Fortunately not as serious as other comments. For context, I have autism, and I frequently stim by making random noises.

One day I was at a global online meeting with very important people. I thought I was muted, so I said “MEOW”.

Suddenly everybody goes quiet and somebody says “did anybody say ‘meow’?”

I quickly turned off my microphone, and fortunately nobody mentioned that again.

Not anything destructive (to the Company) per se, but seeing a meeting with a senior and a member of HR suddenly pop up on my calendar after weeks of waiting in limbo to be placed on a new project was definitely an OH SHIT moment.

Yep, I was made redundant 🙃

I was working as a short order cook back in the 80s. One night after closing we were having a few beers as a farewell to a co-worker. We wanted some music so we taped our walkman earbuds to the intercom microphone. Came in the next day, our busiest day of the week and found out we had blown the amplifier.

Decade or so ago, logging into a work computer and suddenly the screen is just tiled with the word “virus”, but a bit janky looking like it was a screenshot of the word that was enlarged and tiled with no thought to whether the right side of the image lined up with the left and such - it was a very 90s cheesy movie like depiction of what happens to your comp when you get a virus, like you’d expect the next scene to be some shady hacker on the other end exclaiming “I’m in!”

Then again, I don’t know jack fuck about viruses, and the machine is behaving super weird, so I unplugged the internet cable from the back, and called my manager over. He had a similar “…is this for fuckin real?” reaction that I did. Mind you, this is a hospital, so if one of our computers is fucked, this is a big deal for potentially leaking patient info, so even though it had that kind of slapstick appearance, no one was fucking around with it: so, manager pushed it up the chain, and after a few mins a fucking SWAT team of IT guys comes in and starts doing their own assessment.

After some deliberation, they start troubleshooting - keystrokes and whatnot don’t seem to be responsive. One of them eventually reaches back behind the monitor and ‘poof’ the screen pops back to the normal login screen.

So, that facility had a fancy custom login screen, which was some generic desktop background type scenery and a wall of text that none of us ever put any thought into. One of the snipits on that wall of text was instructions on what to do if you suspect your machine has virus (which was basically what I did - leave it running, unplug it from the internet, and call IT… hooray, I’m not completely stupid!). What ended up being the cause of the “virus” tiling was the fucking VGA cable slowing worming its way out of the back of the monitor - when I got to it, that thing was hanging on by a thread, and touching the desk it was on was just enough of a bump to make it cross that line between having enough of a connection to do its job vs not. That micrometer of pull of on that cable wasn’t enough to completely cut its signal, but it wasn’t enough to produce a normal display either: it just picked a random spot on the screen, and filled the monitor with that repeating image. The spot it just happened to do this to was the word “virus” in the custom login text explaining what to do if you think you have a virus, lol.

TLDR, got my management chain from my dept to the top dogs running the hospital, and the entire fucking IT department to swarm to my unit over a potential data breach that ended up being a wiggly VGA cable.

Whoops.

I used to work at a big cable company whose name rhymes with bombast. One day I (M) found myself in a meeting with a bunch of female vice-presidents (Bombast has thousands of vice-presidents). The presenter couldn’t get her laptop to connect to the big TV so I pulled out one of my gadgets and got her set up. She said “wow, you’re pretty handy to have around.” My brain decided that it would be a clever thing indeed to say “well, I’m pretty well-endowed in the dongle department” but when I started to say it my brain realized how completely insane a comment it was. So my brain cut me off and I ended up just saying “well, I’m pretty well-endowed” which was not exactly any better.

To their credit everybody ignored this except for one woman who actually guffawed briefly. I wasn’t fired immediately so there’s that.

Spot welded a screwdriver to the metal sidewall when I slipped trying to discharge a capacitor. At least I thought to wear gloves.

Tower cleared me to position and hold (back before it was called line up and wait), then cleared a 737 to land on the runway I was sitting on.

Now it was day VFR conditions and my little ship was painted bright red and white, I wasn’t exactly camouflaged, but I called the tower with my entire tail number and position. RALEIGH TOWER, NOVEMBER ONE TWO THREE ALPHA BRAVO HOLDING POSITION FIVE RIGHT.

Made a great lesson for my student, the tower WILL forget about you and clear a jet 500 times your mass to land on you.

It wasn’t at work, but I think someone will find it funny regardless.

During my time at university I had a web development exam for which we had to do a group project, you guessed it, making a website. This included having a bunch of different input fields, and the requirement was to properly validate each one and provide clear feedback to the user.

While adding some inputs I was focused on having all the checks in place correctly, and so I decided to put some placeholder text for the errors and do a pass later changing them with more informative ones. Which I did, but I forgot about one.

So, presentation day comes along, the professor is looking at our website, asking us to show him that we had all the checks in place and correct. He asks me to input an invalid date in a calendar widget, which I happily do, knowing I 100% had all the required checks in place. The verification runs and fails, showing the error popup I set up, which read something along the lines of:

“date’s fucked, mate”

Shit. My placeholder message. Which I obviously forgot to change. I was mortified. Luckily the professor chuckled and said that technically the check worked so that was fine.

I put the localization files in the wrong folder. Thankfully, we hadn’t pushed anything to prod yet, but we were trying to figure out why everything kept crashing even though our checking tool was giving the all-clear.

