Expensive Mistakescoopsweb asks "What's the most expensive mistake you've ever made? Should I mention a certain employee who caused 4 hours worth of delays in Central London and got his company fined £500k?"
No points for stories about the time you had a few and thought it'd be a good idea to wrap your car around a bollard. Or replies consisting of "my wife".
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chthonic, Thu 25 Oct 2007, 11:26)
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My own mistakeMy own mistake was simple enough. Enough years ago that the memory blurs, I was working in Munich, doing systems administration and some programming for a German aerospace/defence contractor. Deep-cover stuff. The start of the job wasn't the first time I'd signed the UK Official Secrets Act — I've had a rather interesting working life so far — but it was the first time I'd seen the German, French (lots of subsidiaries in France), and Australian (major buyer) equivalents of the same.
Anyway. Five months in. Simple job, reconfigure a unix workstation. Requires a bit of dicking around on the machine and a remote login to the NIS+ (shudder) server to change something on that end. That's the big computer that tells all the other computers where to find each other. Each little computer has a very limited copy of the big computer's tables, and when moving a machine you have to delete the little computer's copy of the tables.
Guess which cocking spackwit didn't check which computer he was working on?
We'd be fine. We had backups. The backup robot, newly installed, didn't know where the server was, because it relied on the server to know what was where. No workstations could log on. People couldn't do work — they couldn't unlock their machines, as the server told their workstations where the login server was. Fucking NIS+.
My boss, a funky Bavarian bloke with mullet and 'tash, gives me two choices. I can either go home and leave him to fix it, in which case I'm not to venture within half a mile of the site ever again, or I'm to do *exactly* as he says to fix things. That was at eleven a.m. Twelve hours later, we'd got 20 machines back up and running because we needed to get the flight simulators up and running for a demo first thing. I followed my boss' instructions and phoned for a pizza.
It was two weeks before all 300 machines worked. The main two military aircraft we were working on were delivered two years late. Which costs a bit more than wrapping a flash car around your bollocks.
(, Tue 30 Oct 2007, 22:31, Reply)
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