What was your biggest mistake at work? We've all made em, some are more amusing then others, what was yours?
Mine was when i was working for a client, an accounting frim, and I was tasked with replacing a dead drive in their raid five array. This is a simple enough task now that I look back on it with embarassment. Anyways I took out the old dead drive and put the new drive back into the box. Well instead of letting the new drive just rebuild on it's own I forced the drive online. Well by doing this for those of you who don't know how raid works it basically replicated "blank data" to the other two drives and thus and effectively scrambled both of the good drives. Within 20 seconds the server blue screened and the server was down... this was on March 29th and thats dead center in tax season. Well the drives were unrecoverable so we had to rebuild their entire server from the ground up. This took us about 29 hours of free company time plus the accounting firm being down for that amount of time during the middle of tax season. I could of gotten away with it and just blamed one of many number of things but I pride myself in being an honest professional so i fessed up to my mistake. Thankfully the owner of the accounting firm talked me a day later and said that if anything it was a blessing and it gave him an excuse to go home and sleep and that it probably was for the better and that 6pack of beer should cover it. Needless to say a six pack was promptly delivered to his office and we continued to do work for them. Embarrassing none the less and thank God they did backups religiously for 15 years.
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