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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Not as exciting as the server story earlierbut a guy in my team managed to bring one of the major clearing banks to it's knees one sunny Thursday afternoon.
After ignoring consultation with the rest of us on the team, this chap decides to run a particularly dodgy command as the server is running abit low on free space.
This totally spazzes the interactive system, and prevents anybody new from signing in to the application. Unfortunately, 2 weeks previously the application had been "upgraded" and was now incredibly flakey - signing people out on a regular basis.
Cue much gnashing of teeth and the bank being in limbo to the BoE to the tune of £1.4 billion as it missed the cutoff times for £ payments at 4pm. Not sure what the overnight rate was on £1.4 billion, but I'm pretty sure it was a fair whack.
(, Fri 26 Oct 2007, 3:28, Reply)
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