The Worst Typo I Ever Made 

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Once I was ending an email with "Regards," and realized how close the "t" and "g" keys are to each other.

gotta say 5000 articles containing only the word “content” just sounds like a high-effort shitpost

So there was one of these in a D&D rulebook. They had used Find/Replace the word "mage" with the word "wizard". This made funny instances, like damage being changed to "dawizard"

the amount of second hand stress I got watching this video is wild. I'm impressed you're actually able to tell this story to literal millions of people

There are two types of people: those who backup, and those have not lost data yet.

Calling Tom a "Content Creator" has a whole different meaning for him.

I just had the worst onosecond of my life, it involved a panicked client on the phone and a lot of potential loss of data, but everything ultimately turned out fine because this video made me decide to make a backup before I got to work. (I'm not being dramatic, remembering this video is genuinely what made me reconsider and make a backup anyway). It was a ordinary system update that had no right to brick the whole system, but thanks to you Tom it only really cost us 30 minutes of downtime.

Every young engineer needs a "oh ____, I'm going to dry heave into this garbage can for a minute, then never make this mistake again" moment. I'll never forget mine.

I broke out in a cold sweat half way through this. I had a boss once who did find and replace on a massive document that changed "I" to "we" because it was supposed to be written from the perspective of the company not the individual. There were gems like "socweal mobwelwety". It couldn't be rolled back for some reason.

"I replaced all 5000 files with content" "What's the problem then?" "With 'Content' " "Oh."

this just reminds me of the one time that one of the entire toy story movies was deleted accidentally by pixar but it was ultimately okay because one of the artists had made a copy of the ENTIRE THING and brought it home to work on it (which was Very Not Allowed, but it ended up saving their ass) and they were able to resume work with that.

Considering the specific typo that caused the whole mess, you could say it was an… _apostrophe catastrophe._

I literally thought “onosecond” was the worst typo lmao

My worst typo: Accidentally writing “the controversy over the Best Wank in Israel” on the top of a PowerPoint.

I saw a physical copy of "The Lord of The Flies" that had every instance of the letters "iv" replaced with "ChapterIV"

Back in the floppy disk era, I would grab grad students' thesis disks and announce I was going to degauss them, thus permanently wiping all data from them. If they would panic in terror (many did), I would say that I was just joking about degaussing, but maybe you should make backups of your precious data. That was after more than one grad student had to retype their thesis because a massive floppy failure had caused it to be lost. If the data is important enough to panic over the thought of losing it, it is important enough to back up.

I love how onosecond looks like one second has been misspelled

I once deleted 27 TB of offsite backups because I didn't read the text next to a checkbox. We spent a week on the road going to every client to copy their backups on hard drives and another week to copy everything back to the server. Now I read everything before clicking "next" and make a conscious effort to pause and try to understand what I am doing... Those onoseconds follow you all your life, haha !

My worst one was when I was working on a server, and decided to use the console to get rid of all the GIF files in a directory. I wanted to type "rm *.gif" but I didn't let go of the shift in time, and the command became "rm *>gif". That means 'delete everything in the directory and log output to a file called gif'...

why is birthday bot feeling like this

"There are two types of people in this world. Those who make backups, and those who will start making them."

On the other hand, a whole website where every article just says "content" is hilarious.

My brother and I didn't speak for 2+ years because of a missing *_hyphen_* - it was the difference between _"re-sent"_ and _"resent"_ . . . as in, _"I resent that email"_ rather than _"I re-sent that email"_ . . . 😣 When we finally realized the mutually-silly mistake we'd made, we had a good chuckle... but our relationship hasn't been the same ever since and it's looking like I'll never see him again. 😢 Details matter.

Worst moment I had wasn't actually a typo, but still fits the theme of "always have a backup". I was working on a huge arrangement of various songs from a popular television show at the time. It was going to be a gift to a friend that he's (hopefully) have his HS's band play at some point. Well, after working for at least 4 hours straight adding all kinds of notes, edits, and other things, I was about halfway done with the whole thing (I had worked on it for about 6 months before this). Well, I was working on all of this on my laptop in 2014, and my laptop was from a few years earlier (2010 I think): earlier enough that it still had a user removable battery. I had recently replaced the battery since the old one lost its charge capacity. What I didn't do, however, was made sure that the battery had been locked into place. So, I save the file after all this work, and slide the laptop off my lap and put it down on my bed to get a soda or whatever. And... yup you guessed it. The battery came out, shutting the whole thing off, and RIGHT in the middle of saving an entire day's work. I didn't even realize until I came back with my soda. So, I put the thing back in as fast as I could, and boot it back up. I see that my file was still there, but when I go to open it... ERROR: This file is corrupted and cannot be opened. After panicking internally, I remember that I did have a backup on an old hard drive... from over a month ago. I still had the file, but now, over a month's hard work was gone. Still haven't gone back to that file 8 years later.

