Ask HN: What was your worst typo?

Not quite a "typo" exactly, but more a misclick: a few weeks ago, I accidentally clicked the wrong "delete" button and removed a production ecommerce system for organic grocery delivery. Two days before Thanksgiving :(

When I was at school I wrote an essay on Beethoven's life. Beethoven's third symphony, the "Eroica" is important in that it is a marker of the start of the Romantic era (his first two symphonies are straight out 'Classical').

The maybe six times I mentioned it, the third symphony, I managed to each time accidentally title the work the "Erotica". Such is being a high-school student.

No important ramifications.

I went through countless change control meetings, my part being a change to the DNS primary file. Being a smart-ass, I used a curses based editor (nedit) instead of vi for this special occasion. I missed a semicolon.

DNS was down for the company for a while. Being a trading company, I don't know if I cost them or saved them money in bad trades, but traders are bookies. They make money on every bet. A buddy just fixed it for me once it was found out.

NOTE: This is what we should have done and spared those countless change control meetings.

Problem is that some genius before me (no kidding!) set up zone transfers by copying (rcp/scp) the primary file to the secondaries, defeating their ability to take over for the primary. They broke as well. I left before that issue was addressed (or not addressed)

In another job, I did run the find command with rm, and of course, the path ended up being /. Yes, it did try to delete /vmunix, but it was running. In any event, there was a Makefile or a copy lying about. No need to BART home for the backup tape. This was on the department file server and mail server. No downtime.

told my boss "no" instead of "np"

One time I added an extra zero . . .

I had, at the time, a difficult boss need COPELAND. MS Word always wanted to change his name to COPULATE. I always caught it. Also, I had an idiot co worker named TONY. Narcissist. I accidentally typed TINY, and it just kinda stuck after that.