What's the most entertaining story of a technical mistake you've made?

Question

We all make mistakes and sometimes looking back at those mistakes can provide a good laugh. I'm curious to hear stories others might have.My favourite is from when I was in grad school and I connected two network interfaces from the same subnet onto a virtual bridge. This effectively meant my box was repeating all traffic on our lab's subnet. I was trying to debug my own network problems and was puzzled why I was getting duplicate ping replies. I left for class and figured I'd debug it later. Halfway to my class I finally clued into my mistake and rushed back to the lab. One of my labmates asked me if I was having Internet problems. I secretly reached under my desk to pull one of the two network cables and said no and we all got on with our day :)

p0d · Accepted Answer

One day I went from my office to my comms room to fart and didn't notice the nice young lady follow behind me seeking technical support. I can still remember her smiley face turn to shock as she breathed in the foul air. That day I went from IT legend to dirtbird.

gtirloni · Answer

Executed a DELETE command on the users table without a WHERE clause. This caused a major outage at a very large US telecom.Luckily, our DBAs were quick to restore it. This was in 2001 and doing postmortems wasn't common back then.

ianpurton · Answer

rm -rf .Was trying to delete files in a folder but had root access to a prod server in another window. Wiped out a server that was supporting around 20 traders.Went to the backup tapes and restored that server from a previous day's backup.No one ever noticed.

What's the most entertaining story of a technical mistake you've made?

One day I went from my office to my comms room to fart and didn't notice the nice young lady follow behind me seeking technical support. I can still remember her smiley face turn to shock as she breathed in the foul air. That day I went from IT legend to dirtbird.

Executed a DELETE command on the users table without a WHERE clause. This caused a major outage at a very large US telecom.
Luckily, our DBAs were quick to restore it. This was in 2001 and doing postmortems wasn't common back then.

rm -rf .
Was trying to delete files in a folder but had root access to a prod server in another window. Wiped out a server that was supporting around 20 traders.
Went to the backup tapes and restored that server from a previous day's backup.
No one ever noticed.