When I was in the military I used to work with the server room for the whole island of Hawaii, this was an Intranet system so it was contained as it had valuable information on it as anything with the military. This system also supplied service for several off-site areas as well which I'm not going to list out for security reasons.

There were several backups for this system so I can say that no one but our unit was affected by this incident because if there is one thing the military is good at its redundancy.

Now we had just gotten a new Staff Sargent to the unit and he came from a wiring background, so very little to no experience with actual servers. To show off how big his balls were or something he came into the area where my coworker and I were going through some rather regular tests looking over the system as we just had a switchover for the night shift of the 24-hour shift.

You could smell the cheap fast food curry in the background from the Asian restaurant that was nearby affectionately named Catdog (this was for its sign in the front with a weird cartoonish bowl of noodles with a cat and dog staring at it lovingly not because of the menu)

He smelled the cheap food, told us to keep it away from the computers, which they only had a chance to mess up the keyboards and monitors since the towers were somewhere else but we complied. He then started to state various ways we should improve things then a blinking light caught his eye.

Now anyone with any knowledge of any technology should know this simple fact. Some lights stay solid, but some lights blink to give you information that the piece of equipment is working.

”That light is blinking, turn it off and bring it back up.” He bellowed.

Coworker, ”Sir, that's...”

”I don't care what it is, the light should be solid.”

Coworker, ”Actually...”

”I’m giving you a direct order, turn that off.”

Both me and the coworker look at each other, and knowing that he is a little shit we smile at each other and do as he asks.

Now if you've ever seen a movie where two switches need to be flipped simultaneously then you know anything that requires two people usually shouldn't be turned off. Ever...

So we both flipped off our sides of the machine, which was basically an emergency shutdown of the whole server room. When every single one of the severs shut down there was silence between all of us.

The funny thing was is he just turned around and walked off like nothing happened not saying a word. After which he didn't talk to us for the next few weeks.

Bringing back up the system took 4 hours, and woke up two officers that had to work on some parts of it as a few offsite backup areas handled our load for that time. Made friends with a butterbar that day, but those stories stay between us.