I had a much more minor incident, I was doing web and linuxy stuff for a more established consultant who resold my time out occasionally, and on this occasion he'd managed to sell me as capable of installing some line printers onto a Solaris based warehousing system, a operating system I made clear that I had no experience of to him at the time.
After goading and considerable prodding thought I'd very very cautiously give it a go, after telling Alan yet again I didn't know what I was doing really, and him insisting I tried anyway "as its not live yet anyway". So there's 4 temps furiously entering inventory data as fast as they can in four terminals to get the inventory system populated with the stock ready for the go live in two days time, and we arrived onsite mid afternoon and after a hour I had got a shell and felt about and installed the drivers by running the bundled shell scripts, but things weren't playing the game, so I decided one process called "printr" was the culprit and had to be shut down. It ignored a -HUP, so it got the big kill -9 shotgun, and that worked. Sadly I could tell it had because I heard the screams from around the room as a entire day's data entry went down the toilet as it cached all the data entries in ram until told to write it out, which they did at the end of each day. We fired it back up quick and it was devoid of entries...
On the plus side, at that point the printer started working perfectly, so I apologised profusely to the temps for ruining their work and made my exit. And the temps were paid hourly.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
