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Ask HN: What is the worst that ever happened when you slipped with a mouse?

by gizmore on 7/9/22, 12:28 PM with 12 comments

One time i was on filezilla FTP and moved a folder to the parent folder. I slipped with the mouse. The application recreated logs and all the parent folders. Filezilla got crazy. A simply undo or re-move was tricky. I only slipped with the mouse. 30 min downtime.

Has something similiar ever happened to you?

  • by ad404b8a372f2b9 on 7/9/22, 3:02 PM

    Accidentally liked an ex's bikini picture that she'd posted 2 years prior on Facebook. It's been over 10 years but I still think about it at night.
  • by kstenerud on 7/9/22, 12:34 PM

    I once watched a coworker do a complete ls -lR of a remote customer system he was working on so that he could copy-paste the listing to a text editor. Unfortunately, he accidentally hit the middle mouse button while he was still over the terminal window. And he was logged in as root.

    Every file that had a symlink pointing to it was overwritten (including most of bin and etc and the backup disk which was unmounted at the time). The system was completely broken, and had to be reinstalled from scratch.

  • by airbreather on 7/9/22, 1:16 PM

    Not actually happened, but we were doing hazard and risk studies for a new mineral processing plant that had some very large gas fired equipment and due to the placement of adjacent units and possibility there could be a turnaround crew on the adjacent unit, the identified scenario was "operator sits on mouse, kills twenty people".

    End result is we took the equipment in question out of the normal operator controls and put it in the safety system PLC to remove direct control by fat fingered (butts) of operators.

  • by stop50 on 7/9/22, 12:39 PM

    Closed the browser with my remote session. Took over 10 minutes to get everything back.
  • by Peach_blue on 7/9/22, 1:04 PM

    Clicking the wrong flightpath in WoW classic. That would cost you time that felt like an eternity back then.
  • by eternityforest on 7/9/22, 12:52 PM

    I've never had more than minor inconvenience with a mouse. Unlike terminal, where I've accidentally wiped a(Thankfully unused) windows partition with dd.

    GUI software typically has confirmation and undo as high priorities. Most software that doesn't is throwing away a lot if the benefit of GUI.

  • by 0xfaded on 7/9/22, 1:34 PM

    I had a putty session open connected to a friends server he was trying to recover after a somewhat malicious employee walked off. For dumb reasons (basically I don't know how to use windows), I had the whole bash_history on my clipboard and accidentally middle clicked. Luckily the first commands where apt upgrade and then reboot, but that could have been a total disaster.
  • by Kenneth39 on 7/11/22, 6:02 AM

    Almost every day, it's a miss on a tab or closing a window. Clicking on malicious links. Accidental likes. It's just like everyone else :)
  • by unixhero on 7/9/22, 1:53 PM

    Drag and drop FileZilla (which they refuse to remove btw) irreversibly.essed up a few systems and folder structures.