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Colleagues IT Blunders

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    #51
    I once witnessed a whole tree of data disappear suddenly at about 2am, when we had to have a finished product ready for 4am in time for the boss to take it to Heathrow and to the client in the US (before the days you could just upload it). Turned out somebody had moved the whole tree into a subfolder by accident in Windows File Manager.

    I did once write something that would empty the folder and any subfolders it was writing to, for good reasons. Unfortunately we found out some users were just targetting c:\.
    Will work inside IR35. Or for food.

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      #52
      A few years back in one of our data-centres, we had a rather swish tape changing system - a robot arm shooting around on rails putting tapes in and taking out of drives.
      One of the tape changing monkeys that puts the new tapes into the hopper managed to put one of them in upside down. This then managed to become wedged in a tape drive one evening.
      When the robot arm turned up to remove the tape from the drive, it only succeeded in ripping the entire drive from it's housing and then continue it's journey shooting along the rails across the data centre, with a tape drive flailing around, bashing into countless expensive pieces of kit on it's journey.
      We did laugh.

      Rhubarb.

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        #53
        Originally posted by rhubarb View Post
        A few years back in one of our data-centres, we had a rather swish tape changing system - a robot arm shooting around on rails putting tapes in and taking out of drives.
        One of the tape changing monkeys that puts the new tapes into the hopper managed to put one of them in upside down. This then managed to become wedged in a tape drive one evening.
        When the robot arm turned up to remove the tape from the drive, it only succeeded in ripping the entire drive from it's housing and then continue it's journey shooting along the rails across the data centre, with a tape drive flailing around, bashing into countless expensive pieces of kit on it's journey.
        We did laugh.

        Rhubarb.
        We had a system like that, but the manager explained to the newbies that the neon gas would be triggered if anything happened to the data. So they should be very careful as they would never make it to the door
        Fiscal nomad it's legal.

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          #54
          Originally posted by wxman View Post
          Not too long ago actually..

          I was part of a team that was creating a Credit Card processing interface as part of case management system.

          During a fix and due to a quirk in the code, none of the live cases were flagged as completing the payment cycle and remained on the system as unpaid.

          The upshot of this was that the system re-requested that payment again and again – in fact all through the night every 20 minutes. The only time it stopped taking payments, was when the credit card was maxed out and the transaction was declined.

          The next day ½ the team were sacked as some 3,000 customers were affected as some £6 millions were taken over night!
          Holy tulip wxman!

          That sounds like more than a storm in a teacup!
          If you think my attitude stinks, you should smell my fingers.

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            #55
            Originally posted by alreadypacked View Post
            We had a system like that, but the manager explained to the newbies that the neon gas would be triggered if anything happened to the data. So they should be very careful as they would never make it to the door

            That happened to someone where I used to work. Took all the air out of the clean room and he died horribly, you insensitive clod.

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              #56
              Originally posted by hugebrain View Post
              That happened to someone where I used to work. Took all the air out of the clean room and he died horribly, you insensitive clod.
              Confusion is a natural state of being

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