This was a long time ago. I'd just taken over as "team lead" of the internal support desk for an interest rate swap trading system at a tier 1 bank. By team le

This was a long time ago. I'd just taken over as "team lead" of the internal support desk for an interest rate swap trading system at a tier 1 bank. By team lead, I mean that I was nominally in charge of the one contractor who was vastly more experienced than me. She was also famously prickly, particularly with upstart novices such as myself. The lead role was considered a right of passage because of this. Anyway, one morning she comes to me, ashen faced. She had just deleted the first leg of every single swap that the bank held. At that time, this would have been a relatively high proportion of every swap traded in history. We did have overnight backups but these took about 8 hours to bring online and the prod DB would need to be down for all that time. Such was Sybase back in the day. Now, it just so happened that one of the operations team leads was a drinking buddy of mine. I called her and asked if there was any way that they could stay out of the system for the whole day. Bless her, she re-arranged schedules, got people to come back in later, pulled in favours from the US ops team etc etc. In the end we managed the recovery and the day's trading was overlaid without any management escalation happening. Something close to a miracle. Suffice to say that, from that day on, said contractor was the epitome of sweetness and light to both me and the ops team.