There is an old saying in programming: "You either do backups already, or you gonna start doing backups"

I kept on writing "workshit" instead of "worksheet" for about 2 years in school before I realized.

Something I got told during IT school over and again was "kein backup, kein mitleid" which basicly means "no backup, no compassion/pity for you"

It's funny to me that you never point out that the backticks weren't even necessary. You were showing off by being extra safe and that enabled your mistake.

Video title should be: *Tom Scott, 'content' creator.*

Alternate title: How I once became the most efficient content-producer.

Ok so discord birthday bot brought me here hahaha

what kind of typo was it to have all data deleted 💀

Guy: loses a race Guy: oh no, second

Onosecond: when you’re hagrid and you realize you shouldn’t have told them that

birthday bot moment

Hello from Birthday Bot!! 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂

The onosecond, more commonly known as wildly smashing ctrl z even when you know the website doesnt support that

When you work in a company, there is also the wasntmesecond when your colleague right next to you has an onosecond.

8:28 The same can be said about Chernobyl. Its always a string of minute errors that can turn a single small issue into a horrendously massive one.

I love the fact that this belongs to 'The Basics' playlist. Teams need to understand that no matter how defensively you code, humans make errors, and that is a constant factor that needs to be taken into consideration.

"The sort of lesson you only learn once" Tom, you underestimate my negligence.

on april fools next year we all have to just comment the word "content" on his video to mess with him

The "not wanting everything you ever do to be saved" discussion reminded me of the time I was at work, regression-testing and conversing on Twitter & Facebook the side to give my brain the occasional break. I copied a snippet of the Twitter conversation with the intent of pasting it to my Facebook friend but when I saw that my Facebook friend was AFK, I went back to regression-testing. And that's how "Tbh I've always kind of had a thing for [insert kink here]" got pasted into a regression test spreadsheet that everyone on the QA team had access to -- as far as I know, I Ctrl-Z'ed quickly enough that Google didn't save it, but hoo boy was it close.

That is the worst feeling ever. I remember at one point in grad school I'd been working on a paper. I'd procrastinated, as usual, so I spent most of the night in the student lounge at the library working away. I'd gone maybe 5-6 pages since my last save and decided to take a break. I got up to go down to the coffee shop and ended up seeing a friend and chatting for a while. When I got back, my battery had died. I plugged it in, restarted it, and there was nothing. I had to beg for a one-day extension from my professor, but it was a lesson I learned well.

There's another way to tell this: "Hey, I made the database a lot lighter and fast"

Everyother: "I was young, I drank much and didn't think about consequences..." Tom: "I was young, I worked on a live database, with no transaction and didn't think about consequences..."

I was brought here by a birthday bot???

My heart dropped when you explained what had happened. That must have been horrible

coding is like making wishes to a magic Genie, you have to be as specific as possible and you have to make sure there are no mistakes within the wish.

I can just imagine someone trying to access a file and is just presented with "content", then it happens again, and again...

I love how while watching a Tom Scott video, you can’t skip a second without missing so much.

TBH, using such similar characters as backticks and apostrophes with such a different meaning should also be counted as a bad decision by the developers of SQL

"Worst spelling mistake ever" Ehh, how bad could it be? "SQL" Oh .... Oh no ....

Imagine creating 5798 rows of content in 0.01 seconds. Productivity achieved.

I once accidentally deleted a whole live database instead of the test one. I had to restore from a backup then email everyone in the company and ask them to redo their timesheets for the whole week. Onosecond is a very polite way of saying what I said in the second immediately after realising what I'd done!

I was almost finished on my open-source programming language I was making - over 150,000 lines of code - and I realised something was wrong: I needed more memory for my variables. So, simple, right? Just find and replace "int" with "long" and "float" with "double" (I was using C), right? I thought that might work. But, no, EVERYWHERE I had written the three letters "int",changed to "long". So, over 200 long, hard hours down the drain, all because I was too stupid to backup my 7,000 files, 150,000 lines, 3,000,000 words, 11,000,000 characters.

I thought the typo you made was typing "one second" as "onosecond"

Shows how wholesome Tom is: most of us don’t say 'Oh no' in that second...

This reminds me of Master Duel where they used search & replace to swap "Magic" to "Spell" and for a short time there was a "Dark Spellian" series of cards

I worked in a call center for Verizon back in 07 or so; we'd occasionally get calls from people who were needing to speak to the cable side of things and we'd have to transfer them. One day, I learned that the cable division number was one digit away from a naughty-naughty number, because I accidentally transferred a very angry man there. He was not happy when he called back.

