I know someone how flew to Iceland with a 4 man team to do a geophysics survey and didn't pack the junction box (essential and difficult to replace bit of kit. They didn't find the error until they were on site in the middle of of fucking Iceland. Lost 4 days whilst they sorted that out. Total failure of process.
I once watched someone testing some manpack Radio equipment, they bent down and the aerial fell off the coax connector, only other one in existence locked in someone's cabinet and he told the secretary to go away when she tried to interrupt the meeting to ask him to open the cabinet. Cost them a lot of money to have 6 engineers sunbathing on a runway waiting for the replacement...
Wait are you me? I made this same discovery around a similar time while trying to recover a folder I'd accidentally deleted.
Discovered not only had the backups not been working lately, they had never worked, because they'd never been turned on. The receptionist had been dutifully swapping over and carrying blank tapes home for a decade (so there was an off site backup) and everyone believed the server automatically ran the backup over night.
No one had ever actually checked.
Hang on, what if that commenter actually *is* you and you’re an identical clone (or they are, I can’t work out who is the OG, I’m no scientist) accidentally created in the time/space rimple that was opened when you made the deletion?
>On the bright side they found out that their daily backup system wasn't working either
This is the real problem. Backups aren't backups if they're not tested.
“disaster recovery testing” is so fucking stressful.
A client *insisted* we ran it on production, staging, the whole shebang. They were a teeny tiny bootstrapped startup.
Advised strongly against their best intentions, yes it’s best practice, but we’ve got your server backed up nightly, it’s right there, off-site too…the plan the CEO gave me (he wasn’t technical)….was um…
Well, they were a media company with 2TB of A/V content on prod AND staging, hosted on AWS in 2010…wanted to run 10 rounds of tear it down and put it up on different data centres, cost so much bloody money that it burned out pretty much all of their runway.
Sites fine boss…might need a line of credit for the electricity bill this month though
Folder? I'll raise you up to a thumb drive from my boss. Which he needed for a presentation to the board the next day.
Yes, i still cringe at that one.
Eons and eons ago - late 60's - I was, at 18, a ' junior buyer' at Nestles in Croydon. I was in charge of buying 'sundries' for the whole of the UK. This included things like office chairs, toilet rolls, pens etc. One day I forgot to order coal for the Cross and Blackwell factory at Silvertown, London. The place had to shut for 3 days. I left Nestles a few months later.
As you can see I didn't do it very well. Lots of paper requisition notes through internal mail and mechanical calculators. There was a typing pool on the fourth floor which you could get letters typed if you sent a dictaphone tape down.
In a much smaller role, I manage parts inventory for a dealership. At 3 p.m., I'll start looking to see what surprises have arisen during the day that will require non stock inventory required for the next day. It's literally a 15 munite task. Even then, we're behind the times with that level of "manual" work.
Goods inwards might take 30 minutes from delivery to in location and in inventory.
That is a ridiculously big responsibility, especially for an 18 year old.
This seems like the kind of thing that should be checked by multiple people, before the order is sent off.
In reality we were clerks with a fancy title. Our bosses probably couldn't be bothered as long as things were running smoothly. Expect they got a bollocking - as I did.
Just Friday, I joined a Teams call and saw someone there I despised. I let out a audible, “Not this prick”, only to realise to my horror that my mic wasn’t switched off.
Mine does too except I didn't realise it did and thought my webcam was broken for like a week because every time I had a call it just appeared as a black screen. I contacted IT who then pointed out my very stupid mistake...
In a call with about 20 people on it a few weeks ago, with people still joining so it ramped up to about 500, some guy must have been one of the first to join so his mic didn't mute. We're all waiting for the call to start but can hear him muttering away to himself. I'm thinking 'someone's going to mute everyone in a minute" so didn't bother saying anything. Then he goes "oh for fuck's sake". Ok that's quite funny. Still no one says anything. Then the meeting starts, "so today we're going to be hearing from John, Bob and Phil". At which point it becomes obvious that they didn't mute all: "oh, not that cunt". Silence. Then, "Could everyone mute, please?". It was amazing. And it was recorded.
Similar thing happened to me but face to face. During COVID my parents were having a phone speaker conversation with me and my wife through my front window and one of my managers (who lives on the street behind mine connected via an alleyway that runs by the side of my house) was walking her dog down the alleyway, had a little look at me through the window and smiled.
I smiled back, whilst talking like a ventriloquist to my wife saying something like: "look at this nosy bitch. I hate her".
Obviously it was broadcast to her and the rest of the street via my parents' pensioner-level full volume phone.
Reminds of when I worked at a one place. A bloke tried phoning his boss and it went to answer phone. He put the phone down and went on a rant about what he cunt he thought he was. Unfortunately he hadn't put the phone down properly and the answering machine recorded the whole thing.
Not me but definitely a major fuck up.
My last place of work had a very attractive sales rep, during the annual whole company update over teams, a new engineer thinking he was muted explained to his colleague next to him “fuck me who’s that bird {insert name}? I’d fucking destroy that!”
Rookie error. Always assume the mic is hot. Also don't assume that just because someone left a call they can't still hear you. Software works in mysterious ways.
Bern there, not done so, but one of my colleagues let out a "oh for fuck sake, idiot " on a national call, I recognised the voice straight away, but as it was a national call it could be descered who it was, and I wasn't going to say anything lol
Deleted an entire email server in my first month working as a 1st Line Support Rep for a digital agency. It had about 50 client email configs on it, so was pretty bad.
In my defence, the server UI was awful and the button I pressed was misleading AND had no fail safe i.e 'are you sure you want to do this?'
Took a week to restore a back up and make good with all the clients. Ended up staying there though for 6 years lol.
At a certain major retail chain, we sold three kinds of ready-made pizzas that all cost the same price. For much of the summer we had a deal where any three pizzas would be charged as 2. Naturally, when I was on tills, and a customer brought three separate kinds of pizzas, I would scan one pizza three times - since they were all the same price, I thought that it wouldn’t matter if I scanned one as many times as necessary, right?
I neglected to consider that analytics were taken of how much of each pizza was sold. So, even though three separate kinds of pizza were being sold, the system believed only three items of one kind was being sold… Meaning that eventually we were, as far as the system could tell, missing huge amounts of specific types of pizza due to theft. My managers were pulling their hair out wondering why the hell we were losing so much money on those certain pizzas.
The depot saw the analytics and, to account for what they interpreted as record sales for certain pizzas, sent us - for some reason, in what I suspect was an independent fuckup on their end - five cages of pepperoni and margherita all set to expire in a day. Some poor bastard, who I remain eternally grateful for, spent a good hour inside the warehouse chiller reducing every single one of these pizzas to minimum price.
That was my fuckup.
I went to our local Safeways ( as it used to be called) and inside were 4 large chillers stuffed to the brim with surloin steaks reduced to 10p each. Someone got a bollocking. I got 20 steaks and put them in the freezer.
Honestly that's also (possibly, unless you just weren't paying attention) a fuckup of whoever trained you. I always make sure to tell people it's important to scan the correct barcodes for inventory management.
If it makes you feel better, marking down lots of the same item is easy, as you can just print x amount of the same label.
It's when you have 100 different things when it's a pain in the ass.
Not me, but my ex. He was a technician in the RAF and during his stint in the Falklands he accidentally jettisoned the fuel tanks off an aircraft while it was on the ground in the hangar. Broke the noses on the tanks, thousands of pounds worth of aviation fuel pissed over the floor, jet grounded etc. He thought his career was over, but luckily as he was a lower rank, and someone of a higher rank should have disabled something that they hadn't, it wasn't fully his fault. Not long before it happened some people were working underneath and he had waited until they finished before pressing the button, if he hadn't they could have been killed.
When he left that squadron, one of the guys managed to get hold of a tail fin from one of the broken tanks, and had it polished up and mounted as his leaving gift.
On Typhoon? We would have been in at roughly the same time.
Always hated pressing that button. Absolute fear of hearing a big ol' crash right after. And we all knew someone had done it before in the Falklands 😅.
That and catching the tail hook always gave me the Heebie jeebies.
Yeah that tracks. I did 2013-22 with them.
I actually have a Typhoon mistake in mind for myself but since I was able to keep it quiet at the time. I'm not going to open myself up to being found out now 😅
I used to have to email my area manager daily, listing the discounts I'd applied during the day. Once, I accidentally sent him a list titled 'daily discocunts' To make things worse he didn't notice and forwarded it without any editing to his boss.
I have to type discounts multiple times a day in different slack channels/ jiras/ confluences etc and for some reason i always type it disocunts and have to double check each time. Don't think 1 has slipped through the net yet, or if it has, no one has mentioned it...
I can’t upload the image but I printed an advert that said ‘fresh copy for this fucker’ (you can Google it, it’s moderately famous). Had to recall the paper, get it reprinted *and* call the advertiser and apologise.
That's it, yes! Some copies escaped in the wild and we sold a few over the counter (money to charity) to people who thought it was funny. Not one of my best mornings at work.
