Favourite Epic Fails

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Very similar experience when I worked at the Halifax back in the early 80's. BT guys walked into our busy office (5 cashiers going all day and around 100 mortgage applications a month going thru') and promptly announced they were working in the road and were going to cut all our phone and data cables - err, like no you're not ! Big bust up between them and the management resulting in a call to HO. Turns out BT hadn't informed them so they had to fill their hole back in and go away

 

A sales manager from Dell was coming to a a large DataCenter a few months back in order to sell some services to clients.

He was in his BMW X5, waiting at the gate and ringing the reception bell in order to get in. The gate began to open, and the sales manager being too impatient, must have hit gas.

It left a huge dent in the gate which nearly got ripped from its foundations. At the datacenter, they decided to leave the now broken gate in the backyard as a souvenir. Musta been a hefty bill.

p.s. the datacenter hosts multiple finance sector clients, the company I work for is just one who has servers there...

 

When I worked at the old bill we had a satellite office about 800 yards away provided with connectivity to the main office by a line of sight link. Every day at various points at least once a day the link used to go down either completely or intermittently for ten minutes at a time. After a couple of months of this I went to the office and set up an IP cam pointed at the endpoint to see what was causing it. Later that morning the motion sensor was triggered and I had the biggest laugh of my life. Turns out the old dear in the flats above was chucking bread out for the pigeons - who duly swooped down and sat directly in front of the f***ing endpoint for the ten minutes it took to scoff the lot before sodding off again.

Old-Lady-Feeding-Pigeons-FAIL

 

Should of had This as back up

 

I remeber a few years ago going for an interview at Hinchinbrooke Hospital in Huntingdon. Was only for a temp job on the IT support. I'd arrived 15 mins early all prepped for teh interview, suit and tie, folder with my certs in etc.
At teh reception desk was told to take a seat and someone would be with me shortly.
15mins past my interview time, noone had turned up so i went back to reception and asked if they could check to see what was keeping the interviewer. I was again told they would call and could i take a seat.
Another 15mins went past, still no sign, so off i went and asked again, receptionist tried to call but couldnt get through so siad they'd send someone over to It to find out.
30mins later teh head of It turned up all apologetic. Turns out 5 mins before my interview, some electrical contractors had been drilling through a wall to install some new mains cables. And they's only gone and drilled through the main backbone cables for the hospitals IT network! All panic had broken loose will calls to the support department that peoples PC's had crashed and servers had gone down etc.
ONE BIG BIG FAIL!!

(got the job but only stayed 2 months as got perm job somewhere else!)

And for a personal fail not It related. Last year i went to Combat Laser in Thetford forest. Its liek Paintballing but you use guns fitted with lasers and tehy way a ton! Well half way into teh day and i was very tired and exhausted. We were ina game an i was crouched down behind a 2 ft wooden fence for cover. Liek and idiot i stood up and decided to try to jump teh wall and run to teh next bit of cover......

Lets just say that the dirt ended up being my cover, all over my face and front and that gun sure as hell hurt my chest when i laned on it! Still, noone could shoot me as they were all too busy rolling on teh floor with laughter!

 

My winner of the Epic Fail awards goes to BT as well.

I work in a small office of all of about 50 people and we were confused one day to find that all our phones had stopped working, for some actually in the middle of calls with clients. Some initial investigation found that everything seemed to be fine at our end. Just as I was about to place a call to BT on my mobile I spot the tell tale colour scheme of a BT van next to the box across the road. I strolled out towards the incredibly sheepish looking BT guys who before I even reached them said 'Sorry, the box is mislabelled, we thought we were unplugging the school. It'll all be back on in a second'

Labelling-Fail

 

My first week working in the CSFB building in Canary warf (for a hedge fund)
My boss assured me that the switches were set up for multicast,
so I ghosted a new system build, about 7gb of it..
my machine promptly locked, for the next few minutes
lots of folks started reporting similar issues

if it wasnt for the fact i could see both screens (the ghost machine and mine) to notice the ghost image finish and my machine suddenly unlock and move all the windows I'd been trying to move for 10 minutes, i'd of had no idea what happened

the switches didnt have multi cast enabled, so they promptly sent 7GB of unicast traffic to every port on the switch just incase!, killing pretty much every machine on the floor for 5 minutes

rock on week 1