Intern Did Exactly What He Was Told And Turned Off The Wrong Server

Who, Me? Returning to work on Monday morning can feel like a mistake, which is why The Register welcomes readers back to their desks with a fresh instalment of Who, Me? It's the reader-contributed column in which we tell your tales of making a mess at work, and somehow surviving.

This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Wayne," who told us about his time in a summer job at a web hosting firm.

I thought I would have a dual heart attack/aneurysm

"I was considered an intern but as in many jobs since, wore many hats," he told Who, Me?

One day, Wayne's boss told him to visit the server room and perform a hard shutdown on a server named "Orion" that could be found in a certain cabinet.

This was quite a fun thing for Wayne to do, because he described the server room as "The pretty one with raised floor, that weird fire suppression stuff that won't ruin servers but might ruin human life, and biometric doors (that could be bypassed with a regular key)."

Once Wayne entered the room, he found the server, verified it was in the expected cabinet and then proceeded to follow instructions by pulling out the power cable.

Wayne returned to his desk and found colleagues in a huge panic, because he'd turned off the company's primary nameserver, meaning its tenants' websites were all down.

• Under-qualified sysadmin crashed Amazon.com for 3 hours with a typo
• Junior developer's code worked in tests, destroyed data in production
• Yes, I wrote a very expensive bug. In my defense I was only seven years old at the time
• Junior sysadmin's first lines of code set off alarms. His next lot crashed the company

"I was told that despite being an intern, I should have known that the server named ‘Orion' had the label ‘NS1'," Wayne told Who, Me?

He therefore sprinted back to the server room, rammed the power cable back into the box, and prayed for the best.

"It was all good," he told Who, Me? "But for a while there I thought I would have a dual heart attack/aneurysm from the sheer panic I caused."

Nobody bothered to change the label on the server after this incident, and it remained in place when Wayne finished his internship.

He thinks no one ever changed it and remains glad his internship didn't turn into a job.

Have you been told to do the wrong thing? If so, click here – not anywhere else – to send an email to Who, Me? We'd love to tell your tale on a future Monday. ®