Was working for a brokerage as an intern, IT gopher stuff, pretty much my first office job.

A month in, I’m told by my boss to delete a directory on the file server. Which I do. I scurry off and rm -rf it, think it’s taking a while, so saunter out for lunch.

Turns out that that directory was an active mount point for the root of the filestore on which they kept all of their user drives, legal documentation, everything. rm had got about halfway through wiping it before they pulled the plug on the machine.

Turned out they didn’t do backups, because “nothing like this ever happens”.

My boss’s boss flipped his desk over the incident, hurled a monitor tree at me like a battleaxe while purple and screaming, incandescent with rage. My direct boss of course fired me. I was literally booed out of the office by the traders, who chucked cups and bottles and crap at me as I did the walk of shame. Grown-ass men. I was 18.

I learned then that most people everywhere just want someone to blame for their own shortcomings, and being that person can be a valuable service if correctly structured.

Edit: I lie. I learned no such thing at the time. It dented my confidence and gained me a reputation in the city - and not a good one. It was however one of the formative experiences that led to me starting my own business, and never, ever treating anyone (or allowing anyone in my business to be treated by anyone else) in the fashion I was treated.