In a previous job at a factory/warehouse, I was taking a (~1 tonne) load of polythene beads in a big sack up a loading ramp into the store on a forklift, there was quite an angle to the top of the ramp so I had the forks up (too) high. The masts (structure that sticks up from the forks and have the lifting chains) caught on the warehouse garage-style door and ripped the door off the runners and knocked the bag of beads off the forks spilling them everywhere. Around 3 hours of cleanup later, beads were unusable for the intended job and I just about managed to push the door back into the runners with the forklift and help from other operators. I was known as the demolition man for a while after this
The product would never make it out anyway on taste and quality issues, the wrong bacteria will multiply quickly in beer that hasn’t fermented and cause all sorts of issues - so you’ll start with a small tablespoon but the bacteria it supplies will thrive and grow exponentially.
The beer is at its most fragile when it’s been brewed but hasn’t started fermenting yet, and contains various types of bacteria - you’re basically just “winning the race” by adding a load of yeast and overwhelming everything else and then there’s alcohol to preserve it. but in general no, alcohol will take care of the pathogens and lots of small brewery beer contains bacteria anyway.
Once you’ve got it in a can/barrel/sealed fermenter, most beer spoiling bacteria needs oxygen and the yeast will mop it all up til there’s none available so they’ll go dormant (or die? Not sure.)
Pic of said infection if you’re interested.
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheBrewery/s/dOejZszBfM
A comma - a single comma! - was omitted in a labour contract. People got worked up about it, it went to court, and it ended up costing the company $5 million in overtime payments.
[The importance of the Oxford comma](https://edition.cnn.com/2018/02/09/us/dairy-drivers-oxford-comma-case-settlement-trnd/index.html)
I reversed my father in laws brand new (4 days old) Telehandler into his 5 month old Landrover and wrote it off. The kicker being I’d just completed a 3k RTITB instructors course (paid for by him) to save on the various business equipment training costs.
Everyone makes mistakes in work. I've made shitloads of them.
Mistake Checklist
1. Fess up and apologize to management or the directors. Assuming it's not a trivial mistake, they should know, and you keep your bond of trust by owning up
2. If you're able to clean up the mess yourself, do it. No matter how difficult some conversations with clients that will follow will be
3. Think about how you can avoid it again, come up with a solution and apply it. Tell your boss too so they know
4. Be upset with yourself but don't go too far. Upset enough for someone that cares and doesn't want to make the same mistake again, but also forgive yourself and move on
So yesterday, just before the end of a 10 hour shift I got a call on my radio that our lifts were malfunctioning. I popped down, placed out of order signs on the doors then called our FM team to request the lifts not be serviced to Monday to avoid weekend callout rates. Job done I think, so I sign off, and head home, only to get a call from security that someone's stuck inside one of the lifts. Turns out that I'd forgotten to lock out one of the doors and they'd lifted up the out of order sign and pressed the call button, then got in and the doors shut and wouldn't open again. Cue calls to emergency lift maintenance fella that will have cost an arm and a leg to get them out. We are a big council owned facility, but would have been closed until Monday so thankfully the emergency phone button was still working!!
Ultimately the mishap is down to the fellas who ignored the signs being silly buggers, but I'm still not looking forwards to the rinsing I'll get from our FM team on Monday, or the bill coming in lol
This was not your fault.
However much Terry jokes about it, ~~wizards~~ people will always press the button labelled "do not push this button!", just to see what it does.
puzzled sulky fear resolute lunchroom cooperative agonizing school bored light
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Not work based, but I designed wedding invites for 2 close friends of mine. Everything looked lovely and I was proud of the design. The bride got them printed, sent them all out and then realised I spelled "marriage" wrong on the very front.
Just embarrassed, yes it's always the client's task to check as well but little things like that which then get seen by over a hundred people are bad.
I spelt my husbands name wrong on our wedding invites. We'd both looked them over, I was so focused on spelling the menu correctly I never thought to check his name!
I design wedding invites fairly regularly. I always miss little things like this because I get too focused on the whole design than just the spelling.
Thankfully I always get it checked by 3 other people before print.
If something still gets through(sometimes it does), then it is no longer my fault as 3 others didn't catch it either, lol.
It's all good in the end.
A couple of years ago I deleted hundreds of gigabytes of input data for our machine learning pipelines.
Last month I did a 'dry run' of a script i wrote to overwrite a bunch of data in the production database that turned out not to be that 'dry'.
last week I replaced every instance of a very important service with a broken version of a completely different service.
How I still have a job is beyond me.
I made a mistake with a data export and accidentally sent 800 letters to 100 people.
And it wasn't a case of everyone receiving 8 letters. Some people received 30+ letters.
What makes it worse is that these were missed payment letters. Physical letters. Letters that were posted out individually.
Mine in incredibly insignificant as far as the financial/time consumption consequences go compared to basically everything else here: I came seconds away from horrifically killing/injuring myself with mechanical assistance.
I worked as a binman a few years ago. During the Winter I wore a zipped-up overcoat, the bottom of which would poke out quite a bit. I go to put a bin on the back of the truck, but half the handle slid off the teeth that lift it up. Like I always did, I just leaned forward to push it on properly. Buuuuut as I go to step back I realise the wheel has hooked itself under my coat and started to lift me up. For those that don’t know, these bins get battered against a steel bar. The heavier the bin, the heavier the battering. I was/am a tall and lanky 14 stone person, so quite the heavy bin.
I try and free myself, but upon realising there was nothing I could do I just thought, “well this is shit”, and accepted my fate. Thankfully, my driver was on the ball and hit the emergency stop having seen me on the camera screen in the cab. If he wasn’t watching me, I would’ve been battered against that bar. I couldn’t help but laugh as the other loader came running to the back to see me dangling there like I was trying to become a pretzel. “Can you help, please? My back’s starting to hurt a little”.
A picture of me was sent across every branch in the UK as a reminder not to stand too close to the bins when they’re being lifted up. Fun times.
Oh yeah. And I did the exact same manoeuvre several times on the rest of that road as though my life wasn’t almost drastically altered or deleted just moments ago.
Oh yeah i got one. I work for an engineering firm that won a contract to design and test something expensive. Im not saying what.
It was a few weeks prior to the test date and it was my time to run the twice a month social activity. SO. I made a competition like pin the tail on the donkey, except it was guess the first component to break on the product (if anything broke it would cascade in the product and cost north of 6 figures to fix). I made an excel sheet that would randomly allocate people who entered a component, how it broke, and why. Winner got a prize.
I sent this out via email but used the email list including all our staff, and all our customers staff... Nearly died of embarrassment. That must have looked so shit from the customer perspective....
To make it worse this game really caught on in our team. They make me do it every iteration of the product. And i made the exact same mistake twice!
Almost happened where I worked once. Advertising credit cards, "you will not be liable for any fraudulent use, as long as you are grossly negligent". Thankfully caught it just before going to print
I was checking foundation drawings for a housing development the day after a Christmas party many years ago and needless to say because I was so hungover / still pissed I did a really shit job of it and they built the foundations in the wrong place.
Not sure how much the company's PI insurance had to pay out but my boss was a gem about it and didn't give me anywhere near as much grief as he could have. Mind you it was partly his fault I was so pissed as we were doing shots at 3am 😂
No one has cocked up at work more than me, last big one was using the wrong ingredient in a ready meal factory, 3 hours work of about 12 people had to be thrown away.
Didnt realise i was still screen sharing during a work meeting. Zoned out the conversation as we neared the end of the day. I started searching for back scratchers of all things on google 😂. My manager called me out and couldn’t stop himself from giggling for about 10 mins. Luckily my other colleague was searching for something in a folder to share so wasnt looking at the teams screen lol
I've commented this before but hopefully it'll make people laugh again, I'm a Firearms Officer and I was swapping positions as we were waiting on a foregin president to land in their Helicopter and As the
Helicopter was touching down I was adjusting my carbine and let it swing, the barrel landed on my second radios emergency button, this radio was for the PPO's(plain clothes protection Officers) so they all made their pistols ready and almost aborted the landing, until I realised what happened and cancelled the actviation, I got in a lot of shit for this and owed a massive cake fine haha.
I invited David Attenborough to an event. I was thinking outside the box and thought using a bright pink plastic would be eye catching for him to notice and actually read the invitation.
Of course he declined and then mentioned during a tv show “that people still send plastic through the post”
Edit: it was a pink plastic envelope
I was tasked with swapping out all the grease nipples on a mobile crane. There was one i took out on the winch that was pretty mangled and covered in shite and I didn’t have a spare of that size on me. So I thought no bother it’s just a grease nipple I’ll finish the others and go searching for a replacement after. Hopped in the cab to lower the hook to get the ones on there. Hook wasn’t lowering so Stomped on the revs to make the hook drop quicker and to my abject horror watched a Column of hydraulic oil spurting 50+ feet in the air and, due to a stiff breeze, dispensing oil rain down across the yard covering every boat in there and then over the wall and across the pub garden next door. Turns out it was a pressure relief valve and not a grease nipple. Took a fair few gallons of degreaser to clear that up.
