Saved by my own incompetence
I was once doing support for a CMS on the side.
Said CMS was never designed for large numbers of users and got seriously bogged down at one occasion. I found that the performance issues prompted many users to create multiple accounts (they never received a confirmation, but user records were still created), and that further slowed the system down.
So, I had the bright idea to clear out those half-broken accounts until things would easen up a little.
Opened up the SQL query tool on the server and prepared a DELETE command.
Sent the command off and then it dawned on me that I had forgotten the WHERE clause...
Imagine my relief when the query tool refused to execute the command because it was missing the semicolon at the end.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
