An IT pro confesses her 9 biggest professional blunders in this interesting article.

This inspired me to share one story with you on one of my biggest blunders. It was also my first.

I will set the picture for you. I'm a kid - 21 years old. Less than three months after graduating from university. At my first real job - a big Canadian oil company. It's the end of August - the September long weekend is coming up soon. And my boss comes to me and asks me to make a small change to a important (and complex) application that I know nothing about...

So I spent the afternoon looking at the program. I still didn't really “get“ how it worked, but I made the change he requested anyways. I didn't do much testing to be honest, but threw the sucker into production anyways.

So what do you think happened?

Well, I come into work on the Monday after the long weekend, and one of my co-workers comes up to me. “Scott, did you hear what happened?” Apparently, one of the oil company executives was driving up to his cottage for the long weekend, and he pulls into one of the company gas stations along the way. They ran out of gasoline - completely. He was furious, and obviously got my boss on the phone to find out what happened.

My boss was amazing about it. Thanks Bryan! He told the executive that the gas station should have known it was going to run out of gas soon and call somebody. What kind of gas station LETS itself run out of gas? He never called me into his office, and I never heard about the incident from him directly. Great boss - protecting his staff from the company politics as much as he can.

Lessons learned? (1) Testing, testing, testing (2) Understand how the program works before making any changes to it (3) Work for a great boss