You brought back a memory, a second hand one, but still a great story. A guy I knew long ago had emigrated from NZ to NL. His main claim to fame in NZ was that one day he showed up drunk for work. In itself this wouldn't have been memorable, if it wasn't for his job, which was to manage a relatively small hydro plant on one of three shifts. On that particular day the plant had to be brought back online after being out for service and since it was really old the synchronization was manual. You had to control the flow of the water, monitor two concentric spinning wheels with the one driven by the grid and the other driven by the local genny and when the phase markings were lined up 'just so' you had to engage this frankenstein level switch to couple the grid to the generator and from there on inertia did it's thing so you could open up the gate to allow more water so the generator would start leading the grid effectively generating power.

Any kid could do it. Probably. But not a drunk one and instead of waiting long enough for both wheels to stay synchronized indicating there would be only a small jump in phase he just said f* it and connected the two anyway. Predictably, this led to a serious disturbance to the grid which in turn caused a whole lot of other stuff to disengage. Since his chances for re-employment on account of his new-found fame were somewhat minimal he decided to emigrate instead :)

I'm the idiot that sent a fairly high voltage spike into the grid setting off a cascade. Even years later I do not fully understand how it could happen, you'd think the grid would be low impedance enough to absorb a spike like that. But it set off a cascade on a part of the local grid that was known to be weak.

Somehow I simultaneously desperately want to be in that club, and never want to be responsible for an event that would let me join that club...

'Stupid stuff I've done and survived'...