At university I had to use a programming language to do some specific calculations.

It was obviously designed by someone who had not taken any courses in formal languages, compilers and algorithms.

It had a fun quirk, the final result would change depending on which names you used for your variables.

When the phd student guiding our lab session told me to not use underscores in my variable names, I thought i'd humor her just to show her it was a stupid suggestion. But she knew more than me.

I remember when I was an intern at a large telco company, and an older woman who was VP of something or other called me into her office to answer some questions about what parts we needed based on supplies I had just inventoried.

I told her one, and she didn't recognize the part number, so she said she'd look at the distributor's website. I watched her go to google.com, type in the url, and then I "helpfully" interrupted to explain that the address bar was where urls went, and that google was for searching for other things. She proceeded to click the "view cached version" in the google results, and told me that distributor's website was down and this was her workaround.

I learned a lot from that job. Including when to keep my mouth shut!

A lot of older systems were like that before they became more commodity items with guard rails.

Some of the early SAN disk arrays used to use an assembly like config interface with no sanity checks, type in the wrong command and you could wipe the whole array.

The company I worked for at the time had a blanket policy that any change had to be implemented by the vendor to shift liability for any mistakes.

You're probably right, but back then it was assumed you knew what you were doing I guess. The old idiom of "Linux won't stop you shooting yourself in the foot" was even more true of this system.