I spent a decade working in insolvency.

When we were going into a business that had failed the question was “Are the idiots, criminals or both?”

One highlight:

A boat sales / marine business goes bust. When we arrive with the paper work and seize the place there are about a dozen new boats on the lot worth several million. We change the locks on the gates.

Arrive the next day, the gates have been busted open and several million in boats are now missing. We look up the addresses of the owners (one of them lives on acreage) and drive to their property…from the road we can see the boats stashed there. Really smart guys.

So we call the police. Someone inside notices use there and decides to flee with one of the boats, it is huge but they think they can get away.

We then have the slowest car chase in history as we calmly follow this guy towing a boat on a trailer down the road while talking to the cops to meet us.

A milder story than some here:

Someone had accidentally sent an email to the whole company of 44,000 or so employees. Cue a bunch of emails -replying all- asking why they were receiving the email… followed by another wave of emails asking people to stop replying all.

Was a great popcorn moment, and made me laugh every time a new email came in.

An isolated shingle spit nature reserve. We’d lost mains power in a storm some while back and were running on a generator. Fuel deliveries were hard to arrange. We’d finally got one. We were pretty much running on fumes and another storm was coming in. We really needed this delivery.

To collect the fuel, I had to take the Unimog along a dump track and across 5 miles of loose shingle - including one low causeway stretch through a lagoon that was prone to wash out during storms. We’d rebuilt it a LOT over the years. On the way up, there was plenty of water around there, but it was still solid.

I get up to the top ok and get the tank full - 2000L of red diesel - but the wind is pretty strong by the time I have. Half way back, I drop down off the seawall and reach the causeway section. The water is just about topping over. If I don’t go immediately, I won’t get through at all and we will be out of fuel for days - maybe weeks. So I put my foot down and get through that section only to find that 200 meters on, another section already has washed out. Oh shit.

I back up a little but sure enough the first section has also washed through now. I now have the vehicle and a full load of fuel marooned on a short section of causeway that is slowly washing out. Oh double shit. Probably more than double. Calling it in on the radio, everyone else agrees and starts preparing for a pollution incident.

In the end I find the firmest spot that I can in that short stretch and leave the Moggie there. Picking my route and my moment carefully I can get off that ‘island’ on foot - no hope with the truck - BUT due to the layout of the lagoons only to the seaward ridge, where the waves are now crashing over into the lagoon with alarming force. I then spend one of the longest half-hours I can remember freezing cold and drenched, scrambling yard by yard along the back side of that ridge and flattening myself and hoping each time a big wave hits.

The firm bit of causeway survived and there was no washed away Unimog or pollution in the end - and I didn’t drown either - but much more by luck than judgement.

These days I am in a position where I am responsible for writing risk assessments and methods statements for procedures like this. It was another world back then.

I worked at a sandwich shop and had given my two weeks notice a few days earlier. My manager came to me and asked me to clean up the bathroom…alright. I could smell it before I even opened the door.

I told my manager I’d clean it if he’d still give me the employee discount after I was gone. “Done”. That’s when I knew it was really bad.

When I opened the door I discovered someone had ass-blasted the bathroom. I’m not talking about blowing up the toilet, they did that too, but they had dropped their drawers and point-blank diarhea shotgunned the pipes under the sink.

My manager didn’t honor the employee discount after I was gone, either.

I used to work at a car dealership. One day I had to use a bay in a different building because my usual workplace was occupied. The other building had a lift that I hadn’t used before.

Anyways, I drove the car onto the lift, got out and placed the arms of the lift under the jacking points like I had done a thousand times before. I raised the lift a little and checked if the placement was still correct. It looked good, so I raised the car to a medium height. When I looked again, I realized that this lift had a central platform that was also raised and was set about 20 centimeters higher than the four arms that usually lift the car.

This 90.000 Euro SUV was basically balancing on a 180x50cm piece of metal right in the center. I managed to lower it down safely but my pulse goes up just thinking about that day.

Sharing my story for posterity.

I used to work at a medical center for old folks with varying disabilities. It was a great job all things considered, just didn’t pay very well and the scheduling was a mess.

Anyway, one day I’m cleaning tables on the dining room when I hear on my walkie talkie that one of the new people need help with a guy in the bathroom. Usually “they need help” means “something has gone awry, please unfuck the situation” and, since I was the supervisor on shift, my job frequently involved untucking a situation.

I arrive outside the bathroom door and the new employee tells me that she walked into a situation that she wasn’t prepared for. I figured it was some poop, or the guy fell asleep on the toilet or something.

I walk in and the walls were all painted with poop. The sink was painted with poop. The floor was painted with poop. The paper towel dispenser had poop all over the front of it.

The poor guy had gone to the bathroom, got confused and tried to remember what toilet paper was. He saw me and knew I was there to help, but he was nonverbal. His way of saying thank you was to gently take his hand and rest it under your chin.

He did so, but his hand was also still covered on poop.

