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0 pointsKarellen11y ago0 comments

Or, you know, he had a perfectly good reason to think that accidentally resetting all the computers in the building at that time would not be a problem:

"Not long after I arrived in my office, I received a call from a secretary in the Agriculture Department who liked to play a computer game before her workday started. Her favorite game had a bug that regularly froze her workstation. [...] I realized that I had mistakenly hit F7 and reset all the workstations in the embassy. This realization didn’t bother me much, because no one except the Agriculture section secretary was usually on the computer system this early in the morning."

I'm sure I'd have thought something like: "Phew! Glad I made that mistake now, rather than at 11am when everyone was half-way through their morning's work. Likely no harm done at all, and I'm going to be really careful with that command in the future. Yup, definitely dodged a bullet there..."

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sitinaud11y ago

Yes, he had a pretty good reason to think that probably no major damage was done, and this was sufficient to comfort him. This kind of carelessness about the possibility of causing harm or having caused harm suggests to me that he wasn't taking his responsibility as seriously as he should.

ryanobjc11y ago

you're really reading too much into a simple story, from over 20 years ago, etc.

In any case, we already know where your line of thought leads, risk adverse cultures ultimately stagnate and wither away.

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