In 1999 I ran one of those rm -fR thingies with an unset var on a client production system. Systems were dog slow those days but I only noticed when the client

In 1999 I ran one of those rm -fR thingies with an unset var on a client production system. Systems were dog slow those days but I only noticed when the client called that his ERP was down. This was one my country's most successful car rental companies and all went through there. Ofcourse (...) the backups were broken and we did not use CVS yet. The client, a very nice man, said 'well that is unfortunate' and that was all. We restored a very old backup and copied the source files from my dev system to it. After that we ran a mirror in our office (nightly db copies via ssh), used CVS and weekly backup tests. Jikes. Another one which was less my fault but I did blame myself for was dropping a server with 200.000 web sites on it because we had to move datacenters and it was xmas eve and very very slippery with ice. We slid and the server fell which wrecked the (hardware) RAID disks. This had working tape backups so there was a few hours downtime which was going to happen anyway as we were moving. Now that I am writing this anyway; the most traumatic was mid of the 80s with my second computer when I was 10. I had one disk(!); they were expensive and I did not get a lot pocket money. I was learning assembly after Basic became too slow for what I wanted. I was building a game (Chuckie Egg rip off) and after a long time not saving I ran the game and it worked. I was happy and saved the game on the one disk with all the software I wrote with the save command. When I pressed enter I remembered, and I remember this very vividly, that I used the the disk basic ram space because I was running out of memory. The disk started spinning, computer rebooted and ... files (dir) command after gave a disk I/O error... The misery. Edit: ugh. Just remembered a 1984 one; my father brought home a modem for the MSX-1 and those things were, for my notion of money, kind of bare gold, price wise. It was 100s of guilders. But it could only do Viditel. Which sucked. I wanted BBS access and that required shoving the thing into the MSX after Basic was already booted. The MSX cartridge ports are connected intimately to vital computer parts. So shoving it in crooked had my best friend looking at a purple screen after that I decided better would be to solder in a switch. I did that before with stuff I found by the road. I had to cut an IC pin to do it which I had done quite often; this time I cut it and it flew off... Eventually I was forgiven.