Being a developer and also being human, means that I have made a few mistakes while coding in my time, now none of my “little bugs” have actually been severe enough to cost my employers money (Okay maybe a little money). However, If I ever feel that my day is going to hell faster than a greased pig on a water slide, I just remember these little gems I came across while reading Engadget.
The first stuff up was worth over 1.4 million in damages and has also resulted in a court case.
Basically, IBM had sent its $1.4 million super computer to the US Patents office. It managed to fall off the fork lift managed by a federal contractor. Now in a normal world, one would expect the contractor to take the blame and maybe even pay a portion of the damages, however in this case the contractor decided to sue IBM for more than 1.4 million, for their apparent bad packaging!
Not sure how far this is true, but it definitely makes me feel a lot better.
Now as good as the last gem was, this second stuff up is even better.
A technician at the Alaska Dept of Revenue formatted a hard drive during maintenance work which contained an account worth $38 billion! This in itself should not be a big issue, since surely an account of that size would have plenty of backups floating around. This one had 1, which the technician in all his/her infinite wisdom decided to delete as well! They did ultimately manage to get all the information back by re digitizing all the paper work (300 boxes worth!).
Before you think that the poor technician was then made an example of so that something like this never happened again, you’ll be surprised to hear that no one was punished for this. Its probably like a friend said, “Its hard when the population of the town is 50 and most of them are working in that office.”
In either case, news like this really puts things in perspective for me, and lets me know that no matter how bad my day is going, it could go a lot worse 
