Back in the late 90s I was a sales engineer working for a rapidly growing firewall company.

I went to meet with a customer representative at the Philadelphia Stock Exchange.

Middle of the trading day and we were crammed together in the data center in front of his windows NT based firewall with a small rack mounted keyboard, monitor and mouse.

I was in front of the keyboard and he was to my left, the mouse was on the right. He wanted to show me something so he reached over the keyboard to grab the mouse and when he did he accidentally clicked start --> shutdown in rapid succession.

As soon as he realized what had just happened, he started mashing at the keyboard trying to stop the inevitable. As the futility of that effort washed over him, he jumped up and yelled - "you've got to get out of here!"

I'll never forget looking back on my way out of the data center and seeing how pale his face was against the red telephone headset as he uttered the words: "I just shut down traffic to the trading floor."

Wasn't my surgery and I wasn't in charge but I would have done the exact same thing.

Morbidly obese woman walks into the delivery room saying she hasn't felt the baby move in 4 hours. Her due date was 1 week ago. She's visiting from out of town so no medical records to review.

No ultrasound in the unit back in those days... Nurses put patient on fetal heart monitor. Heart rate 80. Either maternal heart beat being heard or profound fetal distress. Minutes matter. Any delay could mean permanently damaged or dead baby. Chief resident orders STAT Cesarean. I run in to assist.

General anesthesia. Patient asleep. Big incision. Rushing to get baby out...

Uterus the size of a small pear. Patient not even pregnant. Oops.... We closed her up.

I bet FastFred will find this hilarious if he ever sees this thread. Very funny my friend

i still cant talk about it. pissed me off. lost 2 weeks of good sleep because of it.

it wasnt even my mistake. an underling mis-read some data..but i was in charge and my name is tainted because of it.

i immediately went into action and contacted all supervisors...turned out they were really impressed with holding myself accountable..one supe said, "you would be surprised to see how many just sweep a mistake under the rug"..he asked me how much sleep i lost. hahaha.

we formulated a plan, fixed it..paid. moved on with my life. my mistake actually put me on the upper management radar..i proved my honesty.

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1500928116.jpg

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1500928116.jpg


j/k

I did, comedy gold right there !

And posted one minute before it was suggested in your original thread. :)

My first job out of college was for a small electronics firm that sold and installed industrial intercom systems. They sold equipment produced by firm up in Pennsylvania in addition to to equipment they manufactured themselves. The state of the art at that time for electronics in an explosion risk environment such as a chemical plant or refinery was to enclose everything in heavy duty aluminum boxes connected with heavy steel conduit. The company that hired me was designing an "intrinsic safe" system that used barriers to limit voltage and current to isolate low power equipment in the hazard area from a safe area where the major switching circuits could be housed. My job was to design a module that would generate low power, low frequency sub-audio tones at the field phones in the hazard area to signal the switching gear in the safe zone. Real easy to design a simple oscillators that could be turned on and off with reed switches activated by magnets mounted under a mechanical button. The tones and voice would be carried on the same conductors run through regular conduit back to the barriers. The circuit would be potted in a meter case. The circuit I came up with worked great in the lab and then in the warehouse were we tested it. We produced a bunch of them for the first job that the sales department scored. It was for a chemical plant outside Hamburg, Germany. All the field phones and switching gear cabinets were shipped and the electricians in Germany installed them. Everything came up and worked great until winter. Then all the field phones started winking out. On a warm day they all came back to life. Ooops. We went out and rented an environmental chamber and tested one of the modules. When the circuit got too hot or too cold the switching frequencies drifted way out of speck. Back to the drawing board. I came up with a temperature stable oscillator circuit, taped the artwork for a new PC board and then we spent a nigh etching a batch of PC boards, stuffing and testing them, potting them in meter cases. By the weekend we had a suit case full of them and were on Lufthansa bound for Germany. After that the company bought an environmental chamber to test everything. One of the sales reps put a bottle of Scotch Whisky in it and froze it way down to slush. He tried drinking it and got frost bite on his tong and down his throat. Dang near died from the complications. Duh.

Not me but a co-worker left a piece of plastic wedge between the bonnet and longitudinal (I thinks it's called) on a 787. Got to the flight line before it was noticed.

That was a $1,000,000 mistake.

not quite that bad..but it may as well been with how badly i felt.. :)

The "food baby" (usually) gets delivered via the other orifice.

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