What's the worst mistake you've made in your career...

[Tab]

I haven't really made any big mistakes yet... Fried a AMD XP once, damn rubber pads!!! I thought the heatsink was touching!

 

[deadseasquirrel]

Worst mistake in my career...

Getting into telecom.

Coincidentally, it's also the best thing I've done in my career.

It's like the battered-wife syndrome. I take a beating (laid off 3 times in 4 years) and keep coming back. But, all should be well now because it looks like we're getting bought :roll:

 

[networkman]

The worst tech type of mistake I can remember making is when I was using a product called Server Magic to migrate some data volumes on a Novell server to larger drives. As fate would have it, I managed to somehow copy the partition of an empty drive over top of the existing data drive. :Q By the time I realized my mistake, it was too late and the data went bye-bye.

Fortunately, I had taken the precaution of doing a full tape backup the night before so it wasn't a complete disaster, but there was no way I could justify overtime to my boss, so I just ate the time and learned to pay closer attention to warning messages.

 

[halfadder]

Worst mistake:

Thinking that my job as "Webmaster" for a company was going to be a nice permanent title! I had a good budget, lots of equipment, nice servers, gobs of bandwidth, and I was able to work with marketing, art, and PR to put together a nice website. 6 months later they stripped my budget bare and told me to leave the other departments alone. 6 months after that I was laid off and they made PR take over the website.... using FrontPage.... and hosted on some $9/month server.

 

[MrDudeMan]

Originally posted by: deadseasquirrel
Worst mistake in my career...

Getting into telecom.

Coincidentally, it's also the best thing I've done in my career.

It's like the battered-wife syndrome. I take a beating (laid off 3 times in 4 years) and keep coming back. But, all should be well now because it looks like we're getting bought :roll:

that could be good or bad for you...hopefully good though

 

[spidey07]

early on I was working with voicemail systems (managed all the telecomm for a company). This system just so happened to have a microswitch for the RESET function or boot. Well we all know that active voicemail systems with 48 lines and thousands of mailboxes has a pretty big database.

knee hit reset button - took 48 hours for the database to rebuild itself.

oops.

then I did it again 6 months later

oops.

needless to say that reset switch was disconnected.

 

[dmcowen674]

Taking the job as the System Administrator for a small State College in Georgia.

Eveyone knows what happened next.

 

[Spongo]

what happened next?

 

[spidey07]

Originally posted by: Spongo
what happened next?

installed distributed computing software on university machines. whole lot of legal trouble.

 

[randal]

he installed some distributed computing software on a bunch of boxes, the state or somebody claimed that was misuse of computers, and they fscked him. http://news.com.com/2100-1023-270939.html?legacy=cnet