Who, Me? It's Monday morning, and a week of possibilities presents itself to IT pros everywhere. Which is why The Register brings you another edition of Who, Me? It's the reader-contributed column in which we remind you what not to do with your day, your week, and your career, by sharing stories of your worst workplace mistakes and the contortions you made to survive them.
This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Wilma" who told us that while at university she volunteered with a group working on the student association's website.
The team completed a new version of the site, and Wilma got the job of uploading it
She therefore set out to delete the old site, before loading the new code.
"To my horror I realized I was in the root directory of the web server – /var/www –rather than the directory holding the files for the site," she told Who, Me? "I had just deleted all websites on the student association's webserver."
In her defense, Wilma told The Register that at the time "I was quite new to Linux and wasn't used to command line interfaces."
"The server was quickly restored from backups by someone competent and I was not allowed to work on the website anymore," she told Who, Me?
"After that I developed the habit of double checking what I'm about to do on the Linux command line before pressing Enter," Wilma wrote. "Because as I learned, Linux will do what you said to do and it WON'T ask if you are sure."
Have you made a mistake with technology you didn't know well? The biggest mistake you can make is not clicking here to send email to Who, Me? to share your story. ®
Source: The register