Then we got a hp-ux machine in the lab. For some reason, the grace period on that system was in seconds ( http://www.polarhome.com/service/man/generic.php?qf=shutdown... )
System dax shutting down in 5 seconds.
I've come close to that as well.
This reminds me of the paradox of being competent vs. a beginner.
It also has parallels in a few thing outside computing.
Beginners make different mistakes because they don't know enough to go quickly.
Once you are experienced you fly, similar to the way you drive in a trance without thinking some times.
With power tools I've seen this as well. You tend to take more chances the more experience you have (or even in my case getting cut with an exacto knife). Someone using a saw for the first time is going to go slowly and follow the directions (of course there are other types of safety mistakes they could make for sure..)
While a newbie might do rm -fr directory * instead of rm -fr directory* an experienced user could do that as well [1] simply by going to fast and not thinking "hey I'm doing something dangerous let me slow down and check before I auto hit return".
[1] I typically do
for i in something* do echo $i done
Then if I like what I see I will up arrow and insert "rm -fr $i" after the echo. Or maybe a read x to pause in between.
(Note: I'm not a sysadmin but I've done over many years sysadmin tasks because it is kind of relaxing in a way..)
Once I realized what had happened on the production server I ended up calling OVH (and they were helpful but not immediately acting).
It's not a good feeling.
Give it a try on some system that's not critically important :)