A colleague from office recently posted a link to an entertaining article. True IT confessions is a post on supergeeks confessing some of the dumbest moves they’ve ever made in their careers – ‘ts hilarious.. Yes, my personal favorite too was #4. Quoting below for your reference:
True IT confession No. 4: What can Brown do for you?
Here’s one of those rare backup mishaps in which data did in fact get backed up. But what it got backed up to is where things goes sour.
Twenty-seven years ago, David Guggenheim had just gotten his first “real job” as biological data manager at an environmental consulting firm in Southern California. At that time, the firm’s hardware consisted of a PDP-11 and a time-share IBM 360 mainframe in Los Angeles, accessed via dial-up.
“It was time to archive an important project from the IBM mainframe, so I cracked my knuckles and began pounding out the JCL [Job Control Language] necessary to write our data to tapes that would then be shipped to our office,” he says. “I submitted the job, satisfied that our data would be safely backed up.”
A few days later a UPS driver poked his head in the door at the firm’s office and shouted, “Is there a David Guggenheim here?”
The UPS truck was filled floor to ceiling with boxes, all of them addressed to Guggenheim. He opened the first one. It was full of punch cards. And so were all the rest of them.
“It was our data from the IBM mainframe,” he says. “To my horror, I realized that instead of specifying output to magnetic tape, I specified output to punch cards. I can’t remember my JCL very well any more, but as I recall, it was the difference between specifying ‘=0′ versus ‘=1.’ I was absolutely humiliated.”
It gets worse. A few days after the entire staff got involved clearing enough floor space for the mountain of boxes, the bill arrived. The cost of a punch-card backup job was nearly $1,000 (and remember, we’re talking about 1982 dollars here).
“I had blown our budget out of the water, killed a forest, and still failed to back up our data onto tape,” says Guggenheim, who’s now Dr. David Guggenheim, Ph.D., president of 1planet 1ocean, and a senior fellow at The Ocean Foundation. “I’ve spent my career since then doing environmental work, so hopefully I paid penance for the dead trees.”
Lessons learned? 1. Little mistakes can cause huge problems, so keep checking until it hurts. 2. Immediately own up to your errors; humility is a great teacher. 3. Take the time to appreciate the humor of a colossal screw-up, says Guggenheim. “It does wonders for the sting.”
