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Too Clever For My Own Good

(2018 sometime)

15 years ago, I accidentally ran a complicated shell command that muffed a couple variables and ended up trying to do a rm-f /.

Through ssh.

Via cron.

On the NIS master system.

Which was in New Jersey.

From Ottawa.

As a contractor.

Fortunately, the OS suicided before it could get to the source code repositories on the same system, so one Jumpstart later (it was a Solaris system) and some judicious restores, they were back in business.

Both my boss and the customer looked at what I had done, understood the intent, and told me to be more careful in the future. I still work for that boss.