What is the Worst Tech Mistake You Ever Made?

CraigEagle asks: "Mistakes are made every day. The more technical knowledge you have the bigger your mistakes can be. What is the biggest technology related mistake you have ever made?"

"In the interest of full disclosure, this is mine:

I was working at a Fortune 50 bank as a consultant. I was due to go on vacation for a week and the company did not have webmail. I decided that I would try forwarding emails to my corporate account. (I know this was a bad idea, and probably against several corporate policies.) I set it up so that any email that came in would forward to my consulting company's account. My mistake was I also left Delivery Receipt on. This was not Microsoft, it was Lotus Notes. The system began forwarding the incoming mail to my account. But then it would get a Delivery Receipt, which in turn would be forwarded to my account, which would generate another delivery receipt, ad infinitum. When I got back from vacation they claimed I had brought down the email system for 4 hours. This incident caused the bank to stop allowing consultants to set up email rules. What's your story?"

Failing to face reality...

[FreshMeat-BWG]

...and force others to do the same thing.

Never, never, never, never commit to a schedule that is not realistic. If you know it isn't realistic before you get started, imagine what happens when you discover the unknown problems.

No matter how much that guy in marketing wants to meet his roadmap, he will not help you design, code, or test your product. If you are lucky, he will complete the requirements before you are supposed to ship the product.

Re:One time...

[forged]

Robert Brewster (the character) in T3 [imdb.com]

Re:my own list

[kcurrie]

'tis true. While in college (1990) I did a similar thing, and another student and I worked frantically to try to kill the fork bombs as fast as possible. Of course, you can't be fast enough to kill a tight enough loop and the machine quickly was unable to run any new processes. We each had a bunch of xterms up, but any command we tried to run we got the old "no more processes message". We thought we were screwed, until our very sharp prof (an engineer from Nortel actually) typed this into one of our xterms:
exec kill -9 -1

The exec overlays the new process, the -1 kills all of the current users processes. It seems the -1 option is a nice undocumented trick-- I've don't think I've seen it mentioned elsewhere... don't do this as root, BTW :-)

Re:Damning evidence

[zcat_NZ]

I frequently use "echo rm -rf foo*" so I know exactly what the shell's going to expand it to. Then I uparrow and remove the "echo".

Re:Playing soundfile on remote UNIX box

[Jerf]

Geez, kids these days.

sally.au

You old-schoolers know what I'm talkin' about.

Oh, come on, old schooler, get with the program. This is the web, for crying out loud! That should read as:

sally.au [ibiblio.org]

Much better.

Warning, not safe for work ;-)

(A class 2 sarcasm warning has been issued for this post.)

Re:FoxPro-based MRP & Bad Networking

[rpjs]

I had a similar experience a few years back. The county council I worked for wanted a PC-based employment budgeting system and in best local govt style a comittee (of end-users) was appointed to select a package that we could be build a customised application on. I was lead technical advisor on the assessment and would be leading the application build. However, it was the committee who would select the package... Uh-oh. Oh and I did mention that the leader of the committee was the most psycho person I've ever had to deal with in my entire career?

We reviewed a whole load of packages and shortlisted two. One was a DOS-based package which had been around for years and I was quite confident would do the job with no problems. the other was a new windows-based package which had very little track record but a whizzo point-and-drool GUI and some very slick salespeople. I had, shall we say less confidence in this package meeting our needs and had recommended that we not even shortlist it (to be fair, I had no doubts it was a fine piece of software for the purposes it was designed for, just that those purposes couldn't be streched to cover what we needed to do).

Of course, the committee chose the Windows package, a decision I made it quite clear I disagreed with. But to no avail, and in due course contracts were signed and myself and a colleague were sent off to the Smoke (London for non-Yookay readers) to learn how to use the package.

Within a day or so it was quite clear to me that what I had suspected was true: there was no way this software could do what the salespeople claimed it could and that it could not begin to do what we wanted. I had visions of a long, nasty project, doomed to failure and quite probably legal action with me probably getting the blame. However, a small miracle intervened in that the course trainer turned out to be an old schoolfriend of my colleague, and after we'd explained what we wanted to do, he agreed that we'd been sold a pig in a poke and was willing to back us up when we complained to the suppliers, his employers!

So thankfully the contracts got cancelled and it was decided to write an app from scratch in VB. As at the time I had no VB experience so I had nothing more to do with the project, which still turned into a disaster, just not as bad as it could have been.

The committee leader stayed in her post and led many other disasters until, again in best local government style, she got pensioned off early for "medical reasons" a couple of years later.

Still, I get a week in London out of it.