During my first year in IT, I had a significant mishap that I handled well, but my boss did not. I called them out on it, and my boss’s boss found it hilarious. Here’s the story:
We had around 600 clients, with those hosted through us spread across a few VPSs. Being new, I had the 10-6 shift, and everyone else was usually gone by 5:30 PM.
One day, a client was moving from WordPress/WooCommerce to Shopify. I handled the migration, set everything up, pointed the DNS to the new location, and everything was live/propagating. All that was left was to clean up, back up, and delete the old site. It was 5 PM, and I thought it would be an easy end to the day.
Except, due to a particularly shit UI/UX… Instead of deleting the client’s site, I accidentally deleted the entire VPS hosting about a dozen clients… At 5:35 PM, so I was alone… and new to the job. I stayed until around 8:30, despite clocking out at 6 to hopefully make a clean situation of my mistake. I was restoring backups, updating IP addresses throughout our infrastructure, and fixing everything…
That night, I got hammered and called out sick the next day. My manager, who was around 25, was furious. They called me while I was out sick, but I didn’t answer. They then sent me an angry, unprofessional email. Apparently, the IP address change had caused our tech lead to think we had been compromised for a few hours, til he figure out what’d happened.
Before going in the next next day, I sent my response CC’d my boss’s boss, explaining that sending angry emails while I was out sick wasn’t the right approach. I mentioned that their insistence on me not asking them for help led me to work for free after hours to fix the issue. I apologized for not leaving a note, but said I certainly would have if I were able to predict I’d be out sick the next day.
During my first year in IT, I had a significant mishap that I handled well, but my boss did not. I called them out on it, and my boss’s boss found it hilarious. Here’s the story:
We had around 600 clients, with those hosted through us spread across a few VPSs. Being new, I had the 10-6 shift, and everyone else was usually gone by 5:30 PM.
One day, a client was moving from WordPress/WooCommerce to Shopify. I handled the migration, set everything up, pointed the DNS to the new location, and everything was live/propagating. All that was left was to clean up, back up, and delete the old site. It was 5 PM, and I thought it would be an easy end to the day.
Except, due to a particularly shit UI/UX… Instead of deleting the client’s site, I accidentally deleted the entire VPS hosting about a dozen clients… At 5:35 PM, so I was alone… and new to the job. I stayed until around 8:30, despite clocking out at 6 to hopefully make a clean situation of my mistake. I was restoring backups, updating IP addresses throughout our infrastructure, and fixing everything…
That night, I got hammered and called out sick the next day. My manager, who was around 25, was furious. They called me while I was out sick, but I didn’t answer. They then sent me an angry, unprofessional email. Apparently, the IP address change had caused our tech lead to think we had been compromised for a few hours, til he figure out what’d happened.
Before going in the next next day, I sent my response CC’d my boss’s boss, explaining that sending angry emails while I was out sick wasn’t the right approach. I mentioned that their insistence on me not asking them for help led me to work for free after hours to fix the issue. I apologized for not leaving a note, but said I certainly would have if I were able to predict I’d be out sick the next day.
That place was toxic.