Who, Me?

Who, Me?

Created by Team Register //

Mon 18 Oct 2021

What is Who, Me?

Who, Me? is a weekly column in which our readers confess to catastrophes they created in the pursuit of IT excellence - and usually managed to get away with.

The column is a light-hearted look at the world of work and tech.

We're always open to new stories we can feature in Who, Me? If you have one to tell, drop an email to whome@theregister.com to anonymously own up to tech mess you caused.

An arc welder in the datacenter: What could possibly go wrong?

Who, Me? Not much if wielded by the experienced and careful operator in this story – but he was not the only actor in this tale

On-Prem01 Jul 2024 | 160

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What is Who, Me?

Developers feared large chaps carrying baseball bats could come to kneecap their ... test account?

Life lesson: Don't delete millions of accounts on the same day you go to the dentist

Brackets go there? Oops. That’s not where I used them and now things are broken

Coder wrote a bug so bad security guards wanted a word when he arrived at work

Panic at the Cisco tech, thanks to ancient IOS syntax helper that outsmarted itself

NetAdmin learns that wooden chocks, unlike swipe cards, open doors when networks can't

BROADER TOPICS

Network engineer chose humiliation over a night on the datacenter floor

The sad tale of the Alpha massacre

Relocation is a complete success – right up until the last minute

I made this network so resilient nothing could possibly go wro...

Linux admin asked savvy scientist for IT help and the boffin blew it

Compression? What's that? And why is the network congested and the PCs frozen?

After we fix that, how about we also accidentally break something important?

Personalized pop-up was funny for about a second, until it felt like stalking

Did you hear the one about the help desk chap who abused privileges to prank his mate?

I don't know what pressing Delete will do, but it seems safe enough!

Python script saw students booted off the mainframe for sending one insult too many

Techie made a biblical boo-boo when trying to spread the word

Bargain-hunting boss saw his bonus go up in a puff of self-inflicted smoke

Developer tried to dress for success, but ended up attired for an expensive outage

Cigarette break burned out a huge chunk of Africa's internet

Hello? Emergency services? I'd like to report a wrong number

Never put off until tomorrow what someone could erase today

Facebook prank sent techie straight to Excel hell

There is no honor among RAM thieves – but sometimes there is karma

Outback shocker left Aussie techie with a secret not worth sharing

An arc welder in the datacenter: What could possibly go wrong?

Admin took out a call center – and almost their career – with a cut and paste error

Techie installed 'user attitude readjustment tool' after getting hammered in a Police station

Seething CEO shoulder surfed techie after mistaken takedown of production server

Screwdrivers: is there anything they can't do badly? Maybe not

A thump with the pointy end of a screwdriver will fix this server! What could possibly go wrong?

Techie invented bits of the box he was fixing, still botched the job

One bank's brilliant upgrade was another bank's crash

Techie's enthusiasm for decluttering fails to spark joy

Software support chap survived breaking his customer

Rarest, strangest, form of Windows saved techie from moment of security madness

Tired techie 'fixed' a server, blamed Microsoft, and got away with it

Windows 95 support chap skipped a step and sent user into Micro-hell

You break it, you ... run away and hope somebody else fixes it

DBA made ten years of data disappear with one misplaced parameter

Yes, I did just crash that critical app. And you should thank me for having done so

Intern with superuser access 'promoted' himself to CEO

Health system network turned out to be a house of cards – Cisco cards, that is

If we plug this in without telling anyone, nobody will know we caused the outage

Self-taught-techie slept on the datacenter floor, survived communism, ended a marriage

'Crash test dummy' smashed VIP demo by offering a helping hand

Developer's default setting created turbulence in the flight simulator

One person's shortcut was another's long road to panic

Poor communication led to complete lack of communication

WTF? Potty-mouthed intern's obscene error message mostly amused manager

New year, new bug – rivalry between devs led to a deep-code disaster

PLACEHOLDER ONLY Someone please write witty headline here

Enterprising techie took the bumpy road to replacing vintage hardware

Sysadmin's favorite collection of infallible utilities failed … foully

IT sent the intern to sort out the nasty VP who was too important to bother with backups

Why have just one firewall when you can fire all the walls?

Bright spark techie knew the drill and used it to install a power line, but couldn't outsmart an odd electrician

Shock horror – and there goes the network neighborhood

After nine servers he worked on failed, techie imagined next career as beach vendor

That script I wrote three years ago is now doing what? How many times?

One door opens, another one closes, and this one kills a mainframe

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