It was checking everything except the localization folders.

Years ago I was working as a pharmacist in a very busy pharmacy in a city center. This was during the opioid epidemic in America and being a high volume store, had a lot of regulatory oversight on our controlled substance dispensing.

One Friday evening a young kid came in with a prescription that he said was for his grandmother. It was for a lot of oxycodone from a city two hours away. He had two girls with him when he dropped off the prescription and had never filled with us before, and wanted to pay cash. We had a policy that we didn’t fill prescriptions for maintenance controlled substances for new patients >100mi from our address. We only got so much of each controlled substance so we adopted the policy so we’d have enough for our regular patients. I told him we couldn’t fill it. He started to get angry and mouth off but left.

Cut to Monday which was my next shift and there is a folder with the DEA logo on the front of it in front of my terminal. I ask what it is to someone who worked the weekend and they said an agent dropped it off. I open it and the only thing inside is a business card slotted into those slits you sometimes see on the face of one of the pockets. I call the number and after some introductions the agent asks me if I was the one who denied the prescription on Friday. I confirm and the guys says that it was part of a multi-jurisdiction sting operation to catch a mid-level dealer who was buying scripts from people. He told me I wasted a bunch of their time and next time to just fill it. I told him it’s emphatically my job to not do that and that I didn’t appreciate him using my store since we had a bunch of other issues that local police weren’t dealing without him adding to it but he just hung up. Whatever.

My heart dropped when I saw that folder though and I’m sure that is what he wanted when he did it.

I was asked to provide technical on-site support at an event, because I knew the underlying server system under the software that project management had found to run this customer event.

They had also hired a bunch of laptops with wifi and a router for this, which was rather expensive back then (you could have bought a small car for that rent fee alone!), so a lot was hanging on this to be a success.

Of course, I knew about nothing what this job was about until I sat in the car with the project manager on our way to the first event. My reaction was: But that software cannot do what you just told me! Oh shit, indeed.

When we arrived in the evening before the first event, the server, wifi, and one of the laptops was set up before anything else, and I went to work writing a rudimetary software from scratch that would do what the customer wanted, and finally hit the bed around sunrise.

The event was a big success in all venues on the trip. The customer was extremely happy with the acceptence of the setup by the audience and the results they got.

I was working on prescribed fire as in controlled wildfire to support ecosystem function. The wind changed in expectedly. The fire jumped containment. We switch into actual firefighting mode for a solid 1/2 hour. Then the wind switches back to predictions. Problem solved. Mop up of the slopover still takes hours and it gets dark.

As we get back to the truck, keys are dropped and kicked in an attempt to catch them. There is tall grass everywhere. We search for an hour in the dark after an exhausting day for our only way to go home. Keys are found. We work at dawn the next day. Not my worst day in the office, just the least predictable.

Not at work but in High School.

It was the 90s and computers at school had just become a thing. Our school offered a typing class which seemed pretty chill so I signed up for that. I think I was the only guy in the class.

Anyway, I started talking to this girl who sat across from me and we ended up just sending emails back and forth to each other all through class, using our school emails. This went on for weeks. The messages started to get kinda flirty and then eventually they got more than flirty.

So I’m sitting in another class one day, maths or something, and a teacher comes in and asks if I can go with her. She takes me to the principle’s office and sits me down. In walks the principle with typing girl and she sits her down next to me. The principle then dumps a massive pile of paper on the desk and asks us to explain… we of course have no idea what she’s talking about. I pick up a sheet and start reading and my heart drops. It’s our entire email chain, weeks of cringe and filth. They must have been monitoring our emails, right? Wrong.

So we get a bollocking, threatened with suspension, the whole deal, but it wasn’t until we were sent on our way that we started to realise what had actually happened and the gravity of the situation. Over the next few hours some really weird shit started happening. I’d be walking through school and kids I didn’t even know would just start pointing at me, shouting out random things. Even my teachers were being super weird. Everything just felt really off and then my mate filled me in.

Now, to this day, I still don’t know how this happened. I genuinely think that our school email system was set up wrong but somehow, when replying to one of typing girl’s messages, I had forwarded our whole email chain to every person at our school. Every kid. Every teacher. Thousands of them.

It was humiliating.

I was forever known as that guy. Typing girl never talked to me again.

TLDR: I accidentally forwarded weeks worth of dirty emails to our entire school and held on to my virginity.

At an online gaming company back in the late 90s, I deleted a file folder whose name was my first name. I had been there about a month and figured I must have created that folder for some dumb reason while I was ramping up. Turned out it was created by a previous software dev who happened to have the same first name as me, and it contained the production software. Essentially I blew away a good part of the external website.

Fortunately somebody found another copy and restored everything, named it something sane and put it in a sane place with access control.

Admittedly it was sloppy of me to delete a folder without at least looking inside it, but I really didn’t feel too bad about it because standards at this place were so low - they had no concept of source control, dev/test/prod environments, or much else. Everything they did was cowboy.

Accidental reply-to-all set on mailman list, of 8,000 users.

Only minor at about 16 minutes and 11 replies shared.

Still had a little bit of cold-sweats, and dolly-zoomed my surroundings.