Never work with children.
That's the lesson learned for NPR, as a young scoundrel managed to bring the station down during a tour yesterday.
The station – of whom we're massive fans, what with their Tiny Desk Sessions and everything else – were having one of the Take Your Kids To Work Days that are so popular with our transatlantic friends; although at least one employee saw trouble brewing.

a room full of grade schoolers meets a room full of buttons to push.

— Gene Demby (@GeeDee215) April 28, 2016

Gene Dempy, who also snapped the above pic, was then proved absolutely correct, as they merrily hammered buttons – and caused dead air for a full minute.
An engineer at the station then sent the following email:
This error was caused by the head of Engineering Department.
As part of Take our Daughters to work day studio 42 demonstration. One of our junior journalists was some how able to press the exact sequence, and perfectly timed live insert panel to insert studio 42 into the stream 1. I kid you not. Although labor laws prevent me from actually hiring the kid (cause he does have a future-but I gave him my card) This resulted in studio 42 being inserted into the stream, causing a lengthy impairment.
This outage is totally and completely my fault. Besides the justifiable public shaming I rightly deserve for the next decade-my lack of oversite caused the outage. Feel free to giggle at will. Thank you to the MOPS crew for getting us back on track, and triggering rapid notification.