Inspired by the very similar thread about school incidents.
Worked in a small Unix team under a broader IT department at a university. The manager of our team was awesome in part because his attitude was “I deal with all the university politics so you can focus on your work”. Anybody who has worked at a large university knows what the politics can be like.
The VP of IT retired and the replacement was hired from an IT department at another university. The new VP’s overall policy was “We will do things this way because that’s how we did it at my old university”. Within about 6 weeks we had a round of “layoffs” that targeted our manager and one other manager that was also known to push back against the university politics. They were the only two people let go out of a department of roughly 100.
Within about a year of that happening every last member of our tight knit Unix team left for greener pastures.
Traded guns for booze in Baghdad. Every NCO and officer involved got removed mid-deployment
Where R they now?
No clue.
Not Baghdad
Prolly cops
Not with a dishonorable discharge.
Dude cops get fired for assault in one town and hired in the next town over.
Very, very different from a dishonorable discharge from the military.
Software company before git. The source server corrupted and the product code was lost. 5 guys had to get together and figure out the latest version between them (everybody had different changesets) and produce a new “current” version. At the end we lost all history prior and ever since all changes prior to 2008 have been attributed to 1 guy.
Gotta respect that save. Reminds me of the Toy Story 2 assets being lost from a server failure and they were saved by one employee having a copy on their personal computer at home.
It wasn’t a server failure. Someone rm -rf on the root of the server. The server did what it was told.
deleted by creator
Drive Savers rescued an episode of The Simpsons. Back when that show was good.
More impressive than the fact that you saved a repo once is that the same repo still exists today with the complete git history. At the rate companies abandon products for new ones, old repos are rare.
Our repo is old as time. Carried through from SourceSafe to TFS to Git
Subversion has existed probably for longer than your company, the fucking managers couldn’t be arsed to read a damn book?
They were using SourceSafe back then. But any source control that isnt decentralised has the same problem. If the central server gets deleted so does all history
I had a worse experience. My first internship was doing web development in ColdFusion. Why that language? Because when the company was first starting, none of the funders wanted to learn Linux/Apache administration and CF ran on Windows.
Also, the front end development team did not have version control but shared code via a file server.
I used to work at an accounting/consulting firm who were dead set on writing business applications in VBA within Excel. The code was embedded in the notebook, and to distribute the software was sending the latest version of the Excel file. This made version control virtually impossible, and we would instead combine our work manually.
I cannot recommend having tech-illiterate people lead software projects.
The amount of times I hear people telling me that “I should just do it in Excel”. Excel. Is not. A database.
Excel is a single-assignment dynamically-typed functional programming language with a really obtuse editor.
Stop… Stop… I’m already dead
Good software starts in Excel honestly. But oh god should you not stay there… Its not designed as a database indeed.
Access is the worst of both worlds.
There’s nothing more permanent than a temporary solution
Excel is a whole OS unto itself. Like Emacs except you can get out of it.
Close enough when your actual database system is written in fucking COBOL.
One of the two bosses didn’t turn up for work one Friday. On the weekend, we all received a call that he had died.
Monday was horrible. We had new starters that came into an office full of people crying, and people from our HQ joining to set people up with any counselling.
The worst part? We had deadlines to meet, and clients didn’t give a fuck that the person responsible had died. One large client outright said to me on the phone on that first Monday “that’s sad and all, but I don’t really give a fuck, have it done by end of day”. To HQ’s credit, after I had told them they asked me to stop what I was doing (had already delivered the work) and our CEO called them and told them we were to terminate our contract with them. One woman I worked with, a Project Manager, was repeatedly brought to tears by clients checking on work or trying to sort out meetings with a guy that was in a morgue. I was able to power through, up until the day of his funeral when we all went to the pub after and saw his children playing without a care in the world.
Initially, it brought us all closer together, but within three months people started to leave - and by the end of the year the HQ decided to just close the office entirely, firing everyone that was still there.
I hate to say it, looking back, but this gave me without question one of the best answers for behavioural interviews in tech, since I ultimately ended up having to help deliver everything and onboard people in a stressful scenario. Knowing the guy, it’s what he would have wanted.
