TL;DR: Lazy programming before a planned cruise trip - I didn’t get food poisoning, but a bit more money and a new cruise trip.

This is back in the late 90’s. I was in charge of a front end demo of one of our network products (including customer signup forms) for a B2B trade show. The demo was installed and tested on site the day before the show opened. I wasn’t supposed to be working at the show, so I took time off work and booked a three day cruise trip from the following morning, together with my (now) ex.

At 6 am (the ship left at around 7 am), around when I was about to board, I was called back. There had been a power outage at the fair. The main db server wouldn’t boot up, but the backup db server was up and running. My server was running, but the front end demo kept freezing and didn’t respond to input.

Took a few hours of debugging.

In my startup script, I was too lazy to set the server IP:s in arguments or variables for setup, all were hardcoded in the program. I didn’t even encase connections in “try/catch”, so no clue in the logs.

Fixed, recompiled, started, and it worked out well for the rest of the show.

As for my ex… There was a massive case of food poisoning from the buffets on the cruise ship, and the autumn storms hit the Baltic sea early and hard.

I got paid overtime because I came in on a vacation day, and another day off. I enjoyed my time off and just relaxing the rest of the week. We got reimbursed with a free (shorter) cruise trip. My ex didn’t want to go on cruises any more, so I went with a sibling instead in spring.

It doesn’t even need to be false flag. All it takes are a few pumped up idiots who use the protest as a pretext for getting thrills and dopamine kicks out of chaos and destruction.

My kid’s school burned down during a protest in a suburb (not in France). The perpetrators were youth from more affluent parts of the city, kicked up on drugs they used the protests and travelled all across the city to try to set fire to preschools, schools and residences.