He Burned Down The School
“In my first high school coding job — I guess that made me a tech intern — I burned down the office due to a cabling mistake. The building survived but inside it was a total loss, displaced 100+ people, and destroyed lots of files, records, artwork, and a lot of the CEO’s memorabilia. That’s his name on the front of the building. He never blamed me, but I think he knew it was my fault.”
Intern Troll vs Mark Zuckerberg’s Wife
“While I was interning at Facebook, we were testing Facebook Questions shortly before the official launch. I decided to answer a few questions, just to see the flow. The second or third question was from a girl asking “How to solve quadratic equations?”
Since I’m a big fan of XKCD (a sarcastic comic strip) my instant response was “Have you tried logarithms?”
Then I decided actually to write it. Well, after all, as any such platform it was expected to have trolls so it was still a valid form of “testing” and I thought it was not that bad. That is until I realized that Priscilla Chan, the person who asked the question, was Mark Zuckerberg’s girlfriend and now wife.”
“The Night Of The Yellow Ad”
On December 4th, 2018, Google made a costly mistake.
At 7 pm, many publishers across the United States and Australia noticed yellow square ads display on their sites. But what really caught them off-guard were the CPMs— the yellow ad was paying over $20 (USD) CPMs. Almost immediately, publishers saw their hourly revenue increase— surpassing their normal averages.
Unfortunately, it didn’t last long. At 7:45 pm, the mysterious yellow ad mysteriously disappeared.
Google spokesperson later explained how the yellow ad was a training mistake made by one of their teams. This had many publishers concerned they wouldn’t be paid for the hefty yellow ad, but Google ensured them they would get paid.
Within that 45-minute span, the yellow ad campaign spent “at least $1.6 million, based on figures AdExchanger could confirm, but total spending may have exceeded $10 million, sources estimated, based on the number of publishers they knew were affected.”
Google also announced they were “erecting guardrails to ensure it doesn’t happen again.”
The “Reply All” Button
“The CPA firm I worked for always hired 4 or 5 summer interns and they just got picked up to help on miscellaneous engagements as needed. When they didn’t have anything to work on, they were required to email the entire department with an ‘available for work’ email so people would know they were free.
When one of the interns sent their email, another intern friend of his accidentally hit ‘reply all’ with three simple words: ‘Suck my balls.’
The intern just told an entire department of 60-something people including partners, managers, department heads, etc. to ‘Suck it.’
It was magical. Everyone got the email at the same time and you could see heads start to come up over cube walls one by one like prairie dogs. Managers slowly stepped out of their offices and everyone just stared at each other in shock.
They now offer ‘reply all’ training as part of intern orientation.”
“The Baby Lived For Only A Few Hours”
“This happened during the fall of 2012. I was a medical intern at my hospital. I am a guy.
The interns in my country are rotatory interns, meaning that they are posted in every department by turn for a fixed duration.
I was posted in the Paediatrics department and I was on duty in the maternity ward. There was a lady who was on the table for the regular delivery.
Apparently, the ultrasound and the other diagnostic results had already revealed that the baby had a condition called meningomyelocele and severe spinal cord atresia accompanied by myeloschisis. There was also a possible severe cardiac defect in the baby, which I can not confirm. Also, the obstetric resident had verified an absence of fetal heart sound by auscultation before the delivery (meaning that the unborn baby’s heart was not beating).
I was unaware of these findings and I had just resumed my night shift for that day a few minutes back.
Without consulting my pediatric resident, I had gone straight into the delivery room to take charge of the situation there. There was no one from the Paediatric team to supervise me at that moment (does happen sometimes when the shift changes).
Now there is an unwritten rule in my hospital not to resuscitate those babies that have been classified as grossly malformed or stillborn. The decision for the same is arrived at by the pediatric residents after consultation with each other.
Apparently, this baby had previously been classified for the same, unaware to me.
Until this time I was just assuming that the baby to be delivered was a normal delivery, which was why no senior pediatric resident was there to receive it. So, I went ahead and offered the Gynae resident to receive the delivery, to which she had agreed.
After the delivery, I received the baby, and noticing that it was limp and lifeless, I panicked. I immediately assessed its condition, just as the protocol normally, and began resuscitating it after finding out that it did not have a heartbeat. By this time I was also aware of the gross congenital anomaly with the baby.
I did everything according to the protocol and somehow managed to save its life (I had a fair amount of experience by then in such deliveries). Now, this was nothing short of a “miracle” because such babies can never survive, or be successfully resuscitated, and here was a stupid intern who had managed to throw life into a dead body, somehow, defying all the laws of nature!
Although I did manage to revive it, it was still taking shallow breaths, or rather gasping for breaths even on 100% oxygen. The heartbeat was thready and very slow. There was possibly severe brain damage because of the lack of blood supply to the brain by then. Every second was a painful one for it. Agonizing actually. The gross congenital anomaly meant that it would have been paralyzed from the neck down.
When my resident got wind of this, he rushed to the room and took charge of the situation. I also received a nice hearing from the team for my careless act.
The baby had “lived” for a few painful hours after that, after which it had eventually died.
Yes, to this day, I get nightmares of that day. I still consider myself guilty.”
“I Nuked Everybody’s Email In An Unrecoverable Way”
“Back in the ’90s, I was an intern at Digital Equipment Corp, before they were purchased by Compaq, and later Hewlett-Packard. Many of the departments back then had their own mail server, and mine at the time had an Exchange Server (version 5.5, if I’m not mistaken).
We had a couple of hundred people on our department’s server, and a couple of them had left the company. So I decided one day that it would be good to remove those people from the Global Address List. I knew virtually nothing about managing Exchange, but I figured that it shouldn’t be that difficult to delete a couple of entries from the address list, so I decided to wing it (I was only 18 at the time and thought I knew better). Instead of removing a couple of entries from the address list, I inadvertently deleted someone’s mailbox by mistake. That was pretty bad, but fortunately, I found a tech note somewhere that explained how to recover a deleted mailbox, which involved restoring the entire database. Without telling anyone or asking for help, I took it upon myself to do the restoration. During that process, I ended up wiping the database without a backup and nuked everybody’s email in an unrecoverable way. It was quite damaging.
Fast Forward 16 years later… I now work for Microsoft and I wrote and contributed to multiple Microsoft Exchange books. Hopefully, my past pains have prevented some people from repeating similar mistakes!”
