You ever done anything so bad at work that you’ve gone out of your way to blame someone else? Like accidentally eating your boss’s sandwich and throwing the wrapper in your coworker’s garbage can or clogging the office toilet after a night of drinking and then spending the rest of the day subtly telling all your coworkers how Todd from accounting has been crop dusting all day with some stomach-churning flatulence?
Well, unfortunately for Marco Marsala, he fucked up big time and has no one to blame but himself. Marsala’s job is to create and manage the websites of various companies. And not a small number of companies. Marsala apparently has 1535 customers. Today, however, during his day-to-day activities of being the digital bitch of corporate America, Marsala input a line of code in his computer that completely wiped not only his own servers, erasing his own company in its entirety as well as every website he had created and managed for other companies. In what I assume is a state of absolute panic, Marsala posted this in Server Fault, a forum for server experts:
For those of you (like me) who couldn’t differentiate your digital ass from your digital elbow when it comes to coding, the [rm -rf] code is a that is essentially an atom bomb. It deletes everything it is told to. The [rm] tells the computer to remove, the [-r] tells the computer to delete everything in the directory and the [f] tells the computer to force delete and ignore every usual warnings that comes when deleting certain files. It’s such a well known destructive code that it’s become a literal joke within the coding world. So how a dude who is in charge of the websites for 1500+ other companies didn’t know this is mind-blowingly bananas. Which is what the other users on the Server Fault forum thought as well:
“You just nuked your entire company.” “It’s astonishingly bad design reinforced by complete carelessness.” “Your company is now essentially dead.” “You don’t need technical advice, you need to call your lawyer.”
Brutal. One after another. I never knew coders were so ruthless. It’s like the transcript from an unaired episode of Yo Mama starring the characters from The Social Network. Regardless, Marsala is hands down having the worst week in the world and what makes it even worse is that it’s literally all of his fault. So hot tip, bros, don’t just plug random letters into your computer because you might end up eradicating your entire way of life. Also, hotter tip for all you bros who have been watching too much porn on the family computer: just type in [rm -rf]. You’re welcome.