Pay Attention, Class: Today Youll Learn The Wrong Way To Turn Things Off

Who, Me? Welcome once more to Who, Me? It’s The Register’s Monday column in which we celebrate your SNAFUS and rejoice in your recoveries.

This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Steven”.

“One of my first jobs in the 1980s was as a training instructor at the headquarters of CAD CAM company Intergraph,” Steven wrote.

At the time, Intergraph sold its own customized versions of long-dead hardware vendor DEC’s mighty VAX servers.

The training system Steven showed to students lived in a cabinet alongside a tape storage system.

“I was demonstrating to wannabee Sysadmins how to power the tape drive on and off,” which is pretty innocuous,” Steven admitted. “Unfortunately, in a triumph of ergonomic design, the VAX power button and the tape power button were located right next to each other.”

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• Intern did exactly what he was told and turned off the wrong server
• Under-qualified sysadmin crashed Amazon.com for 3 hours with a typo
• Junior developer's code worked in tests, destroyed data in production

You can guess what happened next: Steven flipped the switch to power down the tape drive, but switched off the server instead.

“Suddenly, all the training systems just stopped dead as I power cycled the VAX that supported all the terminals in the training centre.”

Steven’s students had just witnessed a major mistake, but they didn’t know it and Steven decided not to tell them.

“I walked out of the machine room claiming innocence and got away with it,” he told Who, Me?

Until now!

Have you walked away from a major mistake? If so, don’t make the mistake of not sharing your story. Instead, click here to send an email to Who, Me? If your story’s a cracker, we won’t err on the side of caution. ®