Inspired by the very similar thread about school incidents.
My company called all lab staff “pandemic heroes” for coming in every day during the pandemic and taking on extra work to compensate for management and office staff who stayed home for years.
Then shortly after return to office, they closed the lab and laid off all lab staff.
Sounds like your company took the Veterans Affairs approach to “hero response”.
Worst part is that they did it mostly to boost the IPI right before we went public by driving down operating costs.
We weren’t even able to buy in u til 6 months after going public and the price leveled off at 6 months
INC-224, never forget.
I am an infra engineer at a fairly large scale (not like Amazon, but we have some BIG customers) SaaS company; despite our scale, we are only like 250 people and of them only about 90 engineers. We store a bunch of data in MySQL.
15:30:00, I get a page “MySQL table is full.” I immediately know my day is ruined, since I’ve never heard of this error before, but know it ain’t great.
15:30:10, every Pagerduty escalation policy in the entire company gets bombarded with pages.
I look at the database instance. The table size is “only” 16TiB, so it’s a bit confusing.
We are hard down for several hours as we scramble to delete data or somehow free up space. Turns out, google backs ClpudSQL MySQL instances with ext4 disks instead of zfs, and the max file size on ext4 is… you guessed it, 16TiB.
We learned a LOT of lessons from this, and are now offloading a shitload of json into either MongoDB or gcs, depending on the requirements. The largest table is down to 3TiB now :D
I love it.
All the other comments had guns sex and drugs.
Your story had mySQL.
Mad lad.
I understood almost none of that.
Database (thing that holds and retrieves bunch of data) broke when it reached a size of 16 Terabytes because the underlying filesystem (Thing that lets you store data on a physical disk like a hard drive or SSD) has a maximum possible size of 16 Terabytes by default (ext4)
16 TiB is roughly 16,000 Gigabytes which is roughly 16,000,000 Megabytes
Ty. I understood the tb but I didn’t know what a lot of the other abbreviations meant.
An IT contractor at my government job was one of the people that tried to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer.
Depends. Had a client pull a knife on me once, and another dragged me around the facility for an hour while he tried to break down a door to “kill” another client because he had stolen the change from a $5 Taco Bell gift card.
The other incident being was a coworker harboring one of the fugitive kids at her house with her like…6 children while her husband was away in Nebraska for work. Randomly saw her in family court a year later while I was working another job, hopefully while her husband fights her for custody of the kids…
Jason spilled a barrel a barrel of ink and fell in it. 🤣
Our department sometimes had a few interns, most of them young and female. Usually one of them got her workplace in the boss’s room in the office and he had plenty of time to show them how things are done etc.
One day the boss invited all staff to his house for a nice little summer barbecue. Later in the evening we recognized him being absent from the party for nearly 2 hours, and one of the interns was missing for exactly the same time.
Software company before git. The source server corrupted and the product code was lost. 5 guys had to get together and figure out the latest version between them (everybody had different changesets) and produce a new “current” version. At the end we lost all history prior and ever since all changes prior to 2008 have been attributed to 1 guy.
I used to work at an accounting/consulting firm who were dead set on writing business applications in VBA within Excel. The code was embedded in the notebook, and to distribute the software was sending the latest version of the Excel file. This made version control virtually impossible, and we would instead combine our work manually.
I cannot recommend having tech-illiterate people lead software projects.
The amount of times I hear people telling me that “I should just do it in Excel”. Excel. Is not. A database.
Close enough when your actual database system is written in fucking COBOL.
Excel is a single-assignment dynamically-typed functional programming language with a really obtuse editor.
Stop… Stop… I’m already dead
Excel is a whole OS unto itself. Like Emacs except you can get out of it.
More impressive than the fact that you saved a repo once is that the same repo still exists today with the complete git history. At the rate companies abandon products for new ones, old repos are rare.
Our repo is old as time. Carried through from SourceSafe to TFS to Git
deleted by creator
They were using SourceSafe back then. But any source control that isnt decentralised has the same problem. If the central server gets deleted so does all history
I had a worse experience. My first internship was doing web development in ColdFusion. Why that language? Because when the company was first starting, none of the funders wanted to learn Linux/Apache administration and CF ran on Windows.
Also, the front end development team did not have version control but shared code via a file server.
Gotta respect that save. Reminds me of the Toy Story 2 assets being lost from a server failure and they were saved by one employee having a copy on their personal computer at home.
It wasn’t a server failure. Someone rm -rf on the root of the server. The server did what it was told.
Had an executive assistant at my company who did very little if anything. Nobody knew why she was kept around and paid so much. Everyone pressured the CEO to fire her, but he strongly resisted. Eventually she was fired, but immediately threatened to sue for sexual harassment. CEO threw her a lovely settlement check despite claiming that nothing ever happened. Mmhmm.
Previous HR was well beyond retirement age essentially working to have something to do and one day emailed all of management a spreadsheet asking us to verify our information. That sheet contained each of our full names, addresses, phone numbers, birth dates, social security number, etc.
To my knowledge nothing of significance happened. I have my credit frozen.
I worked for a company that handled a ton of personal data. Pretty much every person in Germany, including addresses, bank account details, etc.
On my first day there (fresh from university) I was given literally full read access to the entire database. And as I later found out by accident: they did not track any data exfiltration at all. I copied several gigabytes of data without anyone noticing.
Your data is only as secure as the least motivated data broker sees fit. And that’s not very fit.
