Back when text messaging capability was a rarity on mobile phones, which were themselves rare, I was testing an SMS-based weather forecast service that I had written on behalf of one of the mobile network operators.

The testing worked well on the emulator so I decided to test it over the public network to an actual handset. Only I forgot to advance a recordset through which I was looping, so the code never hit the end of recordset condition. It took me some time to notice there was a problem...

The fact that I crippled a national SMS network for a few hours was bad.

The fact that my company had to pay for each SMS, wiping out out profit for that month was worse.

The fact the handset was mine and on my first date with a girl later that evening (whom I later married) my handset kept beeping with incoming text messages (about 96,000 if I remember) was the ultimate.

The handset didn't have a silent-no vibrate function (either it beeped or it vibrated or it did both) and the SMS inbox filled up after 200 or so messages meant it took days for the inbox to fill up, me to clear it message by message, then fill up again ad nauseam.

Still, I laugh about it now...