Definition: In this task, you are given a Reddit post as a text. Your task is to generate a title for this text. The title should start with "TIFU by", followed by a situation that caused humor. The title should contain 7-12 words, ideally.
Input: Text: this was a couple of years ago.

 

i was doing software development work as a consultant with a client that was (among other things) in the business of automatically refilling prescriptions by mail. this client had made some... unusual technology decisions in building the home-grown software system that they used to run their business. decisions that we didn't really have any input into and had to basically just live with if we were going to work with them.

i had made some changes to a tool that ran on a schedule that looked at some database tables to figure out which prescriptions needed to be automatically refilled and then submitted them to the system that printed the labels so the pharmacy workers could pull them. my job was to deploy these changes to the test environment so they could be verified before being put out in the "live" environment. 

simple enough, except for those unusual technology decisions.

first, rather than using the scheduling app that's built into windows, these people paid for and used a third-party scheduler. second, rather than using scripting features built into windows, they had paid for and used a third-party automation tool. they used both of these tools extensively. third, because these things were per-install licensed, rather than paying for a second license and setting them up in a dedicated test environment, their test environment was on their production server - in a folder named "test." fourth, because they were disorganized, their automation and scheduler scripts for both production and test lived in the same folder and we were expected to tell which was which by the names - sometimes this was easy with the word "test" in the name - other times it wasn't.

my fuck up was that after i pushed my changes to their "test environment," i edited the wrong automation script to pass test parameters (a really wide date range to consider) to my code.  i then left for the day, intending to check the results the next day and took my then-wife out to dinner.

my change wound up executing the production version of the utility which picked up a whole bunch of previously-selected prescriptions and submitted them to be filled. they caught the error only after their pharmacy folks had pulled about $200k in invalid prescriptions. apparently per fda regulations, these can't just be put back in the warehouse and have to be destroyed. 

the owner called my boss and chewed him out. my boss called me while i was out at dinner, much to then-wife's irritation.

somewhat miraculously, i did not lose my job, nor did we lose the client. as it turns out, shockingly, this wasn't an isolated issue for them. we pointed out the issues with their environment setup, and noted that they supposedly had process controls that should have caught this before they had to throw away all those meds. we would up working with them for another year or so before we fired them for being too difficult to work with for the rate we were getting. 

at the time we fired them, their test environment was still a folder named "test."

so, happy ending. i did, however, lose the wife over possibly unrelated issues.

TIFU by sending out a few hundred thousand dollars in duplicate prescription medicine