May 10, 2012, 7:50 AM —
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We all make mistakes. But when you work in IT, those errors can quickly go public.
If you've never emailed profanities to 2,500 of your customers or sent a love note to colleagues at a dozen companies, consider yourself lucky.
We all make mistakes. But when you work in IT, those errors can quickly go public.
If you've never emailed profanities to 2,500 of your customers or sent a love note to colleagues at a dozen companies, consider yourself lucky.
[ For more real-world tales of brain fail, see "Stupid user tricks 6: IT idiocy loves company." | Find out which of our eight classic IT personality types best suit your temperament by taking the InfoWorld IT personality type quiz. | Get a $50 American Express gift cheque if we publish your tech tale from the trenches. Send it to offtherecord@infoworld.com. ]
You might have deleted the entire contents of a server by accident or wiped out three months' worth of government agency data without a reliable backup on hand. You may have pulled a youthful prank that cut off Net access for thousands of your employer's customers. You could have deliberately shared your log-ons with everyone else in the company in order to make a point or unplugged network servers willy-nilly, just to see what would happen.
And when caught in a mistake, you might have invented an explanation so ingenious that it earned you a bonus at the end of the year.
[ FREE DOWNLOAD: 6 things every IT person should know ]
Here are seven true tales of IT screwups. Some names have been changed to protect the guilty. Don't laugh. One day, you may find yourself in eerily similar circumstances.
True tech confession No. 1: Email is a bitchIt's the classic oops moment. Compose an email, hit Send, then realize you've made a horrible mistake by sending it to the wrong person.
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