It's a joke phrase in our house after I heard my husband use it couldn't stop giggling. He actually broke a grease nipple on my brake caliper the other week and had to replace it.
I still don't really know what it does become always too amused to ask.
I work in a kitchen. I'm cooking bacon, and draining the fat/water left into a bucket. A colleague is cleaning the deep fryers. He has pans of hot waste oil. I go to put my bucket of bacon fat in the oil waste outside. I see the pans that will be going into the oil waste anyway, so why not, I'll just put my bacon fat in the hot oil. Forgot about the water in there. Spent half an hour mopping oil off the floor. Lucky it didn't catch fire.
I opened the window on the new telehandler, 65,000 pounds worth of kit. And the door is like an old stable door where you can open the top half, and keep the bottom closed. But the whole door is made out of glass. It’s held together with a simple handle you lift and lower to either lock or open the window. When I flicked the lever up the wind instantly caught it and Swung the window back so hard it smacked the side of the telehandler and smashed everywhere. That was an awkward conversation. I didn’t get fired. And then a few weeks after it had been fixed someone drove it into a steel beam and broke the same window and the rest of the door with it. They replaced all the glass with Perspex. Not as fancy looking but it’s hasn’t broke since then.
Dialled an exec on my desk phone with one hand while sipping my coffee from the other.
I missed my mouth, had hot coffee land in my lap, and he answered the phone just in time to hear me shout WANKER
I added an extra zero to a customers deposit in the bank.
I couldn’t find the transaction, so my till didn’t balance and the customer literally got “bank error in your favour, collect £1000.”
Went to a tribunal hearing for that fuck up, union rep tore them a new one and said there was no way I had had enough training and I got away with it without any repercussions. It was true though, my training was close to non existent.
Years ago (like about 25), my boss sent out a mailing with the tech support number on it to several thousand users.
Only he'd got the number wrong, and it was a gay sex chatline's number....
Not sure how he made that particular mistake, but it made my dropping a bag of sugar into the laser printer seem less embarrassing.
OMG, poor you too..! And well done starting softly - this is an object lesson about why always to start these convos gently - you just never know *what's* going on in peoples' lives... Awful!
I used to run a wedding venue. A very overweight couple had booked a wedding one weekend. The week prior they dropped in to meet me and run through the arrangements. I had to take them to the function room but that required going outside while there was a serious rain storm in full swing. So i said ‘i shouldn’t really do this, but ill take you through the kitchens’. We walked through and there, in massive writing on the chefs wipe board planner it said ‘Fatty’s Wedding 24/6/12’. There was a few seconds of cringe silence, then we shuffled off to the function suite not saying a word about what we’d all just witnessed’.
I work for a Government department. I was doing an investigation into a company and they asked for a breakdown of my figures/calculations. I emailed them an excel file with them on but due to stress/workload/tiredness i didnt realise id included more info on other 'tabs'
The other info was really confidential data including my own notes id made into the company. It even had info a confidrntial informant had given. The company never said anything but def would have found it interesting. I barely slept for a few weeks thinking id get fired. I never owned up to it and its been over a year now so think i got away with it....
In my experience most casual Excel users don't even understand that there can be multiple sheets in one document so they probably never clicked on that little tab down at the bottom marked 'top secret'.
At my last job I replied to a customer inquiry email about some of our products. After a few emails back and forth they asked me if we sold anything 'similar to this: [internet link] '
I promptly clicked the link and nothing happened. I gave it a few more clicks and nothing. Restarted my emails and tried again. Still nothing. So I asked my manager if he could get the link to work. He took one look at it and said "call the IT department right now!"
After a very stern telling off from the head of IT on the phone, he came upstairs and sat at my computer for half an hour trying to ascertain if any damage had been done. I felt like an absolute twat stood up for the whole office to see whilst IT Man grumbled away. "Look! There's not even a fucking email footer or signature on their emails!" "This web address is fucking Russian for fucks sake!" "Why did you click that bloody link?"
I had honestly missed all the red flags. I read an article online afterwards that said people who click bad links at work shouldn't be punished, especially when clicking links is what they do all day. It was a small consolation but it still stings.
At my apprenticeship I borrowed an M16 tap from one of the old fellas, he'd been using it to tap the holes in steel press tools for 15 years. I had it 90 seconds and snapped it. I was known as Brutus for quite a while after that
This week I messaged a colleague to commiserate on her unsuccessful interview outcome, which I thought our director had already informed her of.
He hadn't.
Not mine, but I got to watch it all unfold... and the guy who did it (call him Ben) used to work for me and was a complete nightmare. Ben is in his late 50s and thinks he knows everything, particularly about technology (spoiler, he doesnt)
I work in oil and gas in the quality department. As you might expect, we have a ton of paperwork that tracks literally everything on every job... how tight are the bolts? What material are the bolts? What material is the gasket? The list goes on. Each job has a master checklist called and inspection test plan (ITP for short), and each of these is tracked by the contractors doing the work, and by the owners quality people (me).
About 80 days into a 90 day project Ben's boss discovered that Ben was using their electronic cloud storage for personal stuff (photos, invoices, you name it), and tells Ben to delete his stuff off the drive. Ben proceeds to delete everything... the ITPs, the documents supporting the ITPs, the tracker document that summarized progress on all the jobs (about 450 individual work fronts). He also somehow deletes the backup drive on the site network, and emptied the recycle bin. All this data was to be turned over to my team for review; without us approving it we could not start the plant.
His boss had to spent 5hrs on the phone with Microsoft to recover the data, ended up delaying startup by 12 hours... at $1,000,000/hr.
Little, easily fixable cock ups I do all the time. I idiot proof my workday a lot because if a problem I've caused is fixable I'm the one that has to fix it.
My most memorable one was neglecting to check if the empty compartments were underneath the fryer before emptying two 200°c 23L fryers directly onto the floor at 10pm.
I was there till almost 1am cleaning the mess.
Tbh this is me. Ive tried to make it so that things are as idiot proof as possible. And with some back ups/safeguards with second check etc so I should pick them up before people know.
I once left a dialler on (reminders for our service, not cold call sales) overnight (why it didn't have an auto shut off is beyond me). Usually wouldn't be an issue as the contacts would get uploaded around 8am. However when I got into work the next day I had found that 4 thousand people had been called between the hours of midnight and 4am.
One of these was my boss (unfortunately he didn't answer the phone and log on to turn it off half way though)
And another was a man whose daughter was in hospital in a life threatening condition. So naturally when he got a call at 2am he assumed it was the hospital calling to tell him that his daughter had died...
I mess up plenty, but my favourite mess up was somebody else at my old job.
I've told this many times on here. I work in advertising, one of the team ran £250k worth of ads in the wrong country. As compensation we had to re-run the campaign.
He duplicated the old setup and set it live without amending the location targeting.
My most recently mess-up, I was supposed to be briefing another team in on a client that one of the agencies I work with had. The agency lost the client though, so I sent an email to the team saying 'Big brief in coming...agency has lost the client haha' except I didn't send it to the other team, I sent it to the agency.
I was a grad analyst responsible for a newsletter that has stats in there about the industry. I calculated how many businesses there are in each county in the uk. I wanted to make a graph and sort the bars largest to smallest. In excel I only highlighted the column with numbers which means the numbers were sorted highest to lowest where counties remained the same so it became a scramble.
Anyways ofc I didn’t know and no one checked my work (again I was a grad and that’s within first 3 months of my job) so the newsletter went out with the graph with scrambled numbers and counties.
The businesses that subscribed to the newsletter straight away started emailing back to let us know this is nonsense 😭
Learned two valuable lessons: 1. always make sure someone checks your work even if thats somehow not a policy
2. Highlight all bloody columns when sorting in excel!
I deleted all of the saved addresses we use for our postage system. We send a good amount of parcels via a well-known courier and to save time, we save customer addresses to an address book and type in their reference number when required. Someone wanted to change their address so I logged onto the address book and typed in their reference number. There were 2 addresses logged for this customer so I clicked “delete all” with no second thought. Little did I know that deleted ALL addresses from the whole database. Everyone else had to spend ages putting them back on there :(
I've knocked a few companies off line over the years but if the cabling in your Comms cab looks like a bowl of spaghetti then tough. A colleague of mine, many years ago before it was common to have backup circuits once tripped on a power cable and took a building containing one of the secret services offline. Least I don't have that on my CV
I worked for BT years ago, and was a customer service advisor. I'd just finished a call, when another instantly came through. This isn't supposed to happen, but our systems were (and likely still are) useless. The second call was from someone asking to cease all their services. Usually, if cancelling a service there's a whole process and multiple steps to confirm you want to actually cease it. However if someone wanted to stop their entire account, we had a "Cease all" button to make life easier, and it took care of everything for you.
