Three days ago (seriously) I was remotely logged in to a school server, installing Service Pack 2 on a Windows Server 2008 file server.

I decided to schedule the needed reboot for late at night, when teachers wouldn't be logged on finishing their end-of-year report cards. I typed something like:

 at 23:59 "shutdown -r -t 0" 

...which might have worked fine.

But then I second guessed myself. Was my 'shutdown' syntax correct? I tried to view the usage help by typing

 shutdown /h 

...and instantly lost my RDP connection. Panicking, I hit up Google for the syntax. A quick search revealed that the Server 2008 version of shutdown includes a /h switch, which (as you may have guessed) hibernates the machine.

Teachers started calling me within minutes to report that they could no longer open or save the report cards they had been working on. Since I was offsite and the server room was locked, I had to call the school principal directly and walk her through the process of powering the machine back on.

Today I brought homemade cookies to everyone as a form of apology.