Expensive Mistakescoopsweb asks "What's the most expensive mistake you've ever made? Should I mention a certain employee who caused 4 hours worth of delays in Central London and got his company fined £500k?"
No points for stories about the time you had a few and thought it'd be a good idea to wrap your car around a bollard. Or replies consisting of "my wife".
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chthonic, Thu 25 Oct 2007, 11:26)
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Every computer programmer has done this...haven't they?I'd only been in the job a few months. Working as a mainframe programmer for a large finance company.
Not trying to get too techie, but I wrote a program that called another program. The second program fell over, but the first program continued to call it repeatedly until some kind of spool file filled up and the entire mainframe crashed and the company lost a whole afternoon's business.
Fortunately I wasn't bollocked for it! But IBM were called in, and took my programs away to study as there is no way it should have happened. Christ knows how much the company lost though.
(, Thu 25 Oct 2007, 11:45, 2 replies)
"Every computer programmer has done this...haven't they?"No, you should trap errors at all times and rely on feedback as much as possible, not "fire and forget"...
But funny story anyway!
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Firkinfedup last shat on your wife's tits at, Thu 25 Oct 2007, 12:56,
closed)
Yes, they haveI work as a Java/JSP programmer for a large finance company. I once put a lengthy comment at the top of a JSP page, before the opening <html> tag. Something to the effect of
<!--
Before the next release, we should add a feature to do blah blah blah.
This is because blah blah blah.
-(my real name)
-->
It turns out that IE has an error in which it will correctly display the document in this situation when initially fetching it from the webserver, but if you then hit your "back" button, it will only look through the first 200 or so bytes of the cached copy trying to find the opening <html> tag. If it doesn't find it, it renders the document as plain text. So, many customers saw their account details, then went to some other page, clicked "back", and instead of seeing their account details again, saw my little note followed by the HTML source to their account details page.
This resulted in a spike in callcenter volume, and incoming calls to the callcenter cost lots of money. That's why we have a website, after all.
(, Fri 26 Oct 2007, 15:00, closed)
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