Company moves into a new building, threw a big Christmas party with booze. Most of the management fucked someone not their wife/husband, lots of condoms as well as heroin needles and smudges of coke left in the bathrooms. Drugs and booze all over the damn place.
We got cards and little bits of candy after that, never another Xmas party
Who on earth does heroin at a Christmas party? :p
Chick-fil-A, Hobby Lobby, a mega-church
I’m guessing call center
Could be all sorts of things. Loggers. Taco Bell employees. Law firm.
All im hearing is management.
I’d put good money on a company doing something marketing/ad related. My first summer internship was at a company that did digital ads, and the amount of alcohol that was consumed on literally a daily basis was insane. I’m talking the majority of the office being having a minimum of 2-4 drinks after about 2pm rolled around, and probably triple that on Friday.
The only party I was there for was the CTO’s birthday, in which at lunch he received a piñata filled to bursting with those little alcohol shots, and by the end of the day basically everyone had to Uber home. For 19 year old me, it was pretty unreal seeing my bosses and coworkers that drunk in the middle of the week.
Knowing how fucked up everyone was during a normal workweek in the office, it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if a Christmas party there was an absolute drug-filled rager.
I worked at a preppy catholic school in Chicago. Every year they had a Gala with an auction where people would throw around $60k like it was nothing. Afterwards all the parents of students I taught were plastered and grinding on each other on the dancefloor, and then I was invited to a sex party in the hotel they stayed at. Being 20 years younger than these folks, I was really weirded out.
Catholics go hard.
Years ago I worked for a large-ish post production company. They had recently moved into a swanky new location and everything there was tailored to spec, including the server room. In norwegian we sometimes call a server room a ‘machine room’, this is relevant.
As a part of the server room spec, a dry fire suppression system was among the requirements.
The summer of the incident was particularly hot, and we experienced some trouble with our cooling, so a cooling technician was called to have a look. While he was working on the unit inside the server room, he made a mistake that caused all the cooling gas to dump into the room, triggering the fire extinguishers.
A dry fire system works by releasing an inert gas into a space to displace any oxygen, effectively choking any fire. I imagine this is usually done by some solenoids opening some canisters of gas and the room quickly, but gradually becomes oxygen free. Luckily, my boss at the time was present and he quickly got both himself and the tech to safety.
All good right? No. The contractor who constructed the new location had ordered and installed a system meant for maritime machine rooms, not the computer ‘machine room’ we had. In an environment filled with fuel and grease, you optimize towards filling the room with an inert gas as quickly as possible, and it turns out they use explosives to complete the task. In this room there were three canisters in the ceiling with fire shooting out of them, burning pellets to generate the inert gas. The gas and smoke from the canisters combined with the leaked cooling gas, and started condensing.
Into hydrochloric acid.
While all this was going on, all of the servers and workstations were happily humming along, sucking the now extremely corrosive atmosphere into themselves, making sure that every nook and cranny inside and outside got covered in a thin greasy film of acid.
The aftermath: Mine and two colleagues’s summer break was cut short, as we were called in to do damage control. Ripping out and wiping hard drives clean was what we did all summer. With external help we managed to recover all of the data. One feature film was delayed a few weeks. The insurance payout actually made the company a bit ahead financially. As far as I know there’s still burn marks in the floor of the server room, from when flames shot out of the fire extinguishers. Everyone involved now knows what a proper dry fire suppression system for a server room looks like.
The kicker is, the cooling was messed up because a fabric awning on the building had fallen down and was covering the air intake. If anyone had thought to check the roof this whole thing would have been avoided, and that server room would probably still have bombs attached to its ceiling.
I’m in awe about this. I work in compressed gasses and it’s pretty common knowledge in our industry that the environment dictates usage. I cannot believe they never consulted a gas specialist or used a completely inert gas that could have done the same thing.
Sounds perfectly normal for a construction/install team to me. “Maritime…doesn’t that mean like ocean or something?” “Hey the drawing says install it so I’m installing it.” “…yeah fair enough.”
Great story! Very well told. I can tell you must enjoy retelling it to newbies when they join the company :)
But wow, other than 2 summer breaks being cut short, it sounds like a good outcome. Especially considering no one was seriously hurt
I’m not with that company anymore, but given the right audience, ‘that time the server room blew up’ is a big hit.