I’m used to poop. It’s a normal job hazard in that line of work. But something about having to clean myself and every surface in the room from caked poop while somebody else gave the poor guy a shower…that kind of story sticks with you. To this day I can’t look at finger paints without feeling a little queasy.

I work in live sports TV.

Champions League Final (European Football). Kind of a big deal. Doing a money shot camera behind the goals. 4 minutes in, one of the cameras goes dead. I try all the fixes I can remotely, while all the while the director wants the camera back up and getting quite heated about it. The only thing left to try is to replug the remote head. That part is, unfortunately, 10m past the ad boards, on the grass.

I waited for play to be down the other end (and gave the security guy a heads up what I was about to do!). Jumped the ad boards, and replugged everything. At that moment, there’s a roar from the crowd, as there is a break down the wing. I am VERY much NOT supposed to be on the grass! My brain tries to freeze, luckily, 100 million years of instincts kick in to save my arse. Next thing I know, I’m finishing a sort of head first leap/ airborne commando roll, over the ad boards to tuck in behind them.

The camera restarted just before a shot on goal. The operator captured it perfectly. Much to the directors relief/delight. I also, somehow managed to avoid being on any of the camera shots. I’m still not quite sure how.

Alt tabbed once too many times, clicked drop database, clicked yes. Realized what I’d done and panicked.

Deleted the user db for the east coast auth server for the game America’s Army: Operations. Thankfully it was the secondary so we just redid replication.

Two nights ago I had a random meeting with the CEO, who I have a really good relationship with, added to my calendar. Thought nothing of it.

I entered the zoom call and said ‘so am I getting fired?’

The answer was yes.

Awkward silence ensued for a minute until they started telling me about the severance package.

Side note: I can try to negotiate that severance a bit right?

Older gentleman walked into the lobby of our office. None of us knew who he was or had seen him before. He looked confused and lost. Someone went over to ask if they could help him. He tried to but didn’t respond. Then fell over. Hit his head on a table on the way down. Was dead before the pandemics arrived.

We were all in shock. Poor guy was starting into a stroke when he walked in. Maybe even walked into our office to try getting help. But it was already too late.

My first salaried job was also my first proper IT job and I was a “junior technician” … the only other member of IT staff was my supervisor who had been a secretary that got a 1 week sysadmin course and knew very little.

The server room was a complete rat’s nest and I resolved to sort it out. It was all going very well until I tripped over the loose SCSI 3 cable between the AIX server and it’s raid array. While it was in use.

It took me 2 days to restore everything from tape. My supervisor was completely useless.

A few months later I was “made redundant”, leaving behind me everything working perfectly and a super tidy server room. I got calls from the company asking for help for the following 6 months, which I politely declined.

Not my oh shit moment but certainly someone’s. Working in a call centre they sent out an example of a fraud email that was being sent out with our logo. It asked for all your personal information and credit card information.

Several individuals replied with all their details filled in. 3 of them replied all (entire call centre) with their details filled in.

Worked at a hotel. Our phone system required you to dial 9 to reach an outside line on every phone except one: the fax machine, which was set up to dial that 9 automatically when you started dialing.

It would take a second to start making dialing sounds while it dialed that 9 in silence. Our AGM would dial the 1 before the area code, not hear any immediate sounds, and then press the 1 again. Then dial the rest of the number.

So as far as the switchboard I used to direct calls was concerned, someone just dialed 911. So it made the “holy fuck someone’s dying” alarm, our local 911 dispatcher got to hear a fax machine screeching its handshake tones, and I got to go into “oh shit a guest is having a stroke” mode, only to find out that no, my manager didn’t read the sign posted over the fax machine because of this behavior. Again.

And then we would get a call from 911 asking what the emergency was and have to explain that it was dialed by mistake.

Of course, this was almost always during a rush.

Great thing about fax machines. They can be set up in such a way that if they don’t get a fax handshake, they wait a few minutes and try dialing the number again.

I have a small PC I use for exposing a private PC to the wider web via nginx proxy. It had two accounts on it: mine, and one I called “remote” with some basic password I set up to forward the proxy connection.

One day, this machine started making 100% CPU noises, for several hours. Wtf? I check the processes and a Tor node had been setup and was transmitting gigabytes to some Russian IP.

My brain goes into panic mode, I kill the process, wipe the remote user, and eventually pull the Ethernet plug.

I wish I hadn’t wiped the user directory as I wanted to know what was being sent and where. Nonetheless the logs showed that several Russian IPs had been attempting an SSH brute force for literally months and one finally guessed “remote” and weak password I set for it.

I have decades of experience on Unix system, and I cringe having made such a rookie mistake.

Lesson learned: change the default SSH port to a transient port, have one dedicated SSH user with a non-standard username, and use auth-key entry only.

I still wonder what was being sent over that Tor node, and why it required all the CPU cores. My best guess is crypto mining, or it was used for a DDOS attack net somewhere.

A bunch of angry cops showed up looking for their murder suspect. It was a guy I worked with that apparently was also involved in the heroin industry. He ended up in prison but not for murder.