Early in my career (software engineer) I was debugging an issue in our application that was causing some funky data to be written to the DB (turned out to be do

Early in my career (software engineer) I was debugging an issue in our application that was causing some funky data to be written to the DB (turned out to be double encoding of UTF8 strings). While validating the issue locally, I decided the best course of action was to drop the table and recreate it. I did just that, except I still saw the issue. Well, turns out that I was connected to not to my local DB, but instead the production DB. My manager was very understanding, and walked me through the procedure to restore the DB from backup. I learned an extremely important lesson that day, and have always remembered it when I see others screw up.