I knew a kid once. He was a 'junior operator' in a computer room .. you know, in the good ol' days, where the computers lived. (Before they escaped and attach

I knew a kid once. He was a 'junior operator' in a computer room .. you know, in the good ol' days, where the computers lived. (Before they escaped and attached themselves to your wrists.) He thought he was smart. And sometimes, he was. One day, he overheard a team leader talk to his programmers about the newly-minted database, sitting there in front of them on the table, on a brand new .. amazing .. 640Meg hard drive. This database had consumed the disk. It had cost the company a cool million dollars to create. It was vital that we backed it up. So, the new 640 Meg disk was on its way, onto which we'd back the database up. The first thing we'll do, the leader said, is copy the database, sector for sector. "And only then, will we re-index the database!", he claimed. "Until then, the indexes will remain un-sorted!" Well, the kid overheard all of this, but only heard "the indexes will remain un-sorted!". Later that night, this kid thought he'd prove himself. He re-indexed the database. He didn't tell anyone. The next day, a not-so-junior programmer came in, saw the database disk attached to the operator machine, and thought that the backup had been done. For reasons we shall not explain, he disconnected the disk from the operator machine. The index had not been done. The database was gone. The new disk arrived, but nobody could mount the old database disk. Much panic ensued! Operator logs were consulted. The computer room security cam tapes were spooled. Oh shit! Epilogue: I made a lot of money from those kids, writing a tool to recover a corrupted database, whose power had been removed mid re-indexing ..