The Bootleg CD That Cost Me My Job
A street-bought email list turned out to be my employer’s stolen customer database. Customers detected the breach before the company did, and I paid for mistakes on both sides.
War Stories
Everyone Was an Expert. Nobody Checked Layer 1.
A senior developer at a fully remote, fully cloud, fully technical company couldn’t connect to the VPN. The problem turned out to be roughly six layers lower than anyone expected.
The Recycle Bin That Got Me Reported to My Manager
I asked the user if I could clean up her disk. She said yes. Turns out we had very different ideas about what ‘clean up’ meant. This is the story of how a full hard drive taught me the difference between getting a yes and getting informed consent.