In 1989 my then girlfriend now wife convinced me to go into contracting because it was 3x the pay vs working for our mutual employee, a savings and loan (sort of like a bank if you're not in the US) in receivership.*

Our mainframe guy had a buddy who said he knew unix so I interviewed him and rejected the guy because he clearly did not. The company hired the dude anyway and I went on to a fun contract with Shell where every server was named after mollusks which sounded amusing until you had to login to a box with a twenty letter name.

A few weeks after I left my girlfriend calls and to tell me the head of HR had come by and asked if had "done anything" to their computers? What? Like what? No, of course not. I called someone at the S & L to find Mr. New Unix admin had decided to "optimize" the cabling layout of the Sun servers which had in-rack storage. He didn't know that changing the cabling order changed device names, he didn't keep a map of device names to physical disks, which as a Sybase shop using raw disks was a big mistake. You had to know enough about Sybase to take it into maintenance mode and rename devices and if you got it wrong hello database corruption as the dbs spanned multiple disks. For the disks with mounted filesystems he didn't leave breadcrumbs on the root of each respective disk so he could mount it and figure out how to fix fstab. I don't think he even knew what fstab was. After breaking everything he claimed I had somehow dialed in and my "hacking" was to blame.

*I wasn't angry or upset at the S & L, but it was a valuable lesson for me. Hired as a 'C' programmer to write mortgage bond software when the company discovered I had database skills they also had me write a payroll app, which is how I knew everyone's salary and that the previous sysadmin I worked for made $10k/yr more than me. When I asked for a raise to his pay after officially taking over his job (which I had effectively been doing anyway) I got like a $3k raise and the employer claimed it was the best they could do because of their receivership situation.

That was the impetus of looking for another job because my gf was like if you can get more you need to do it. Fiiiiine. When I turned in my notice, my boss' exact words were "Oh, shit" because he knew he'd been underpaying me and there was no replacing a kid making $24k a year who was still coding mortgage analysis software, acting as their DBA and sysadmin. Even if I was the type to exact some kind of revenge (I was not) the fact they had to hire two or three people to replace me was enough. When my boss magically had money for a raise, thanks to my aforementioned payroll app I got to say one of the most satisfying things I've ever said to anyone: "Vic, I make more than you do, now. What's your counter?" Sorry if that's a pointless, rambling sorry. The nightmare was getting accused of hacking some company because of a mishire.

Supporting traders at Enron Capital & Trade was fun because the traders had root to their SPARCstations. In fact the interview was to fix an unbootable SPARCstation with a compressed kernel, something the support team had happen to them when a user needed more disk space. You had to know Solaris well enough to have the installboot syntax memorized and those workstations were so slow to boot you essentially got one shot at it because it was a timed test.