Ages ago, on a planet far away, when I was the CIO of a certain insurance company That Shall Not Be Named, our claims department happened to somehow write a damaged record into claims_db. Since no one had tried to read that particular record for months, it lay there dormant - while the backup tapes made previous to that poison injection receded into the past and got reused (I fought against that policy, but it was taken out of my hands. That decision got reversed pronto quick after this incident...) Then, one day, someone tried to use that record to activate a claim - at which point, the broken bits machine-gunned the entire claims_db into complete unreadability. Which, in turn, brought down the entire claims system. Reloading the pre-explosion (but still broken) claims_db didn't help: all the other data was now affected, and although that would all be reset to normal once I had a working claims_db, the knowledge gave me remarkably little comfort at the time.

It took me most of a week to hunt down the binary format for the Clipper-created DB; then, I opened the file in a binary editor and carefully fixed the record. Within 10 minutes, everything was up and running, and the VP of claims stopped meaningfully glancing at my neck and the spool of Ethernet cable in my office.