In my thirty-year and seven-month computer analyst career at Auburn University, I made two significant technical mistakes that almost no one witnessed. I barely survived both mistakes.
Mistake 1
About halfway through my career, a coworker called me from a professor’s office. They needed help installing a new hard drive on the professor’s computer. He wanted to copy a lot of data files from an old drive to the new drive. This was a Unix computer (look it up), and the task required typing a series of lengthy weird commands, something I had done correctly countless times. I was confident, definitely too confident. I sat down at the computer keyboard and display and was ready to install the new drive. I then typed one incorrect character in a command sequence, which promptly erased the old drive containing the data files.
My coworker freaked a little, and the professor was in shock. Then I was in shock. Luckily, the professor had copies of his data files on a magnetic tape (yes, a tape, I’m old), and we were able to install the new drive and then restore the files.
I was shaken about this for a while. My coworker needled me later (rightfully so), and the professor never called me again (so it wasn’t a total loss).
I told my boss this story about a year later. I waited until after my annual review.
Mistake 2
I managed and co-managed several computer servers. From time to time, we’d receive software updates (aka patches) from vendors for these systems. I installed these updates countless times without fail, until once early in my marriage. First, I installed these updates on an afternoon on a weekday. You should almost always schedule updates for a weekend morning. But only a handful of people used this server, so I wasn’t worried.
I misread the instructions slightly, installed the update, and it sort of killed the computer. I cursed and spent a few hours looking for an easy fix. I couldn’t find one. By then, my coworkers had left for the day. I called my wife and told her to eat dinner without me.
This computer was “backed up” (a copy was saved) to a network machine. I eventually was able to restore it to its original state, and it worked again after midnight. I didn’t install the new software updates and went home.
I was a little late showing up for work the next day. My boss asked me what happened.
“The patch instructions were weird. It works now.”
“Okay.”
A few weeks later, on a weekend, I installed the new updates, correctly this time.
Almost Mistake 3
A few years before I retired, I inherited a computer server that contained thousands of video files. It worked great, and people all over campus used it regularly. I understood the software and setup of the computer, and since it worked, I didn’t want to touch it. The vast majority of the time, I didn’t have trouble working with computer systems, but I didn’t want to tempt fate. Still, I would regularly login to the machine and look for problems. The system had been mine to manage for a few months when I noticed it wasn’t being backed up to our network backup server. In fact, as far as I could tell, it had never been backed up. This was an old computer with old hard drives. If a hard drive died, the files would probably have been lost forever. I went into high gear, connected the computer to the backup system, made a copy of every file, then I set it up to copy new files every day.
The computer continued to work and was taken out of service a year or so later. If it had died, I was ready.