A few years ago I asked a customer for a list of employees, so I could verify who could purchase on their account. They replied with their personnel files. Luckily it didn’t have social security numbers, but it had a LOT of personal information. Medical records, drug test results, stuff like that.
The whole workplace drug testing thing is so wild to me. An employer can actually lay claim to your bodily fluids? Absolutely mental.
In the Netherlands, it’s very simple:
- if there are performance problems, then you address your employee’s performance problems.
- if there are no performance problems, then there is no problem and what your employee does in their free time is none of your business.
The overnight IT guy was caught watching porn while working (this was over a decade ago, he was in the office every night and not a remote worker). How was he caught? He was saving the pornographic photos on a shared network drive…
When confronted, he didn’t try to deny anything, his explanation was simply, “That’s just my thing.”
Boss: “Were you looking at porn in the office?”
IT guy:
One of my very first tech jobs, there was a guy who watched porn in his office, as far as I could tell just continuously. I saw the DNS logs so I was aware. I didn’t care as long as it wasn’t interfering with my ability to get things done.
One day I had to go in his office and talk to him about some of his code that was breaking, and he went OH and tried to hide all the blatant porn on his screen. Like dude I know. I don’t care. I am here to talk with you about your shitty code not your personal failings and issues; those are purely your own problem IMO.
The ceo of a client viewed porn pretty much all day every day during the pan when everyone was wfh. Our screen sharing tool showed a stamp-sized preview of the client device before connecting. One of the interns said after over a week of trying to engage him with the chat feature and closing the connection due to porn before sending a chat, he gave up and accepted that there was no time when porn wasn’t on-screen.
I saw this so often when I was client facing. CEOs, doctors, and sales people were the biggest offenders.
We had a gyno who had a huge pile of porn on his file server. It was all from the waist up. Seriously, he had half a terabyte of titty pics.
Separately, there was a sales guy who was juggling like 5 women (poorly) at any given time. He was fucking gross and would try to show them off to anyone who came to work on his continuous computer problems that were all caused by him.
Separately from that, we had a “troubled boys ranch” as one of our clients. One of the C Suite was caught with porn and we had to go over it with a fine toothed comb to make sure none of it was of any of the kids. There wasn’t (thankfully) but there was a whole lawsuit about it and he was charged with showing it to some of the kids.
A gyno with just tit pics either feels like he went 50/50 in career path and made a bad choice, or has become so desensitised (or put off) by his work that he just cant bear to look below the belt
When your hobby becomes your job!
We should be able to look at a liiittle porn at work.
You’re a rock star!
As a treat.
Aside from the obvious don’t watch prom at work, I don’t see how anyone does it with company property. Doesn’t pretty much everyone have a phone or computer these days? Shouldn’t it be common sense to use your phone rather than the work computers need by your employer?
I would say no. But there is a part of me that sees he’s an overnight IT worker, and then I’m like “what the hell else would he be doing?”
WoW
EvE Online until he perfecta his spreadsheets
As a former overnight IT worker, I always just assumed my browsing history would be reviewed by other IT people. Maybe they wondered why I spent so much time on horror game forums, maybe they already knew I was a disturbed mind.
stressed out researcher tried to get a temp to ship out biological specimens by fedex.
Like standard mail fedex? No special packaging or anything?
yup on standard fedex. I mean packaged up well on our end but still something that is a crime.
One day a coworker of mine was walking into our huge office building and thought he saw a mitten on the ground of the lobby. When he picked it up it was actually a pair of lacy women’s underwear. Ostensibly it fell out of someone’s gym bag or got caught in their pant leg in the laundry and dislodged there. He drops it immediately and comes into the office. He doesn’t mention this to anyone.
Two hours later the main receptionist comes in with the underwear in front of our whole group and says she saw him drop these this morning and she wants to return them. He’s denying the whole thing and at this point none of us have the previous context and all locked in to the conversation and silent laughing. She says, “We just want to give these back in case they have sentimental value!” and the the whole group is dying laughing now. He eventually convinces her he isn’t interested in a stranger’s underwear (which she bare handing) to which she says she’ll keep them in case he changes his mind (???).
It’s been 5 years and it gets brought up nearly daily
Sounds like the receptionist did this on purpose lol
Does he still work there and does he laugh with you? Otherwise this sounds like bullying
Someone must’ve summoned Shenron the day before he found them and got underwhelmed by the wish fulfillment.
Oolong back on his shit
Funny if they were her panties all along. Turned the embarrassment from “Guess who dropped her panties in the lobby” to " Guess who was playing with panties in the lobby."
This adds a whole new dimension to the lore.
Used to work at a local resort. One time, Kid Rock rented out the whole top floor of the hotel, and requested no staff go up there during his stay. Of course, it’s a hotel full of minimum wage teenagers, so intra-staff communication is abysmal. A maid ended up running into a naked Kid Rock holding a bag of cocaine lol
That’s complicated to answer in my case, as nobody gets along (I’m one of the few people with a relatively stable work relation), so there’s an incident everyday, though there are also occasional ones that stand out a lot. I for some reason have a lot of bad rep without any actual cause for it and remember people storming into our operations more than once and demanding I be exiled from the place. There are two types of people in this situation whenever it has happened: those who are almost about to oblige and fulfill their wish, and me who calls authorities and ends up dealing with the situation before they can do so before everyone just forgets all that happened.
I bet you have done good stories about that
It depends on what you mean by good, as they aren’t things I like to think happen to me often, though one consistent theme reveals itself out of it, even when merely talking about it.
I hurt my back working today. That was an incident.