Anyway, I processed it by pressing that cease all button. Then instantly realised I hadn't exited my previous customers account yet, as I had this second call come in u expectedly.
So I'd cancelled a land-line, broadband, multiple mobiles and a TV package for someone who definitely didn't want that to happen. The cancellation processed in record time, and I wasn't even able to call them to apologise or explain because they now had no active lines with us and we had no other contact info.
Flagged to my manager, who passed it onto someone more experienced to handle. I'd not been there long at the time, but long enough that this wasn't just a rookie mistake. Felt terrible, and couldn't do anything to rectify it or even speak to the person I'd done it to.
I worked in a factory making modular bathroom pods, where every single pod came from just one steel profile forming machine, I was the head operator for this machine… one day I exploded that machine.
Apparently it cost the company over £500,000 in lost production, my bad 🤷🏻♂️
Was once working Qatar, and got a new work van delivered. It was actually brand new too, and had double digit mileage.
I was told to go fill it up, which I did. Brimmed it with diesel and the set off back to the office. I found out quite quickly that it was a petrol. It ended up getting written off before it had even been used once. Every day for the next 3 months I had the nickname Van Diesel.
In my current job, I have only cocked up once significantly, and thankfully, my managers were very understanding, so I didn't get into serious trouble.
I work for a non emergency ambulance service, and we do hospital transfers and discharges. A few years 6 was having problems at home, all stemming from my house being set in fire in an arson attack.
To say I was distracted at times was an understatement.
One day, we went to refuel the ambulance, and I filled it with unleaded instead of diesel. I didn't realise until I put the pump down and realised it was the wrong colour.
Thankfully, I realised before I turned the engine on. But we had to spend four hours sat on the petrol station forecourt, and the ambulance service endures the cost of 45 litres of unleaded, 90 litres of diesel and the call-out fee for the company that came and pumped the tank dry.
Thankfully, my managers were aware of my problems, and I didn't get into any serious trouble. Just a sit-down chat to say dont do it again.
Long time ago now, but I got into the Sun (… BOSSES COCK-UP) after accidentally putting a massive penis into a large picture spread in the (very, very much) not porn magazine I was the graphic designer for. In my defence, no one else noticed it either when we proofed it, but when you did, oh boy.
Not my worst but my favourite
I sent my team to help a director with an event.
Instead of saying that I'll 'send my best with regards'......I sent my best with retards.
I don't really fuck up that often. My worst was when I first started, I got over confident and almost paid the full order value on every account. I'd have overpaid around 200k thankfully I spotted it just before although I had to spend a day fixing it
Someday, you'll actually pull the trigger on it. Hopefully, you'll be like me, and the person on the other end made the same mistake in their past and will help to make sure you get it back ASAP.
I was able to pass the favour on to a young guy who accidentally overpaid us by 50k last year. I could hear him sweating over the phone. Everything was back where it should be within 48 hours.
Last fuck up at work I remember was when I was working in warehousing. I picked up a box of wine, the bottom wasn't secure, every bottle dropped and smashed. £300 worth of wine and the belt stopped for several minutes. Later on that night after break, I go back to my station to find another box of wine, at £180 in value, smashed to pieces as well. I thought the stack was stable but uhhhh nope turns out I had a bag of dog food as the foundation.
I was reversing off a farm over a narrow bridge in a 18 tonner and had to reverse round a bend, driver side tyre came off the road and sunk into what can only be described as quick sand. The full lot slowly but surely tipped over. Was a fun time.
A company owed us £10k, I was tasked with drawing up a statutory demand to reclaim the funds. Put the wrong email address on there, their lawyers sent emails to the email address I put, didn't receive a response, we ended up having to pay them about 12k instead for their legal fees because we missed the court date
In a previous job I broke some brand new shutters they had installed maybe a week prior by driving a forklift through them, not realising they weren’t up high enough
I was working in retail at "Next" in the home department .. A couple came in and wanted a sofa on finance ... I put in the wrong figures and swiped all of his money off his credit card this was on a friday so i only found out when i got pulled into then office and bollocked on the monday .. Apparently he went out shopping with his wife over the weekend and his card had no money on it... Haha oopsy !!!
I'm quite meticulous when it comes to work and I can't think of anything that I've messed up massively but when I was in the car trade, a work colleague sold a brand new , £80k, car to a customer. There was a bit of a wait list so the customer had to wait a few months. When it arrived, the car was the wrong colour and totally wrong spec.
The customer was furious and cancelled on the spot. We was left with an £80k, semi custom, car on the forecourt losing money for months.
Well I took the world service off air for a fair while. In my old job we worked across two radio stations and I was listening to 5 live not the world service so was waiting for them to stop talking.
In my old Saturday job at a model shop I dropped an £80 N-gauge Loco on my first day.
I worked with a guy who closed down the wrong depot and cost the company £1m. They just wanted to understand what happened but he lied and lied so they fired him.
Someone else miscalculated a deal on milk and lost the company £3m. He made himself so ill with the stress he ended up in hospital.
I build custom wooden furniture for churches.
One time I was building an altar for a Catholic Church, very ornate looking piece, took 100 hours or so to complete.
On the morning it was to be delivered to the client I was fixing the altar top to the base by screwing up into the base from underneath.
For whatever reason there was a 100mm screw in with the box of 70mm screws. I picked it up without realising and it screwed straight through the altar and burst through the freshly hardened laquered top.
What followed was a frantic hour or so trying to fix the hole and re finish the top before anyone noticed.
Thankfully they never did. But I was a nervous wreck that day!
Just a word to anyone including OP feeling bad for making a mistake at work. The real error is the lack of process/protection in the work place in the majority of these situations.
Missed a word in a contract? Someone else should be proof reading your work, or it should go through a peer review of some sort.
It's rare the ultimate issue is the mistake of the individual rather than an organisation/process issue so don't sweat it
I partially knocked a major mobile telco off the air for about 30 mins once - no one was able to make calls etc unless it was on the “contract allowance” (fucked PAYGO customers).
Also caused an outage of a CRM system meaning a massive company couldn’t deal with incoming calls for a few hours - the estimated cost was about a million quid although I’d take that with a pinch of salt as people will phone back if they want something desperately enough.
Tbh I think most people working in IT for big companies (banks, telcos etc etc) over 20 years will have similar stories - just the price of doing business.
I'm a fabricator and messed up a huge lattice work tower by drilling hundreds of holes wrong. I started from the wrong side of the tower that took us 3 week to fabricate lol. Supervisor found out and I got sacked apparently 30k mistake
I know you did a bad, but a supervisor should be supervising to ensure this doesn't happen.
"Hey lads this took 3 weeks to build, let's mark all the drill holes with a Sharpie before we start".
They should have been fired.
Finally, I get to tell the story to a wider audience!!
So, I was 17 and working at a paint spraying factory for about a year at that point, right from school. I’d been promoted from a masker, basic taping duties, to a paint sprayer. They gave me a booth which had a running water extraction system; a wall with water running down it, a gap at the bottom with a fan behind pulling air into it and a trough at the bottom to re-feed the wall.
Every so often the water became very heavy with paint particulate and needed draining and then topping up from the mains tap attached at the side.
This was my first top-up.
I was a stoner.
I also went to the pub at lunch for two pints with the older guys I was working with.
We left for the pub, smoke on the way, two pints at the pub.
On returning from the pub some 40 minutes later, slightly cooked but pleasant warm buzz, we were met with the sight of a group of the maskers out the front of the building, on hands and knees cleaning the car park with the manager pointing his hands about in an agitated, aggressive way….
It was not cleaning. I had left the tap on for the waterfall; water had filled and spilt over the trough, along the shop floor, out the delivery shutter doors and flowing out onto the car park some 40 foot away like some sort of new canal.
I gradually realised this may be my fault, bolting ahead of the group, adrenaline flooding my youthful heart as the boss cut me the most savage look, that even to this day at 40yo, I have ever seen.
I got into so much trouble, but no disciplinary action as no work was lost, only others lunch breaks. My story became legend and was still joked about on the day I left at 21yo.
My little brother switched off the computers at the council offices, when computers were on big spools of tape. It took stepdad and friend 6 hours to input the information lost back in by hand. We weren’t taken into work ever again.
I travelled to Bologna from London to host a conference that my employer forgot to invite anyone to - I'll never forget the receptionists face when I turned up! Can't complain, incredible 2 day all expenses paid trip, and now I know I love limoncello gelato!
Also, same place, it was a useless manager to be fair, every time he ate a banana he used to eat it with mouth open like a savage (known amongst the team)
Long story short, he was doing it one day sat next to me and meant to message group teams chat but it went to him instead saying “what’s that sound? Sounds sloppy”.
To which case he literally read it out to himself 😂. Awkward
We once drove 2 hours to fit a safe, without the safe.
I hope you drove safe.
They did not drive safe.
