Few years ago after leaving this telecom vendor I was working
with one of my colleagues who was with the application team IMed
me and asked for help to delete a directory with a & at the end.
The command I told him was:
rm -rf dir\&
which in the most bizzare way got translated by him to:
rm -rf dir /&
This would have caused minimal damage had this not been run as root
user and on the main database server with terabytes of data
on it..What happened next is anybody's guess