Ask HN: What's the worst you've ever screwed up at work?

We were rearranging the layout of the office. Coworker was moving in to his new space, setting up his desk. He boots up his computer, wonders why he has no network. Looks around, discovers the ethernet cable isn't plugged in. Plugs it in to the wall, still has no network.

A few minutes pass, and the entire office is running around wondering why the hell the network isn't working. Maybe an hour passes, the network guys are losing their shit trying to hunt down what is wrong. I'll give you a hint: the router was lit up like a Christmas tree, and the aforementioned coworker had both ends of his ethernet cable plugged in--but neither end was attached to his computer.

yup. that really happened. it was 4-5am in the morning and I'd been working all night. I was on the server trying to set something up and was trying to blow away a folder ... I did a normal rm and that didn't work (obviously) because there was crap in the folder. So I pulled out my nuclear weapon to nuke the folder but left off the preceding ./ (which still wasn't that smart anyway) ... I sat there for a second wondering why the deletion was taking so long ... then another 30 then a minute ... then I looked at what I'd just typed again ... then I realized what had happened.

ctrl-c'ed (or d, can't remember now) out of it. then tried to find root folders

cd /etc => folder not found

cd /var => folder not found

I'm from a third world country where we laugh at Americans (sorry) for throwing up when they're nervous or having panic attacks, but at that moment, I had a full blown panic attack. I'll never forget it.

The work was a subcontract for a client who was doing work for Nike, and it was a decently sized project that was critical to the success of the firm, and I'd just blown away their live production server ...

Afer freaking out and almost crying for 5 minutes. I decided to call media temple support (we were using one of their vps servers) ... and by the biggest absolute stroke of luck they'd just backed up the entire server ... not even 2 hours prior to my madness. $100 for a full restore (I don't recall why) and would I like to do that?

HECK YES I WOULD!

so they restored the server for me. I wrote an email to the head of the small company I was doing all the work for, explaining what I had happened and telling him I'd sent over a check for $100 to cover the backup because it was my fault. He was obviously very relieved and never cashed the check I sent.

I still get chills thinking about that exact moment when I thought I'd fucked up my career and reputation for good.

They had ASIC design runs for research purposes once every three months, yielding your design on Silicon as ten 6" wafers. It gives enough parts for testing the first revision of your design. The person was carrying the wafers to a vendor for cutting into separate ICs and packaging or something. Gets to the parking lot, and where are the keys. Puts the wafers on the top of the car, finds the keys in his pockets and starts driving. Boom, the box of wafers was still on the top of the car, now on the ground. All broken. Some $100K in wafers + three months lost + bad face before the customer + ... Lesson: Don't put stuff on the top of the car!

In production.

I'm the DBA.