In college, my teammates and I played the Madden Football video game all the time.

Back then, at least (I don’t know how video game systems work now), there was a small memory card that would be inserted into the playing console to save and load game info — the season, each team’s rosters etc. Once by accident, we learned that if the memory card was removed while the PlayStation was saving info for our Franchise Mode league, the file would be deemed “corrupted” and the entire league would lost. So we had to be careful not to bump into the console while it was saving.

One particular season hadn’t started too well for me. My team was 0-2 after two games, one reason being that my roster was not very talented (and, probably that I wasn’t yet very good at playing Madden). So, while the game was saving after my second loss, I “accidentally” bumped my controller into the game console in a room full of fellow players. The corrupted file had to be deleted and we’d have to start the season over. A teammate labeled me a “Known File Corrupter.”

The new season went better for me.