I work with computers daily and last night had to spend several hours working on my home PC only to finally determine that I have a bum hard drive — I gotta get a new one today. The good news, though, is that I had backed up my data.

This morning a coworker pointed me to this article online where a computer tech for the state of Alaska delete a bunch of their data AND then somehow managed to format the backup, and still kept his job.

Nine months worth of applicant information for the yearly payout from the Alaska Permanent Fund was gone: some 800,000 electronic images that had been painstakingly scanned into the system months earlier, the 2006 paper applications that people had either mailed in or filed over the counter, and supporting documentation such as birth certificates and proof of residence.

Wow. If I had done that, and cost my company over $200,000 to fix the problem, I seriously doubt I’d still be sitting at my desk when it was all said and done, and this guy actually kept his job. Of course, he works for the government, so go figure.