[fouc]

TIL: "blot one's copybook": to spoil one's reputation by making a mistake, offending against social customs, etc.

By the way I definitely wouldn't hold it against an intern 20 years later, so I'm surprised that you do. An intern by definition is going to make mistakes, even huge ones.

[C1sc0cat]

Oh it was "that bad" trust me.

[fouc]

Hmmmm. It's hard for me to imagine a scenario that's so bad, but still the fault of the intern alone and not actually the company's fault for lacking proper controls, code review process, and backups and so on. i.e. an intern accidentally deletes the production database, or writes code so bad that it takes down critical software. Whoops. Pretty bad, but if it's a larger software company or larger IT team then they should've had processes against big mistakes.