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Now, I've gotten a few good chuckles out of these, but I'm curious, anyone here have the guts to laugh at themselves and some of the mistakes they've made?
I'll venture forth with two memorable mistakes I've made:
1. Doing an update of a site for a client, on a site that had been designed by someone else, the client was nice enough to provide, along with all the original sources, a spreadsheet listing all the changes they required, and various other relevant information, including the FTP account and passwords for their website. After completing the work, very early in the morning, I brought up my FTP program, and just dragged and dropped the apropriate folder onto their webserver. As several hundred files were involved, I went outside for a smoke while it ticked away. When I came back in and checked to see that all had gone up the line, I realised that one of the files I'd uploaded was the spreadsheet. So (for a thankfully brief period of time), I'd loaded on the web for all to see, the account information and passwords necessary to take control of my clients website.
Ooops.
#2 Adding a forum onto a site, the customer wanted a split window frame, top and bottom, with their logo and site nav in the top frame, and the forum in the bottom frame (don't ask me why, just assume that it did make some sort of sense). Fine fine, I set up the forum, test run it to make sure it's glitch free, then make the frameset to tie it in with the logo. Do that, upload it, run it, and poof... all I get is the logo.
I spend hours messing with the frameset, then checking the CHMOD on the forum, checking the code on the forum, checking my browser security settings. Call up a friend and ask for help, and we spend a few fruitless hours looking for the problem with the framset and the forum.
After all that, staring at the screen, I finally decide to check the logo/menu page, and THEN realize that in that page (like every other page I make), I'd automatically added a framebreaker script in the header.
I'd wasted a day and a half looking elsewhere.
Spent a month, together with my team of over 20 people (remember the good old .com days? :)), designing the new portal, launched it, drank bubbly, etc. Then start getting tech support calls complaining that we were breaking peoples computers. 4 days later, and a couple hundred irate customers later we figuered out that I'd left a floating point error in some JS on the homepage that caused NN4 to eat up all available memory and crash Windoze.
Oops.
So I just assumed (you know what they say about assumption) that my predecessors copy of DW would be set up for the correct local and remote filesshare. How wrong I was. The local path was pointing to files on his c drive and all the sites were set up for contribute. 3 weeks in after clearing up all the code (and doing a damn fine job), i find out I have overwritten 6 months of contribute created user changes from the out of date local files. I cacced myself! Luckily I had, by this time, built up a good relationship with our hosts who helped me recover the data. And spent the next 48 hours working my nads off to compensate for the mix up.
Moral of the story - don' t assume you know anything, especially when a CMS is involved!
We never did figure out how that slipped through our testing. We suspected that one piece of code didn't get properly deployed.
The pages I upload get horrible erros.
That's a quite brilliant Freudian slip...
;-)
Syzygy
It was easily retrieved, but put the whole network down for about 2 hours while the administrator restored everything. Funny that the first thing people noticed was that their MP3s disappeared (this was back in the glory days of Napster)
Personal:
I always run background checks to be familiar and comfortable with potential clients. Well, I knew of these folks for years, never been introduced, but seen and read and heard of them, so did not bother.
I will now run a check before meeting my mother as a client.
The man was there first and in making conversation while waiting for his female partner I said: "I am looking forward to working with you and your mother ..." And he said: "[name] is not my mother, [name] is my wife ..."
Business:
Talking with clients in their living room while a tech ran Cat5 through the attic for a home network we were installing.
The wife had just finished saying how her friends had recommended us for our exceptionally clean neat workmanship when the tech came crashing through the ceiling - having mis-stepped off the walkway ...
Technical:
Once upon a time I used to write software documentation - an underappreciated often maligned occupation.
This moment in disaster I was working on four or five projects sort of simultaneously and uploaded the wrong help file to the wrong software file and did not notice until 1,000 CDs had been produced, labelled, boxed, and shipped ...
I am old for my years and have the errors to prove it.
I was (old term?) Senior Analyst Programmer at a bank dealing with mortgages in the UK. One of my twice monthly jobs was to create two BACS tapes (for two different bank accounts) that debitted about 10,000 customers' mortgage payments.
As I was going off on holidays I instructed the head of the operations department how to create the tapes and FedEx them for clearing. He seemed ok with the instructions so off I went.
I came back to mayhem. He had created two copies of 1 of the BACS tapes resulting is one group of customers being bebitted twice (causing some to become overdrawn and incur penalties) and the other group not paying at all.
Arghhhh....
We got it back... one weekend later... heh
It was one of them define sites in DW
I really did mean to write afternoon.... while describing what a delightful event was had by all,
how the b managed to sneak in, in place of the n, and do it both times is beyond me!
Ok, I managed to eventually spot this slight error, but the time frame wasn't measured in minutes, days, or even weeks. Thankfully it wasn't years either.
