“Oh, there’s a word for what I feel? I guess I’m trans.”

I was testing some code late at night in the test system. Rolled out the changes, log on to the admin interface and write a short news article about how one of the more hated profs at the university had died suddenly and unexpectedly.

Result looks good, roll out changes to prod, about to call it quits for the night. Think to myself: common reason people get fired, maybe delete the story from test system. Check test system, no story there… Uhoh.

Story has been live for about three hours. Hope no spiders have caught it yet, hurry to delete it and learn how to purge all evidence from database.

Turns out the shithead admin had copy and pasted the server config for the test system from live and forgotten to change the admin rewrite rules to test system. Phew…

A short, medium, or long story

So, a story?

Two big ones in my younger days:

Alt tabbed one too many times, clicked drop database, clicked ok, realized I’d just deleted the live user database for America’s Army. Thankfully it was the east coast site and west coast was the primary, and it was only one way replication. We shut down east coast auth and rebuilt the secondary.

Someone distracted me while typing in a vlan command on a switch, I hit enter without double checking, took out our fiber between two datacenters in the middle of a move. Took me 15 minutes to run to the DC, plug in a console cable and fix it. Took all of our customers out.

I predict this will be quite tame compared to the rest of this thread but here you go anyway:

Our scene opens on a person with a bass guitar, practicing some sick slap bass perched upon an IKEA office chair. The player is lost in the zone, all mental facilities put to work making every strike with the thumb is accurate and powerful, and every pop of the fingers sends the strings into the fretboard with a gorgeous thwack! The sound is heavenly, a deep, rich, cutting tone- full of appropriate levels of CLANK and SNAP. The short riff being performed to a concert of no-one reaches its magnificent height, a slammingly heavy riff sounding like a funky machine gun, the bassists hands become a blur, the strings vibrate with precision and power, a glorious cacophony of ma-

kkrrmp.

Oh crap, I broke a string

“We need to talk.”

Just one?

Shit job from 10 years ago. Getting too drunk at the office Christmas party and talking so much shit about my horrible fucking boss to a couple of influential senior managers who are close to the CFO. Freaked out all weekend about it, severe anxiety attacks. That mixed with the hangover I was just vomiting all weekend.

And then: Run into one of those senior managers early in the office on Monday morning, apologised for being inappropriate. Get a response “oh, we all know how bad she is, can’t believe you haven’t quit yet”.

Used to work for a gaming company that had a really big Facebook presence.

When most companies launched a new game they would just launch the game connect to Facebook and call it a day.

But when we launched a new game we would turn on cross-promotion and send millions of users to the new game day one.

The problem is that Facebooks load balancers don’t scale quickly. And if you start sending millions of people to a game that just errors, it’s pretty bad for marketing.

So we had a script that you would run for an hour before you went to launch a game that would start making hundreds then thousands than tens of thousands of connections to Facebook giving their load balancers time to scale.

Well, I didn’t write the tool I was just given it and the documentation on it was kind of sparse at the time. I started with the value of 30,000. Weeeellll, turns out a sane value would have been 3-5 as it multiplied whatever input you gave it by 10K.

My cluster made sweet love with their cluster, and Facebook went down for about 3 hours.

Within a week they had some pretty decent changes to their new API limit subsystem.

Boss walks in: “can I see you in my office for a moment…”

Fuck corporate life and I’m sorry to everyone living in it… -former boss

I was once driving on some back roads I was unfamiliar with. I turned a corner and didn’t realize there was a stop sign until too late and went right through the intersection. As I went through it, I turned my head to the left and noticed that a car was heading right for me. It missed me by inches.

My old company stopped contributing to our 401k even when they were taking the $$ out. The CEO Irma gave us her personal message that they were going to take care of it and that we were doing just fine.

Then we got a surprise video meeting over memorial day. The oh shit moment was everyone was told via the call that we were indefinitely furloughed. I didn’t even know that was thing. Unfortunately when you get furloughed like we did, you can’t get unemployment since your not terminated, you can’t get insurance, and paychecks started to bounce from over a month ago. It was a bad situation. So yeah that was my oh shit situation.

Yesterday I was waiting for the Tram.

As I stood there, I turned my head to the right and witnessed how a pigeon was hit by a car.

Kinda traumatizing, especially when the cars that followed ran over and over the carcass.

It was my sister’s birthday and I was over her place helping set everything up for the night party and then she said “dad’s not picking up the phone”

I had the gut feeling then and there something had happened and indeed he had had a hearth attack that morning

When I realised that full-blown corruptions (sometimes of of entire folders) are happening on not just the HDD that I store games on, but also the HDD that stores Windows. This computer’s old and my next one will have SDDs but I’ve decided I want to make the most out of this computer since it still runs games very well, and I’ll go to the computer store to buy a new one once it inevitably bricks itself.