Re: Humble
By a strange coincidence, 1988 happens to be the first year that I fucked something up. I had been working at a data center in West Germany for the US Army, and we ran massive cycles on the mainframe for supplies and requisitions, as well as financial.
These cycles had dozens of jobs that had to be started when a previous job had passed a certain job step otherwise things would quickly go TITSUP. By automating the job release processes, we were able to automate a lot of this, which reduced mistakes and sped up the processing of the cycles. I also made lots of changes to automate generation dataset processing and free up lots of space. There was nothing special about this - it was basic MVS JCL.
n 1988, we had just finished setting up the last cycle for automation - the monthly financial cycle which took more than a day to run.
All of these cycles had one thing in common - a job at the end of the cycle to print the spool files and produce the output for the customer. Since this was pretty simple and never really had any issues, it was an afterthought. No one, including me, had really looked at.
So when this cycle that I had modified was scheduled to run, I was out of town. And of course that was the first time we had ever had in issue with the print job. I don't remember the details, but it failed to print, issuing a return code, but not abending. And the file disposition for that JCL step was set to delete the spool files.
So the job didn't print, the spool files were gone - and weren't on any backups because they had just been created. And the person who just made changes to the cycle - me - was out of town when it ran. And had I been available, I could have easily avoided the problem.
The client wanted his printouts - and my head on a platter. We had to restore from backups and re run most of the cycle. I owed lots of people beer after we got those printouts. And to this day, I am always around when any production system I made changes to runs for the first time to ensure it runs smoothly.