I was waiting for, "Fortunately.... " It never came.

At the other end of the spectrum, there is the smug feeling that you can experience when something goes wrong and you DO have a working backup. Last time it happened to me, my colleagues thought I had gone mental as I danced a little jig around my desk.

7:37 the delivery of this sentence actually made me laugh so hard

“Oh no.” “It’s due today.”

Surgeon: _"Pass the forceps"_ Nurse: _"But the patient is dead!"_ Surgeon: *_"ROLLBACK"_*

The onosecond. Often spelled with a capital ‘F’.

All articles finally ended up having some real content!

I always make sure I double check whenever I type “bigger.” B and n are scarily close on the keyboard

clicked on this video thinking "how long is an onosecond?" not disappointed.

The onosecond is basically a bruh moment

I was sent here by the discord birthday bot..

In your defense, the fact that one person can FUBAR that much work (because no automated backups, someone who is specifically tasked with that each day, whatever) was even more negligent.

Everybody experiences the onosecond when they are tipping their chair in school and lose balance.

That was an apostrophe catastrophe.

Tom, Today, I changed a simple security setting on a client server. Very simple thing. Any user in folder "users" can't ask the server for a list of usernames. So if a user gets hacked, the hacker can't find out the username of an admin account to hack that. It's not our standard. It's never been done with any of our clients. But for this one, it's how it was. Presumably a relic of their previous IT. Our primary admin account was in the normal users folder, rather than a special folder for itself. On our biggest client, I applied that security update to the folder and our main admin account. The email sync ran. The account didn't see any users or email lists. It deleted all of the email lists, and no one could send email as the various departments they needed to send as. With some quick thinking and scripting, I managed to fix it, but not before people were keenly aware it'd broke. -Nehemiah Kenny, IT Professional of six years

3:04 it's okay, I heard someone say "zed" in an American accent earlier, you're just restoring the balance of the universe

"Every single page just replaced with the word content" Well, at least you have a good description for the website... at least what it used to have.

when you tell a joke but your parents turn it into a lecture o n o s e c o n d

Manager: How is that website coming along? Him: Ohhh. It had alot of content.. Manager: Can I see? Him: Sure....

I once typed "needles to say..." in an email, so I know how you feel.

"If you haven't tested your backup you do not have a backup"

That mistake is art by mistake "Content" was the right word for it lmao

This has to be one of the best ads for a password manager. Honestly that buildup to it was incredible!

i dont think those volunteers felt content

this makes me way too nervous

as an IT guy myself; let me in on the secret language we apply: when we are curing and shouting profanities at the system we're working with, usually that means things are going great. Once we very quietly say 'oops' or ' o no' however.... that's usually the point where you should start panicking.

I totally relate to this. I made a mistake many years ago where I hit the delete key while in just the wrong place. The feeling in the seconds afterwards was just dread at the realisation of what I had just done. Panic, disbelief, confusion, indecision, shock! Several days of work was needed to fix my little mistake. Life lesson learned.

When you work on Unity and don't back up. You get to personally experience the 5 stages of grief: -Denial -Anger -Bargaining -Depression -Acceptance

Toy Story 2 was almost wiped due to an oh no moment of "sudo rm -fr *". Their backups were not working, fortunately someone who was pregnant was working from home and had most of the data on her home PC.

"Oh, that's not the right word, we should delete that..." ***deletes the internet***

Birthday bot led me here (was here before tho)

Brilliant. So feel for you. I personally no longer EVER work on 'live' files unless there is a minimum 30 day uncompressed backup file retained on a seperate drive array. Yup, in the past, been there, done that.

I always remember a colleague once saying "every time a program I've written does something wrong, it's because it's doing exactly the wrong thing I told it to".

The second you send the wrong homework folder to the teacher.

I spill the secret that I am a badass all the time that I thought people already knew, and yet everytime they act surprised. So many onomoments…

I am so glad I learned this as an intern where I edited and screwed up a file for a customer, going into a full panic only to find out a college made a backup for me. Never stopped making backups since.

My onosecond was when I went out of the math test of the "baccalauréat" (it's a national exam that French students pass at the end of high school, it has a high symbolic value), and my friend tells me "you must have found the last exercise super easy, as a programmer". I hadn't turned the last page...

I too learned this the hard way, but I had the foresight to think "I might screw this up. I better make a backup, just in case. And if it all works out, hey, at least we have one more backup now!" Hit "Execute", and I truncated all +100k user's names to 3 characters. *Sweat*, *make another backup in case the restore borks*, *restore*, *relief*. It only took some 10 seconds to undo, but boy did I learn the value of backups before working on live systems.

This is the origin story of Tom Scott creating online content