Though the click of a mouse may seem like a small thing, it can lead to serious problems.

Imagine seeing a message pop up on your computer that says your PC is about to be erased, and you’re given two options: yes or no. What would you do? Would you take time to investigate what that really means? Or would you just choose yes and move on?

In the following story, an IT ops manager recounts a story about this very situation. Here’s how it played out.

Contracts manager loses all his contracts

I was the local IT operations manager for a multinational food company. On-site, we had desktop support people from a large US-based IT provider. They deployed PCs to users in our country.

One evening, a desktop support guy, let’s call him Dave, is downstairs in the tech room preparing PCs for redeployment by reinstalling the OS, reformatting the drives, etc. He uses a tool to do this that requires him to enter the PC’s asset number to erase and rebuild it.

He enters the wrong number.

Upstairs is the Contracts Manager, let’s call him Rahul. Rahul is at his desk and sees a message flash up saying that his PC is about to be erased. Y/N? Rahul clicks Y.

He had been warned not to do this.

The next morning, Rahul comes and sees me. I know nothing of what has happened. Rahul is very angry as his PC no longer contains any of his information, and all his contracts are lost. He has only stored them on his C drive, despite repeated communications to users recommending against it.

I talk to Dave and find out that he messed up, but there’s nothing he can do, and anyway, Rahul clicked Y and should have saved his files elsewhere, so it’s all Rahul’s fault.

Many weeks and several thousand dollars later, we recovered some of the files using forensic data recovery.

Wow! That’s one costly mistake.

Let’s check out if the people over at Reddit have experience with situations like this.

Sounds like he chose the hard way.

Here’s how this person thinks it should’ve been avoided.

Yet another suggestion on avoiding these situations.

According to this comment, the company will fix it soon.

What a bad experience.

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.