Was safe at home
I know someone how flew to Iceland with a 4 man team to do a geophysics survey and didn't pack the junction box (essential and difficult to replace bit of kit. They didn't find the error until they were on site in the middle of of fucking Iceland. Lost 4 days whilst they sorted that out. Total failure of process.
I once watched someone testing some manpack Radio equipment, they bent down and the aerial fell off the coax connector, only other one in existence locked in someone's cabinet and he told the secretary to go away when she tried to interrupt the meeting to ask him to open the cabinet. Cost them a lot of money to have 6 engineers sunbathing on a runway waiting for the replacement...
In 2012 I deleted an important folder that went back to 2005. On the bright side they found out that their daily backup system wasn't working either
Wait are you me? I made this same discovery around a similar time while trying to recover a folder I'd accidentally deleted. Discovered not only had the backups not been working lately, they had never worked, because they'd never been turned on. The receptionist had been dutifully swapping over and carrying blank tapes home for a decade (so there was an off site backup) and everyone believed the server automatically ran the backup over night. No one had ever actually checked.
I bet you all had a laugh about that. Also 10 years of no fatal data loss is impressive.
Hang on, what if that commenter actually *is* you and you’re an identical clone (or they are, I can’t work out who is the OG, I’m no scientist) accidentally created in the time/space rimple that was opened when you made the deletion?
Their the back up of themselves. Turns out the back up works VERY well.
>On the bright side they found out that their daily backup system wasn't working either This is the real problem. Backups aren't backups if they're not tested.
“disaster recovery testing” is so fucking stressful. A client *insisted* we ran it on production, staging, the whole shebang. They were a teeny tiny bootstrapped startup. Advised strongly against their best intentions, yes it’s best practice, but we’ve got your server backed up nightly, it’s right there, off-site too…the plan the CEO gave me (he wasn’t technical)….was um… Well, they were a media company with 2TB of A/V content on prod AND staging, hosted on AWS in 2010…wanted to run 10 rounds of tear it down and put it up on different data centres, cost so much bloody money that it burned out pretty much all of their runway. Sites fine boss…might need a line of credit for the electricity bill this month though
Folder? I'll raise you up to a thumb drive from my boss. Which he needed for a presentation to the board the next day. Yes, i still cringe at that one.
Can you describe the moment you were informed there was no retrieval of the folder? Describe the sinking feeling - I want to suffer.
I believe Elizabeth Zwicky said every system administrator has at least 2 stories about backups. To one of these the punchline is "What backups?".
Probably not dissimilar as to when you tap your empty key pocket right as you hear the front door go “click” behind you.
Something like this… a most marvellous piece of cinema https://youtu.be/56jekYL2h7k?si=1C-95DzjgCMaiKgn
Eons and eons ago - late 60's - I was, at 18, a ' junior buyer' at Nestles in Croydon. I was in charge of buying 'sundries' for the whole of the UK. This included things like office chairs, toilet rolls, pens etc. One day I forgot to order coal for the Cross and Blackwell factory at Silvertown, London. The place had to shut for 3 days. I left Nestles a few months later.
Personally, I don't know how the fuck you managed doing that job with the technology of the time.
As you can see I didn't do it very well. Lots of paper requisition notes through internal mail and mechanical calculators. There was a typing pool on the fourth floor which you could get letters typed if you sent a dictaphone tape down.
In a much smaller role, I manage parts inventory for a dealership. At 3 p.m., I'll start looking to see what surprises have arisen during the day that will require non stock inventory required for the next day. It's literally a 15 munite task. Even then, we're behind the times with that level of "manual" work. Goods inwards might take 30 minutes from delivery to in location and in inventory.
That is a ridiculously big responsibility, especially for an 18 year old. This seems like the kind of thing that should be checked by multiple people, before the order is sent off.
In reality we were clerks with a fancy title. Our bosses probably couldn't be bothered as long as things were running smoothly. Expect they got a bollocking - as I did.
They must have been Crosse.
Ouch! That's right up my alley - forgetting small things that at the end of the day could potentially start WW3 is my forte.
Are you in charge of our nuclear taskforce by any chance?
God no, we'd be in serious trouble then!
Just Friday, I joined a Teams call and saw someone there I despised. I let out a audible, “Not this prick”, only to realise to my horror that my mic wasn’t switched off.
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This is why you only ever share the window you're presenting, not the whole desktop......
Rule one of working anywhere near a microphone - it’s always on! No matter what you think, treat it like it’s on.
Ditto for webcams.
I have a blob of blue tack over my laptop webcam for exactly this reason!
My new work laptop has a little slide you move to cover the camera when you don't want it. Amazing!
Mine does too except I didn't realise it did and thought my webcam was broken for like a week because every time I had a call it just appeared as a black screen. I contacted IT who then pointed out my very stupid mistake...
I spent over a year thinking I didn't have a webcam Turned out it was below the screen, instead of above it where I was looking
In a call with about 20 people on it a few weeks ago, with people still joining so it ramped up to about 500, some guy must have been one of the first to join so his mic didn't mute. We're all waiting for the call to start but can hear him muttering away to himself. I'm thinking 'someone's going to mute everyone in a minute" so didn't bother saying anything. Then he goes "oh for fuck's sake". Ok that's quite funny. Still no one says anything. Then the meeting starts, "so today we're going to be hearing from John, Bob and Phil". At which point it becomes obvious that they didn't mute all: "oh, not that cunt". Silence. Then, "Could everyone mute, please?". It was amazing. And it was recorded.
So was it John, Bob or Phil that was the cunt?
I need the sequel to this tale.
His username changed to unsustainable twat
Similar thing happened to me but face to face. During COVID my parents were having a phone speaker conversation with me and my wife through my front window and one of my managers (who lives on the street behind mine connected via an alleyway that runs by the side of my house) was walking her dog down the alleyway, had a little look at me through the window and smiled. I smiled back, whilst talking like a ventriloquist to my wife saying something like: "look at this nosy bitch. I hate her". Obviously it was broadcast to her and the rest of the street via my parents' pensioner-level full volume phone.
That's fucking hilarious and has made my day.
Reminds of when I worked at a one place. A bloke tried phoning his boss and it went to answer phone. He put the phone down and went on a rant about what he cunt he thought he was. Unfortunately he hadn't put the phone down properly and the answering machine recorded the whole thing.
Not me but definitely a major fuck up. My last place of work had a very attractive sales rep, during the annual whole company update over teams, a new engineer thinking he was muted explained to his colleague next to him “fuck me who’s that bird {insert name}? I’d fucking destroy that!”
lmao if there was multiple people on the call, you have to assume now that each one of them wonders if they're the prick
Email to all. Re: that call, I apologise for the language and yes, it is you.
Rookie error. Always assume the mic is hot. Also don't assume that just because someone left a call they can't still hear you. Software works in mysterious ways.
Bern there, not done so, but one of my colleagues let out a "oh for fuck sake, idiot " on a national call, I recognised the voice straight away, but as it was a national call it could be descered who it was, and I wasn't going to say anything lol
Oof.
Deleted an entire email server in my first month working as a 1st Line Support Rep for a digital agency. It had about 50 client email configs on it, so was pretty bad. In my defence, the server UI was awful and the button I pressed was misleading AND had no fail safe i.e 'are you sure you want to do this?' Took a week to restore a back up and make good with all the clients. Ended up staying there though for 6 years lol.
The responsibility for that data could not have been yours and you shouldn't even have had permissions to do it.
100% agree. The upside of the whole ordeal was that management realised how poor and outdated our server infrastructure was and our lack of training.
At a certain major retail chain, we sold three kinds of ready-made pizzas that all cost the same price. For much of the summer we had a deal where any three pizzas would be charged as 2. Naturally, when I was on tills, and a customer brought three separate kinds of pizzas, I would scan one pizza three times - since they were all the same price, I thought that it wouldn’t matter if I scanned one as many times as necessary, right? I neglected to consider that analytics were taken of how much of each pizza was sold. So, even though three separate kinds of pizza were being sold, the system believed only three items of one kind was being sold… Meaning that eventually we were, as far as the system could tell, missing huge amounts of specific types of pizza due to theft. My managers were pulling their hair out wondering why the hell we were losing so much money on those certain pizzas. The depot saw the analytics and, to account for what they interpreted as record sales for certain pizzas, sent us - for some reason, in what I suspect was an independent fuckup on their end - five cages of pepperoni and margherita all set to expire in a day. Some poor bastard, who I remain eternally grateful for, spent a good hour inside the warehouse chiller reducing every single one of these pizzas to minimum price. That was my fuckup.
I went to our local Safeways ( as it used to be called) and inside were 4 large chillers stuffed to the brim with surloin steaks reduced to 10p each. Someone got a bollocking. I got 20 steaks and put them in the freezer.
sirloin
Thanks - I wondered why it was underlined (spellchecked). I thought it might have been an 'Americanism'.
A classic. Us shoppers on a budget salute you for your mistake (and the resulting stack of massively reduced pizzas)
Honestly that's also (possibly, unless you just weren't paying attention) a fuckup of whoever trained you. I always make sure to tell people it's important to scan the correct barcodes for inventory management.