It could have gone way worse. A stressful lesson and a good story is best case scenario outcome when stuff hits the fan.
Creepy guy got fired. Showed up the next day and confronted HR. Idk what went down but they had to call the cops.
That time the food cart pod exploded:
https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2017/10/food_cart_pod_on_fire_in_downt.html
Them including that pic of Audrey Donovan is hilarious
stressed out researcher tried to get a temp to ship out biological specimens by fedex.
Like standard mail fedex? No special packaging or anything?
yup on standard fedex. I mean packaged up well on our end but still something that is a crime.
Hmmm I guess we have two of different types
1: late into pandemic when inflation was really bad a bunch of the workers were super upset by their wages, management got together to get a solution. The plant supervisor called a meeting and told everyone there would be a “substantial raise”, it was $0.20. Less than 1%
The second, more recent, a fire broke out after a maintenance repair went awry. Someone pulled the fire alarm and it failed to work. Someone pulled a second fire alarm, it failed to fully initiate the system. Then on the last attempt it finally went off but the fire suppression system and sprinkler system did go off but not over the actually burning area. This lead to a whole region of the building getting smelted and a big investigation on the fire suppression system. After it was resolved they asked employees to continue working their shift, even in the smoked out areas. The stench was horrible and probably carcinogenic lol
And this is why we need unions.
I’m definitely pro union, my work did almost go union actually! But we just follow a union contract that another workplace has from their union. For the most part I think its the best of both worlds, but if they keep aggravating people we aren’t too far away.
I’ve been following what’s been going on unionwise all very the USA and I’m kinda pumped about it
Holy shit do you not have any fire inspectors? Would you describe your local and state governments as “Republican”, or “very Republican”?
I’d actually describe them as Blue/non-designated, it feels red-leaning recently with some of the stuff they are passing though
The fire department comes and checks stuff out really only when there’s an issue. We do have test fire alarms though they never use the fire suppression system, mostly only the noise alarm. I’m unsure if they pull the same one or random ones for the test but either way, it wasn’t good enough apparently.
A similar thing to the first point happened at my old company.
When it became clear that working from home won’t go away, management came up with some new and actually reasonable rules, that basically allowed 100% wfh, if the team was okay with it.
Now, here in Germany east/west differences are still pretty stark. So someone asked “sooo, I’m in the East, get a low wage, but work with a team from the West. If my neighbor would start working for the same team, formally at an office in the West, but 100% from home, he’d get West wages”. Management didn’t address that at all, so a bunch of people (including myself) just said fuck it, quit and now earn way better wages working from home.
That’s wild! In the states there’s a similar issue with cost of living being vastly different in different areas of the country. I have a family member who does financial stuff for business but works from home. They ended up having to get a postal mailing address in a higher cost of living area so they could get fair wages since their normal address would make business offer only real low wages. It’s asinine
I was supervising filling in a pit we had dug on the edge of a forest. We had dump trucks coming in dumping gravel. One particular driver wasn’t great at his job and there had been issues with him in the past.
That driver came in and dumped his gravel, but then he drove off with his bed still raised and almost immediately smashed into electric lines that ran off into the forest. One telephone pole even snapped at the base and fell over.
Within 30 seconds multiple cops came speeding onto the job site. It turns out those electric lines ran to a radio tower in the woods that ran the police radio. The idiot in the dump truck had taken out the police comms for the whole town.
Couldn’t they sell a few of their spare MRAPs to buy a backup generator and a redundant microwave link? Sheesh.
Note: if you’re planning a crime in that town, you only have to cut one wire to disable all police communication.
That’s some lacking infrastructure
This is why we shld bury our lines, much more effort to dig down six feet than get a ladder and snip
A wild backhoe appears!
What does a network engineer bring on a hiking trip in the woods? Water, snacks, extra sunscreen, a first aid kit, bug repellent, bear spray … and a folding shovel and a piece of fiber-optic cable.
(What’s the fiber for?)
Well, if you get lost in the woods or need to be rescued, you take the shovel, dig a trench, put the fiber in it, bury it … and within an hour, someone with a backhoe will show up to tear it up. Then you can just follow the backhoe tracks back to civilization.
It used Dig! It’s Super Effective!
Or use mobile phone networks.
