructure management system.
Tripped and dropped a box, worth approximately $220,000 today, of extremely precise tooling meant for a cutting die. I was on my way to my bench to wrap them up safely. Boss was not pleased that day.
There were three women who were best friends, took their breaks together, etc. And in the Christmas season they wore matching knit sweaters and would walk down the hall side by side so it would read "Ho! Ho! Ho!"
But one day when I was leaving the break room, they approached... and one was out sick. Before I could stop myself I asked "Where's the other Ho?"
Might've gotten a visit to HR from it if I hadn't looked so shocked at myself.
I work in a grocery store meat department, and part of my job is breaking down the newly-delivered pallets in the morning.
Ground beef was on sale and the warehouse had allocated (i.e., sent us extra on top of what we ordered) way too much. Each box has a production date and a use by date, but the text is very small, so I am supposed to write the day of expiration (excluding the month, since ground beef gets only 20 days on the shelf anyways; so a box that expires July 5th would get "5") in larger size and circle it.
I was very sleep deprived and on some of the boxes accidentally wrote the day of the production date (last month) instead of the expiration date, making it seem like they had 10 extra days. So the butchers ground other boxes before those ones, and the mistake was only discovered two days after the last two remaining (roughly 80-lb.) boxes had expired.
A funny mistake that's not mine is when a new hire, on his second day, was told to run our cart of fresh pickles. When he pushed it over the threshold from the backroom to the sales floor, the too-large, precariously-stacked cart completely collapsed, causing dozens of jars of pickles to smash (and to be clear, I did tell him how to push carts backwards over the threshold so that exact thing doesn't happen - he just didn't do it).
And to top it off, he wasn't wearing his slip-proof shoes (even though he had been told to multiple times), so when he was carrying a box of sauerkraut to the department to be written off, he slipped in the pickle juice on the floor and dumped sauerkraut all over himself.
Was relocating a $10k piece of networking hardware and dropped it into another 10k VM server. Server was fine, network hardware was not. It was during a project that was a real mess, thought it was a stupid mistake though.
We were able to work around it, though we did lose the contract we were trying to make. Honestly though given how rushed and panicked that whole three months was though, we were lucky nobody suffered anything worse. Real shitshow.
Put down a bottle of bleach a little too quickly, a little spurt splashed exactly straight up out of it when it hit the floor and somehow hit me right in the eye. Washed it out in the sink and finished my shift with my eye bright red, instead of, IDK, going to the fucking doctor like I probably should have, because I was young and exploitable.
Not me but a coworker: Found a handgun in our customer's stuff, started messing around with it. You know the punchline. The bullet went through a few walls, cops got called, he made up some story about how it went off on its own while still in the cabinet which no one believed, somehow still didn't get in legal trouble. He got fired over the phone before he had even left the customer's premises.
Got hired to a startup to fix the intranet slowness, started work as everyone was leaving, instantly fucked the router and broke the network completely for the whole floor, couldn't fix it for hours and stayed there in a panic until about 3-4 in the morning when I finally figured it out, and fixed the network and the slowness both. Never told them anything except the ending, and they liked my work and hired me full time.
Fucked the partition table to the main production server and my boss who was sitting right next to me had a mini panic attack while I reconstructed it from my notes and all the filesystems came back. Keep a notebook, it'll save your ass.
Maybe 20 years old. He was waving it around at the other guys on the job, too, joking around with it. He was lucky he didn't kill someone and have to live with it for the rest of his life.
My dad told me when I was a kid: If you're ever in that situation, just stand up and leave. Don't say hey don't do that. Don't wait around and hope everything is okay. Don't start joking around about it too. Just don't say a word, stand up, walk out of the building, go somewhere else, the end.