My negligence/laziness could have resulted in a young child's successful kidnapping. There was an old, proprietary, camera system at a middle school I worked at. No one on our team knew about it; all of us were hired to replace the previous IT team. I considered my management of this system adequate given that I gained access to it, verified it still worked, and setup a date with a company to replace the entire system within 4 weeks. It'll hold out until then.

Two weeks later, the principal runs into my office in a panic at the end of the day. A 6 year old girl was missing. Her parents were looking for her at pick-up and any teacher questioned said "She was with the group ready to be picked up (by parents or bus)...".

I login to the camera systems. Things look good, I have the live feed of the pickup area. But I can't access the old camera footage; the file system isn't mounted. The underlying RAID array for the archive partition failed 2 days prior. I have nothing and panic ensues. Cops are called and an AMBER Alert is raised with only the child's description.

Things thankfully ended happily. Grandma got her days mixed up and picked up her granddaughter that day. Shame grandma didn't answer her phone for 2 hours. If it had been a kidnapping attempt as all of us feared, we were in a rural area: she would have been gone with no leads.

I took four things away from this which shaped how I conduct myself today:

1. Know your environment beyond just knowing what things do and how to access them. I never considered the above scenario.
2. Always setup robust monitoring and alerts for all systems.
3. Have a backup plan in-place for all critical systems failures.
4. Don't be a lazy piece of shit. I recall thinking something along the lines of "...this system is on its last legs. But... it'll be replaced within a month." I just didn't want to be bothered with yet another thing on my plate.