I had this experience when, years ago on my first day as group lead at $JOB, I was being shown a RAID 5 production server that held years of valuable, irreplaceable data (because there were no backups. Let me repeat that there were no backups). For some bizarre reason, I thought "oh cool, hot-swappable drives" and pulled one out of the rack. This naturally resulted in loud, persistent beeping from the machine, which everyone ignored on the assumption that the fellow who was just hired as the group lead knew what the f he was doing.
While I didn't know what I was doing, I did manage to get the beeping to stop, and had to come in at 5 a.m. the next day to restripe the drive I'd yanked out.
Did I mention there were no backups? When I was a little bit more seasoned on the job, I raised a polite but persistent issue with management of the need for durable backups. Although I kept at it for months, they thought about it, talked about it, and ultimately did nothing. A few months after I left, the entire array failed. Since the group's work relied on the irreplaceable data, all work ground to a halt for the several months it took for an off-site company to recover the data.