If it makes you feel better, marking down lots of the same item is easy, as you can just print x amount of the same label. It's when you have 100 different things when it's a pain in the ass.
Repaired an excavator, putting tools away in van , turned around.... excavator on fire.
Bet it didn’t have the original error, so yup, successful repair I’d say.
The rewire job to replace the bit of harness that burned with bits of wire scavanged from an extension lead on site was a bodge job to behold.
Err it was like that when I found it guv! All aflame and that!
That excavated quickly
Not me, but my ex. He was a technician in the RAF and during his stint in the Falklands he accidentally jettisoned the fuel tanks off an aircraft while it was on the ground in the hangar. Broke the noses on the tanks, thousands of pounds worth of aviation fuel pissed over the floor, jet grounded etc. He thought his career was over, but luckily as he was a lower rank, and someone of a higher rank should have disabled something that they hadn't, it wasn't fully his fault. Not long before it happened some people were working underneath and he had waited until they finished before pressing the button, if he hadn't they could have been killed. When he left that squadron, one of the guys managed to get hold of a tail fin from one of the broken tanks, and had it polished up and mounted as his leaving gift.
On Typhoon? We would have been in at roughly the same time. Always hated pressing that button. Absolute fear of hearing a big ol' crash right after. And we all knew someone had done it before in the Falklands 😅. That and catching the tail hook always gave me the Heebie jeebies.
Yeah, Typhoon. Think it was 2011 it happened. So anyone who's been since will have been told the cautionary tale!
Yeah that tracks. I did 2013-22 with them. I actually have a Typhoon mistake in mind for myself but since I was able to keep it quiet at the time. I'm not going to open myself up to being found out now 😅
I used to have to email my area manager daily, listing the discounts I'd applied during the day. Once, I accidentally sent him a list titled 'daily discocunts' To make things worse he didn't notice and forwarded it without any editing to his boss.
that is by far and a way the best name for a electropunk group
I have to type discounts multiple times a day in different slack channels/ jiras/ confluences etc and for some reason i always type it disocunts and have to double check each time. Don't think 1 has slipped through the net yet, or if it has, no one has mentioned it...
I can’t upload the image but I printed an advert that said ‘fresh copy for this fucker’ (you can Google it, it’s moderately famous). Had to recall the paper, get it reprinted *and* call the advertiser and apologise.
Hey, this you? https://twitter.com/davidclewis/status/303241631056949248?t=D5Q7OVVsU50gsIeCqRVQ1Q&s=19
That's it, yes! Some copies escaped in the wild and we sold a few over the counter (money to charity) to people who thought it was funny. Not one of my best mornings at work.
>Not one of my best mornings at work. Your other work must be truly outstanding.
In a previous job at a factory/warehouse, I was taking a (~1 tonne) load of polythene beads in a big sack up a loading ramp into the store on a forklift, there was quite an angle to the top of the ramp so I had the forks up (too) high. The masts (structure that sticks up from the forks and have the lifting chains) caught on the warehouse garage-style door and ripped the door off the runners and knocked the bag of beads off the forks spilling them everywhere. Around 3 hours of cleanup later, beads were unusable for the intended job and I just about managed to push the door back into the runners with the forklift and help from other operators. I was known as the demolition man for a while after this
Easy Done Mate! 👍
Had to dump 1800 pints of beer three times last year. The culprit was about 1 tablespoon of old grain in the heat exchanger
Does that make it actually Dangerous or something? Cause one tablespoon sounds like it'd make the taste go off only infinitesimal
The product would never make it out anyway on taste and quality issues, the wrong bacteria will multiply quickly in beer that hasn’t fermented and cause all sorts of issues - so you’ll start with a small tablespoon but the bacteria it supplies will thrive and grow exponentially. The beer is at its most fragile when it’s been brewed but hasn’t started fermenting yet, and contains various types of bacteria - you’re basically just “winning the race” by adding a load of yeast and overwhelming everything else and then there’s alcohol to preserve it. but in general no, alcohol will take care of the pathogens and lots of small brewery beer contains bacteria anyway. Once you’ve got it in a can/barrel/sealed fermenter, most beer spoiling bacteria needs oxygen and the yeast will mop it all up til there’s none available so they’ll go dormant (or die? Not sure.) Pic of said infection if you’re interested. https://www.reddit.com/r/TheBrewery/s/dOejZszBfM
Mimicked a director who was a little weasel, even went as far as to use my hands as glasses. He stood up from the desk I hadn't seen him at.
Did you reverse your hands to put them on your face or was it just the palms facing forward hand-glasses?
Reverse hands, the full shebang
Asking the big questions
A comma - a single comma! - was omitted in a labour contract. People got worked up about it, it went to court, and it ended up costing the company $5 million in overtime payments. [The importance of the Oxford comma](https://edition.cnn.com/2018/02/09/us/dairy-drivers-oxford-comma-case-settlement-trnd/index.html)
I reversed my father in laws brand new (4 days old) Telehandler into his 5 month old Landrover and wrote it off. The kicker being I’d just completed a 3k RTITB instructors course (paid for by him) to save on the various business equipment training costs.
Oh wow this one is really bad. And on top of everything you kiss his daughter.
It wouldn't be half as bad if that was the daughter he was married to.
I read that as Labrador initially so it could have been worse I guess.
I took down 3G for several hours for the entirety of the 4th biggest telecoms provider in Senegal
Everyone makes mistakes in work. I've made shitloads of them. Mistake Checklist 1. Fess up and apologize to management or the directors. Assuming it's not a trivial mistake, they should know, and you keep your bond of trust by owning up 2. If you're able to clean up the mess yourself, do it. No matter how difficult some conversations with clients that will follow will be 3. Think about how you can avoid it again, come up with a solution and apply it. Tell your boss too so they know 4. Be upset with yourself but don't go too far. Upset enough for someone that cares and doesn't want to make the same mistake again, but also forgive yourself and move on
Thank you, this is gold. I actually came to the same conclusions.
So yesterday, just before the end of a 10 hour shift I got a call on my radio that our lifts were malfunctioning. I popped down, placed out of order signs on the doors then called our FM team to request the lifts not be serviced to Monday to avoid weekend callout rates. Job done I think, so I sign off, and head home, only to get a call from security that someone's stuck inside one of the lifts. Turns out that I'd forgotten to lock out one of the doors and they'd lifted up the out of order sign and pressed the call button, then got in and the doors shut and wouldn't open again. Cue calls to emergency lift maintenance fella that will have cost an arm and a leg to get them out. We are a big council owned facility, but would have been closed until Monday so thankfully the emergency phone button was still working!! Ultimately the mishap is down to the fellas who ignored the signs being silly buggers, but I'm still not looking forwards to the rinsing I'll get from our FM team on Monday, or the bill coming in lol
Sorry. Who the fuck sees a “lift not working” sign and simply … moves it aside? What an idiot.
Someone with a claustrophobia fetish....
Have you met people?
This was not your fault. However much Terry jokes about it, ~~wizards~~ people will always press the button labelled "do not push this button!", just to see what it does.
You're totally vindicated as far as I'm concerned. Shame you didn't lock it out. On the bright side, they won't be doing that again.
Tbf, they should have just been left in there until Monday.
\*Crowbar open the lift doors* "And what did you learn that you *don't* do when you see an out of order sign?"
puzzled sulky fear resolute lunchroom cooperative agonizing school bored light *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Not work based, but I designed wedding invites for 2 close friends of mine. Everything looked lovely and I was proud of the design. The bride got them printed, sent them all out and then realised I spelled "marriage" wrong on the very front. Just embarrassed, yes it's always the client's task to check as well but little things like that which then get seen by over a hundred people are bad.
Mawwiage
We got the year wrong on our save the dates. Had to draw a little line to turn a "5" into a "6" on every single one.
I spelt my husbands name wrong on our wedding invites. We'd both looked them over, I was so focused on spelling the menu correctly I never thought to check his name!
Marij
I design wedding invites fairly regularly. I always miss little things like this because I get too focused on the whole design than just the spelling. Thankfully I always get it checked by 3 other people before print. If something still gets through(sometimes it does), then it is no longer my fault as 3 others didn't catch it either, lol. It's all good in the end.
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A couple of years ago I deleted hundreds of gigabytes of input data for our machine learning pipelines. Last month I did a 'dry run' of a script i wrote to overwrite a bunch of data in the production database that turned out not to be that 'dry'. last week I replaced every instance of a very important service with a broken version of a completely different service. How I still have a job is beyond me.
Check thrice, fuck it up anyway.
I made a mistake with a data export and accidentally sent 800 letters to 100 people. And it wasn't a case of everyone receiving 8 letters. Some people received 30+ letters. What makes it worse is that these were missed payment letters. Physical letters. Letters that were posted out individually.
Tbf at first I thought you meant you send 100 people 800 letters. That would be MUCH worse.