And this is how a micro quake severed our T1 line from LA to Phoenix and shut the network down in our office for a week.
Honestly never thought of that, sounds like there would need to be some sort of protective channeling, with space to allow some shifting
Buried lines of all kinds are frequently severed by excavators because their position isn’t properly or fully documented.
The best set up I ever saw was a sewer tunnel, almost 12 feet tall, that handled all the services. From sewage to water to electricity to data; it held everything and was trivial to maintain and run new lines in.
line sounds like a really interesting idea, although I feel like documenting where you put things should be a basic task. Probably why it’s not done properly
I knew some people who would in a small jurisdiction have a friend go far from where they were doing crimes and light off a bunch of pop-pop-pop fireworks to draw police attention away from the less attention grabbing thing they were doing
Allegedly
You’d be surprised, how fragile critical infrastructure often is. There was an incident in Europe a few years ago, where a single miscalculation in a planned power line shutdown almost caused the entire European grid to split.
It slowed down a bit, and then we quickly learned that maintaining the perfect 50hz wasn’t actually necessary anymore. Few people still have clocks that depend on it
Clocks, true.
Computer systems in general, however, will start acting very squirrelly outside of an approved MHz range. Wall warts and power supplies can handle only so much deviation from the norm. It’s why high-end UPS systems do power conditioning to provide a pure sine wave.
No worries we’re talking like 49.9995 hz
I’m not talking about the incident in Romania, but in Germany.
A shipyard needed some wires over a river deactivated and that caused an overload cascade, because the river was the border between two providers who had different assumptions about the capacity of the power lines connecting them.
oh damn, ain’t something. I will be looking into that, thank you!
That’s some lacking infrastructure
They probably had plenty of infrastructure for normal operations.
What they were lacking was a BCDR plan.
…which includes having backup lines or a more robust installation. Police officers aren’t engineers or system administrators for public infrastructure.
You’re right tho, a backup alone would not be sufficient
A coworker aggressively made out with my face at a work event out of town and they stopped letting us put alcohol on our expense reports. I was universally blamed for the policy change and HR tried to send ME to sexual harassment training because it was my fault for socializing with her, apparently!
Direct quote from the HR director: “If you knew she was a sloppy drunk, why did you go out with her?”
Wow that’s fucked man. What happened to you?
My idiot friend told his boss about it and she reported it on my behalf. I told them I didn’t want anything done about it but they sent me through the HR grinder anyway and I quit like 6 months later for a shit job. Good times, kinda ruined my life for 8 years
Probably one of our male executives ‘gracefully’ stepping down after being caught having sex on security camera at the construction of a new location with the overseer of the construction that was the husband of the security director that found the footage.
What??? 😂😂
This was actually after I left, although I have a million crazy stories about this place- but the guy who I used to work directly under was an alcoholic, and one day Monday he didn’t show up for work, wasn’t answering his phone, etc. This was pre-social media, so they couldn’t ask around or anything.
He comes in a week later and it turned out that over the previous weekend, he had gotten drunk, driven from where we lived in Indiana down to Georgia for some reason (he had no connections in Georgia), went into a bar in some small town, got into a fight, and wound up in the slammer for a week.
He was no longer employed after that. And this is a small business where every employee was so vital to the owner that I once got mad at him, screamed, “GO FUCK YOURSELF, [his name]!” and stormed out and went home and he called me up the next day, apologized and begged me to come back in with various compensation promises which I can’t remember. It took a lot to get fired from there, but that was enough.
Why do people constantly ask this question in this community? I swear this gets asked at least weekly. 🤦🏻♂️
Karma farming isn’t a thing here. Yet people seem happy to groundhog day the hell out of it…
I’ll be honest with you chief, I’ve been on Lemmy pretty chronically for the last year and a half and this is the first one of these I’m seeing
I mean I could be going mad… uh, chief… but I could have sworn it was this community. My mistake, apparently.
Perhaps I got the community wrong, but not about this question appearing repeatedly on Lemmy. 🤷♂️
Maybe people just enjoy reading the kinds of replies that these kinds of questions tend to garner?
No doubt you’re right, as everyone seems to be replying in good faith.
I don’t want to yuck anyone’s yum, so to speak, but if this kind of thing is popular, maybe the mods could create a weekly thread for it?
