Years ago a new hospital in Scotland's second city was being built. The principle contractor wanted huge banners attached to the list housing. I was running the 2nd banner install. It was a crap process concocted by someone who had never worked at height. The area beneath our worksite wasnt tidied like werecassuredxit would be .
My problem was I should have stuck to my guns when I said it was crap and wouldn't work. Unfortunately the previous weekend got the banner up in the same manner. The eyelets were cheap and not substantial enough. Two hil lines were dropped down and attached. we started hauling it and a gust of wind the strength of a butterfly's fart whipped round. The eyelets on one side ripped and the left haul line went slack, I got the joy of looking over he parapet a seeing the eyelets on the right haul line ripping and a 20m x20m banner slowly drifting over the building site. I was told I looked back and screamed it's gone, it's ****ing gone.
Or while cutting the hill guides off the Prince of Wales aircraft carrier. I'd been asking to get a skip moved all week, noone would move it so they covered it in fire blanket and put a barrier around it.
As I was burning the hill guide off the molten metal was splashing all over the fire blanket. I stopped to move and some numpty decided to throw the blanket off and grab a cardboard box out of the skip. Unfortunately I started working again and fire rained down on the now exposed skip and set it on fire.
At least I'm not the only one to miss the where clause of a sql stateme t against a production database. Mind you it had been checked by my boss.
TBH it’s pretty common.
I always used to use sql to write sql updates with the selects which were explicit ID and generated sql that printed out the existing values, so to split the fix into multiple parts, more work but less chance of cockery up or if it does you’ve got the original values.
I also did like generating sql Jupyter Notebooks before I retired to fix sql data.
On the fly sql on production databases is always abit meh and being in a mad panic to fix usually ends in tears and the solution is worse than the existing problem.
Or as I’d say in meetings “Do it Micky Mouse and you’ll be Donald Ducked”.
Anyway I’ve a few boring IT ones
That one day I bought £20k worth of shares because a flag wasn’t set on a record update on something that was underwritten by shares.
Only got told in my performance meeting,it wasn’t an issue as we made money on the shares.
Other good one was another flag issue which ended up with a couple of million quid stuck in no-man’s land, I never had much luck with flags but TBH it wasn’t simple stuff It was a team of analysts accountants and me fixing weird and whacky data issues 🙂
Best one wasn’t mine but when someone’s code was arsed and it took monthly premiums from all the wrong sort codes, so someone expecting 50 squid to come out was surprised when 500 or 1000 squid was taken, Took a while to sort out that mess as it was a big well known Name , dunno how it passed testing.
I was a cool cookie under pressure and used to get dragged into all sorts of cluster****s that weren’t my fault to un****, I don’t miss it TBH, some people love to be the hero fire fighting (usually issues caused by themselves) whilst I’d rather just rather write code.
On the fly sql on production databases is always abit meh and being in a mad panic to fix usually ends in tears and the solution is worse than the existing problem.
Last week I was copied in on an email announcing that there was a problem with a very, very high priority project as they couldnt run a script and so they needed access granting YESTERDAY!
I looked at it and suggested it might help if they ran it against the staging database which they had already been given access to vs the production one which they deliberately hadnt.
I may have gone on to suggest that all their access should be revoked as a precautionary measure.
A rather ambitious, yet peculiarly unpopular, senior police officer spent months working on an in depth report into public safety and wouldn't let anyone else near it until the final version was published. Alas, whatever word processing tool he used to auto-correct mis-spelt words resulted in him having 50 shiny copies of a final report, each making hundreds of references to pubic safety.
My then colleagues son in writing their first report in their first job their first job - an accidental 'replace all' click changed every incidence of 'warehouse' to 'whorehouse'
each making hundreds of references to pubic safety.
Not quite on topic but kid in my class at school misread and asked why it was called public hair when it's on your private parts. In class. In front of 30-odd classmates
Obviously no-one ever mentioned it again, at all.