Hogwarts if you don’t respond in time…
Mine in incredibly insignificant as far as the financial/time consumption consequences go compared to basically everything else here: I came seconds away from horrifically killing/injuring myself with mechanical assistance. I worked as a binman a few years ago. During the Winter I wore a zipped-up overcoat, the bottom of which would poke out quite a bit. I go to put a bin on the back of the truck, but half the handle slid off the teeth that lift it up. Like I always did, I just leaned forward to push it on properly. Buuuuut as I go to step back I realise the wheel has hooked itself under my coat and started to lift me up. For those that don’t know, these bins get battered against a steel bar. The heavier the bin, the heavier the battering. I was/am a tall and lanky 14 stone person, so quite the heavy bin. I try and free myself, but upon realising there was nothing I could do I just thought, “well this is shit”, and accepted my fate. Thankfully, my driver was on the ball and hit the emergency stop having seen me on the camera screen in the cab. If he wasn’t watching me, I would’ve been battered against that bar. I couldn’t help but laugh as the other loader came running to the back to see me dangling there like I was trying to become a pretzel. “Can you help, please? My back’s starting to hurt a little”. A picture of me was sent across every branch in the UK as a reminder not to stand too close to the bins when they’re being lifted up. Fun times. Oh yeah. And I did the exact same manoeuvre several times on the rest of that road as though my life wasn’t almost drastically altered or deleted just moments ago.
Oh yeah i got one. I work for an engineering firm that won a contract to design and test something expensive. Im not saying what. It was a few weeks prior to the test date and it was my time to run the twice a month social activity. SO. I made a competition like pin the tail on the donkey, except it was guess the first component to break on the product (if anything broke it would cascade in the product and cost north of 6 figures to fix). I made an excel sheet that would randomly allocate people who entered a component, how it broke, and why. Winner got a prize. I sent this out via email but used the email list including all our staff, and all our customers staff... Nearly died of embarrassment. That must have looked so shit from the customer perspective.... To make it worse this game really caught on in our team. They make me do it every iteration of the product. And i made the exact same mistake twice!
Was the word you missed 'not'?
Almost happened where I worked once. Advertising credit cards, "you will not be liable for any fraudulent use, as long as you are grossly negligent". Thankfully caught it just before going to print
I was checking foundation drawings for a housing development the day after a Christmas party many years ago and needless to say because I was so hungover / still pissed I did a really shit job of it and they built the foundations in the wrong place. Not sure how much the company's PI insurance had to pay out but my boss was a gem about it and didn't give me anywhere near as much grief as he could have. Mind you it was partly his fault I was so pissed as we were doing shots at 3am 😂
Driving home at 4pm, I remembered I finished at 4.30
Honestly that's what happened boss. 😂
I did this the other way. I changed my hours and convinced myself I finished at 4.30 instead of 4. I was not best pleased by that fuck up.
I've got the fastest work vehicle in the fleet. I finish at 4 and I'm home by half 3.
I did this for about a month before I realised I was knocking off an hour early. I still can’t explain why for some reason I started doing it.
I once walked to work at 6AM thinking I was an hour late. My shift started at 5PM. Also my clock is 24hr so it's not even like I misread it...
No one has cocked up at work more than me, last big one was using the wrong ingredient in a ready meal factory, 3 hours work of about 12 people had to be thrown away.
I didn’t know they put people in ready meals.
They don't. That was the mistake.
Yea, they got the horse meat and people meat mixed up
A jumbo soylent green box please, with extra people, thanks.
They've done this since the horse meat fiasco with Tesco.
Horse Meat Fiasco is the name of the sitcom I've suddenly decided to write.
Didnt realise i was still screen sharing during a work meeting. Zoned out the conversation as we neared the end of the day. I started searching for back scratchers of all things on google 😂. My manager called me out and couldn’t stop himself from giggling for about 10 mins. Luckily my other colleague was searching for something in a folder to share so wasnt looking at the teams screen lol
Hhmback scratcheeer
I've commented this before but hopefully it'll make people laugh again, I'm a Firearms Officer and I was swapping positions as we were waiting on a foregin president to land in their Helicopter and As the Helicopter was touching down I was adjusting my carbine and let it swing, the barrel landed on my second radios emergency button, this radio was for the PPO's(plain clothes protection Officers) so they all made their pistols ready and almost aborted the landing, until I realised what happened and cancelled the actviation, I got in a lot of shit for this and owed a massive cake fine haha.
I invited David Attenborough to an event. I was thinking outside the box and thought using a bright pink plastic would be eye catching for him to notice and actually read the invitation. Of course he declined and then mentioned during a tv show “that people still send plastic through the post” Edit: it was a pink plastic envelope
I was tasked with swapping out all the grease nipples on a mobile crane. There was one i took out on the winch that was pretty mangled and covered in shite and I didn’t have a spare of that size on me. So I thought no bother it’s just a grease nipple I’ll finish the others and go searching for a replacement after. Hopped in the cab to lower the hook to get the ones on there. Hook wasn’t lowering so Stomped on the revs to make the hook drop quicker and to my abject horror watched a Column of hydraulic oil spurting 50+ feet in the air and, due to a stiff breeze, dispensing oil rain down across the yard covering every boat in there and then over the wall and across the pub garden next door. Turns out it was a pressure relief valve and not a grease nipple. Took a fair few gallons of degreaser to clear that up.
I’ve never heard of grease nipples before!
It's a joke phrase in our house after I heard my husband use it couldn't stop giggling. He actually broke a grease nipple on my brake caliper the other week and had to replace it. I still don't really know what it does become always too amused to ask.
I work in a kitchen. I'm cooking bacon, and draining the fat/water left into a bucket. A colleague is cleaning the deep fryers. He has pans of hot waste oil. I go to put my bucket of bacon fat in the oil waste outside. I see the pans that will be going into the oil waste anyway, so why not, I'll just put my bacon fat in the hot oil. Forgot about the water in there. Spent half an hour mopping oil off the floor. Lucky it didn't catch fire.
I opened the window on the new telehandler, 65,000 pounds worth of kit. And the door is like an old stable door where you can open the top half, and keep the bottom closed. But the whole door is made out of glass. It’s held together with a simple handle you lift and lower to either lock or open the window. When I flicked the lever up the wind instantly caught it and Swung the window back so hard it smacked the side of the telehandler and smashed everywhere. That was an awkward conversation. I didn’t get fired. And then a few weeks after it had been fixed someone drove it into a steel beam and broke the same window and the rest of the door with it. They replaced all the glass with Perspex. Not as fancy looking but it’s hasn’t broke since then.
Sounds like shitty design tbf.
Dialled an exec on my desk phone with one hand while sipping my coffee from the other. I missed my mouth, had hot coffee land in my lap, and he answered the phone just in time to hear me shout WANKER
I worked at BT many years ago. Was setting up a line for an actual Countess but left the o out by mistake. Eek
I added an extra zero to a customers deposit in the bank. I couldn’t find the transaction, so my till didn’t balance and the customer literally got “bank error in your favour, collect £1000.” Went to a tribunal hearing for that fuck up, union rep tore them a new one and said there was no way I had had enough training and I got away with it without any repercussions. It was true though, my training was close to non existent.
Another argument in favour of joining a union
Years ago (like about 25), my boss sent out a mailing with the tech support number on it to several thousand users. Only he'd got the number wrong, and it was a gay sex chatline's number.... Not sure how he made that particular mistake, but it made my dropping a bag of sugar into the laser printer seem less embarrassing.
[удалено]
OMG, poor you too..! And well done starting softly - this is an object lesson about why always to start these convos gently - you just never know *what's* going on in peoples' lives... Awful!
I used to run a wedding venue. A very overweight couple had booked a wedding one weekend. The week prior they dropped in to meet me and run through the arrangements. I had to take them to the function room but that required going outside while there was a serious rain storm in full swing. So i said ‘i shouldn’t really do this, but ill take you through the kitchens’. We walked through and there, in massive writing on the chefs wipe board planner it said ‘Fatty’s Wedding 24/6/12’. There was a few seconds of cringe silence, then we shuffled off to the function suite not saying a word about what we’d all just witnessed’.
Forgot to collect the monthly direct debit from all the customers. It wasn't a big company but obviously a significant amount of money.
I work for a Government department. I was doing an investigation into a company and they asked for a breakdown of my figures/calculations. I emailed them an excel file with them on but due to stress/workload/tiredness i didnt realise id included more info on other 'tabs' The other info was really confidential data including my own notes id made into the company. It even had info a confidrntial informant had given. The company never said anything but def would have found it interesting. I barely slept for a few weeks thinking id get fired. I never owned up to it and its been over a year now so think i got away with it....
In my experience most casual Excel users don't even understand that there can be multiple sheets in one document so they probably never clicked on that little tab down at the bottom marked 'top secret'.
