stupidest pc/work mistake you ever made?

**parismouton** · February 17th, 2006, 04:24 AM

i work from home mostly. had a client that needed a new motherboard(it's covered in fruit juice...ho hum..) and a larger HD. They wanted the exact same MB put in for some reason, its a bit old so i had to order it online.
i have a 4/5 day wait for it to arrive and thought 'hey, thats the exact same MB as in my home PC', so i thought i'd image the clients HD to a new bigger HD by using my own pc whilst waiting.
All goes well.....
...until 2 days later i realise i threw my own pc 160gig HD out with some other old parts!!!!!!!!!!!!

please, is there anyone out there as stupid as myself?????

i do believe EMR, currently on the piste in the Alps, will wet himself when he reads this ;-)

Parismouton
(in mourning for the HD in the great recycling tip in the sky)

**Guts3d** · February 17th, 2006, 07:03 AM

My stupidest mistake has to be when I Ghosted the customers irreplaceable data from one drive to another, but failed to check which was which... Needless to say I said a few bad words...But on the bright side the Ghost session lasted only a second!

**Pluto** · February 17th, 2006, 07:27 AM

In the old days when PC cases had numerous screws and the inside looked like spaghetti junction, I installed a CD drive upside down in a tower, put the lid back on, reconnected everything etc then had to take it all apart again when I realised what I'd done. All that while the customer looked on!

**Stalemate** · February 17th, 2006, 09:02 AM

2 for 1 today:

1. Failed to notice the "Delete files after backup" option was checked off on a Novell server. This was the main server for all departmental files in a hospital. That was 6 years ago.

2. Changing the security settings (fumbled it somehow after working 16 hours straight) on the root drive of Win2K3 server. Much joy with accessing applications and user profiles. That happened 4 months ago.

**shamus** · February 17th, 2006, 11:16 AM

First day with Admin rights to our FirstClass e-mail server....I delete my wifes account.
It's a long story.....

We're still married!

**amyb** · February 17th, 2006, 11:39 AM

There have been numerous mishaps..but once was doing a M$ update on a user's machine; got the blue screen of death and after that couldn't access the hard drive. It might have been a coincedence (sp), but the hard drive failed after that and it was decided that she needed a new machine anyway. Also, decided to run a update on a novell server during working hours, server crashed and had to reinstall from scratch.

**houseisland** · February 17th, 2006, 11:59 AM

Accepting a job here:

Links to Register Article

By the way, a colleague was terminated for having submitted this photo to The Register.

**parismouton** · February 17th, 2006, 12:49 PM

Originally Posted by shamus

First day with Admin rights to our FirstClass e-mail server....I delete my wifes account.
It's a long story.....

We're still married!

that i like ;-)

in the days of win 95 and my 0% knowledge of PC's basically, i reformatted a diskette i found lying around the bedroom, as a bootdisk.

ofcourse, this diskette contained my (ex)wifes COTY/LANCASTER(face cream and nice smelling stuff) marketing strategy for emerging eastern europe. oops!!!!

**Richard1** · February 17th, 2006, 03:48 PM

I have made a few myself but I think the biggest was about 2 years ago, when I was updating the home page of a very popular site. i always tell myself, "always make a back-up before editing." This was such a minor change that I said screw it. Well, needless to say I uploaded the wrong template and I was stuck without a back-up. The front page had another sites page on it. I had to pull out my old laptop and finally found a copy from when I was traveling, it was old but it worked. Anyway a few hours later, all was well.
Then there was also the time a rear ended a police car but that story we'll leave for another day.

Then there was the time...... and so on and so on, until right about now.

**rgharper** · February 17th, 2006, 07:13 PM

Probably the best one I have pulled to date was setting up a very restrictive user permission template in Active Directory - then instead of applying it to only the user container I applied it to the entire AD domain. Tested it and it worked great, all the stuff I wanted to lock down was locked down ... then logged back in with my admin account and discovered that I was locked out of almost everything including administering the domain. Fortunately I had left a hidden backdoor intended for tech use when working on a PC, and was able to exploit it sufficiently to back out the last changes to the domain.

One that likely qualifies as second best happened just yesterday - I did a mass-update to all the user accounts in the domain and managed to also expire everyone's passwords instantly. A few folks who had just done password changes were a little annoyed at having to change it again so soon ...

**emr** · February 19th, 2006, 10:42 AM

Originally Posted by parismouton

i do believe EMR, currently on the piste in the Alps, will wet himself when he reads this ;-)

Lucky I didn't read this when I was still up the mountains skiing; I would have laughed so hard it would have set off avalanches.

You deserved that; it's been months since you bought me a beer. Karma I say.

emr

**xpuser357** · February 19th, 2006, 06:52 PM

Originally Posted by houseisland

Accepting a job here:

Links to Register Article

By the way, a colleague was terminated for having submitted this photo to The Register.

I just gotta know from what I see a big white tub with a tie?
Also I can see where you need a lot of wire ties

After
looking in on the register I see two tubs that looked like a tie in the middle.
I hope this was the place,

walking distance to your house and lots of bennies

**El_Squid** · February 21st, 2006, 06:32 PM

When first I started working here, I was given a small project to modify a tricky piece of code in the Claims module of our in house Purchasing-Claims-Inventory suite. I spent a few hours tesing and retseting my changes, seeing if in fact they worked properly. Then I received a phone call from one of the confused accounts payable folks, asking me if I was creating new records for some reason.

I had forgotten to link to the test databases and was merrily wreaking havoc with the live data.

Fortunately, we had a good backup from the night before and all that was lost was one mornings' work for the AP folks.

**NooNoo** · February 22nd, 2006, 07:39 AM

Carefully turned off the machine and yanked the nic... to find I had turned off the wrong machine...D'oh.
Fdisked the wrong drive

But the kicker was ex hubby - he put a cd in the 5.25 drive slot - had to take it apart to get it back out....

***DonJ*** · February 22nd, 2006, 09:56 AM

I was working on an old HP 2116B; that's the big box in the upper right. It wasn't powering up at all and brilliant me stuck a phillips head screw driver across the power relay contacts to check for power and POW!!! 220 volts arc-welded and melted the tip of my screwdriver and blew the circuit breaker. Of course, it completely destroyed the contacts of that relay and I had to order a replacement which caused further downtime. Luckily, I wasn't electricuted but it definitely scared the bejeezus out of me. I still have that screwdriver and relay as a constant reminder.

btw, what looks like smoke stacks at the top of the equipment bays are actually the exhaust for large cooling fans. They have large fans at the bottom sucking in cool air and other large fans at the top blowing it out. Needless to say, this whole setup makes a lot of noise.