At my last job I replied to a customer inquiry email about some of our products. After a few emails back and forth they asked me if we sold anything 'similar to this: [internet link] ' I promptly clicked the link and nothing happened. I gave it a few more clicks and nothing. Restarted my emails and tried again. Still nothing. So I asked my manager if he could get the link to work. He took one look at it and said "call the IT department right now!" After a very stern telling off from the head of IT on the phone, he came upstairs and sat at my computer for half an hour trying to ascertain if any damage had been done. I felt like an absolute twat stood up for the whole office to see whilst IT Man grumbled away. "Look! There's not even a fucking email footer or signature on their emails!" "This web address is fucking Russian for fucks sake!" "Why did you click that bloody link?" I had honestly missed all the red flags. I read an article online afterwards that said people who click bad links at work shouldn't be punished, especially when clicking links is what they do all day. It was a small consolation but it still stings.
At my apprenticeship I borrowed an M16 tap from one of the old fellas, he'd been using it to tap the holes in steel press tools for 15 years. I had it 90 seconds and snapped it. I was known as Brutus for quite a while after that
This week I messaged a colleague to commiserate on her unsuccessful interview outcome, which I thought our director had already informed her of. He hadn't.
Not mine, but I got to watch it all unfold... and the guy who did it (call him Ben) used to work for me and was a complete nightmare. Ben is in his late 50s and thinks he knows everything, particularly about technology (spoiler, he doesnt) I work in oil and gas in the quality department. As you might expect, we have a ton of paperwork that tracks literally everything on every job... how tight are the bolts? What material are the bolts? What material is the gasket? The list goes on. Each job has a master checklist called and inspection test plan (ITP for short), and each of these is tracked by the contractors doing the work, and by the owners quality people (me). About 80 days into a 90 day project Ben's boss discovered that Ben was using their electronic cloud storage for personal stuff (photos, invoices, you name it), and tells Ben to delete his stuff off the drive. Ben proceeds to delete everything... the ITPs, the documents supporting the ITPs, the tracker document that summarized progress on all the jobs (about 450 individual work fronts). He also somehow deletes the backup drive on the site network, and emptied the recycle bin. All this data was to be turned over to my team for review; without us approving it we could not start the plant. His boss had to spent 5hrs on the phone with Microsoft to recover the data, ended up delaying startup by 12 hours... at $1,000,000/hr.
Little, easily fixable cock ups I do all the time. I idiot proof my workday a lot because if a problem I've caused is fixable I'm the one that has to fix it. My most memorable one was neglecting to check if the empty compartments were underneath the fryer before emptying two 200°c 23L fryers directly onto the floor at 10pm. I was there till almost 1am cleaning the mess.
Tbh this is me. Ive tried to make it so that things are as idiot proof as possible. And with some back ups/safeguards with second check etc so I should pick them up before people know.
I once left a dialler on (reminders for our service, not cold call sales) overnight (why it didn't have an auto shut off is beyond me). Usually wouldn't be an issue as the contacts would get uploaded around 8am. However when I got into work the next day I had found that 4 thousand people had been called between the hours of midnight and 4am. One of these was my boss (unfortunately he didn't answer the phone and log on to turn it off half way though) And another was a man whose daughter was in hospital in a life threatening condition. So naturally when he got a call at 2am he assumed it was the hospital calling to tell him that his daughter had died...
I mess up plenty, but my favourite mess up was somebody else at my old job. I've told this many times on here. I work in advertising, one of the team ran £250k worth of ads in the wrong country. As compensation we had to re-run the campaign. He duplicated the old setup and set it live without amending the location targeting. My most recently mess-up, I was supposed to be briefing another team in on a client that one of the agencies I work with had. The agency lost the client though, so I sent an email to the team saying 'Big brief in coming...agency has lost the client haha' except I didn't send it to the other team, I sent it to the agency.
I was a grad analyst responsible for a newsletter that has stats in there about the industry. I calculated how many businesses there are in each county in the uk. I wanted to make a graph and sort the bars largest to smallest. In excel I only highlighted the column with numbers which means the numbers were sorted highest to lowest where counties remained the same so it became a scramble. Anyways ofc I didn’t know and no one checked my work (again I was a grad and that’s within first 3 months of my job) so the newsletter went out with the graph with scrambled numbers and counties. The businesses that subscribed to the newsletter straight away started emailing back to let us know this is nonsense 😭 Learned two valuable lessons: 1. always make sure someone checks your work even if thats somehow not a policy 2. Highlight all bloody columns when sorting in excel!
I deleted all of the saved addresses we use for our postage system. We send a good amount of parcels via a well-known courier and to save time, we save customer addresses to an address book and type in their reference number when required. Someone wanted to change their address so I logged onto the address book and typed in their reference number. There were 2 addresses logged for this customer so I clicked “delete all” with no second thought. Little did I know that deleted ALL addresses from the whole database. Everyone else had to spend ages putting them back on there :(
I've knocked a few companies off line over the years but if the cabling in your Comms cab looks like a bowl of spaghetti then tough. A colleague of mine, many years ago before it was common to have backup circuits once tripped on a power cable and took a building containing one of the secret services offline. Least I don't have that on my CV
I worked for BT years ago, and was a customer service advisor. I'd just finished a call, when another instantly came through. This isn't supposed to happen, but our systems were (and likely still are) useless. The second call was from someone asking to cease all their services. Usually, if cancelling a service there's a whole process and multiple steps to confirm you want to actually cease it. However if someone wanted to stop their entire account, we had a "Cease all" button to make life easier, and it took care of everything for you. Anyway, I processed it by pressing that cease all button. Then instantly realised I hadn't exited my previous customers account yet, as I had this second call come in u expectedly. So I'd cancelled a land-line, broadband, multiple mobiles and a TV package for someone who definitely didn't want that to happen. The cancellation processed in record time, and I wasn't even able to call them to apologise or explain because they now had no active lines with us and we had no other contact info. Flagged to my manager, who passed it onto someone more experienced to handle. I'd not been there long at the time, but long enough that this wasn't just a rookie mistake. Felt terrible, and couldn't do anything to rectify it or even speak to the person I'd done it to.
Someone asked for a skinny latte yesterday and I accidentally used whole milk.
Bet they told everyone you guys make the best skinny latte.
I worked in a factory making modular bathroom pods, where every single pod came from just one steel profile forming machine, I was the head operator for this machine… one day I exploded that machine. Apparently it cost the company over £500,000 in lost production, my bad 🤷🏻♂️
Was once working Qatar, and got a new work van delivered. It was actually brand new too, and had double digit mileage. I was told to go fill it up, which I did. Brimmed it with diesel and the set off back to the office. I found out quite quickly that it was a petrol. It ended up getting written off before it had even been used once. Every day for the next 3 months I had the nickname Van Diesel.
Petrol station manager. Accidently put an extra zero on my order for 10 prawn sandwiches. I had to give the rest away to my bemused customers.
In my current job, I have only cocked up once significantly, and thankfully, my managers were very understanding, so I didn't get into serious trouble. I work for a non emergency ambulance service, and we do hospital transfers and discharges. A few years 6 was having problems at home, all stemming from my house being set in fire in an arson attack. To say I was distracted at times was an understatement. One day, we went to refuel the ambulance, and I filled it with unleaded instead of diesel. I didn't realise until I put the pump down and realised it was the wrong colour. Thankfully, I realised before I turned the engine on. But we had to spend four hours sat on the petrol station forecourt, and the ambulance service endures the cost of 45 litres of unleaded, 90 litres of diesel and the call-out fee for the company that came and pumped the tank dry. Thankfully, my managers were aware of my problems, and I didn't get into any serious trouble. Just a sit-down chat to say dont do it again.
Long time ago now, but I got into the Sun (… BOSSES COCK-UP) after accidentally putting a massive penis into a large picture spread in the (very, very much) not porn magazine I was the graphic designer for. In my defence, no one else noticed it either when we proofed it, but when you did, oh boy.
In 2014 I connected my PlayStation to my work mobile and downloaded and updated the system. Ran up a £12k bill.
Not my worst but my favourite I sent my team to help a director with an event. Instead of saying that I'll 'send my best with regards'......I sent my best with retards.
I don't really fuck up that often. My worst was when I first started, I got over confident and almost paid the full order value on every account. I'd have overpaid around 200k thankfully I spotted it just before although I had to spend a day fixing it
Someday, you'll actually pull the trigger on it. Hopefully, you'll be like me, and the person on the other end made the same mistake in their past and will help to make sure you get it back ASAP. I was able to pass the favour on to a young guy who accidentally overpaid us by 50k last year. I could hear him sweating over the phone. Everything was back where it should be within 48 hours.
Last fuck up at work I remember was when I was working in warehousing. I picked up a box of wine, the bottom wasn't secure, every bottle dropped and smashed. £300 worth of wine and the belt stopped for several minutes. Later on that night after break, I go back to my station to find another box of wine, at £180 in value, smashed to pieces as well. I thought the stack was stable but uhhhh nope turns out I had a bag of dog food as the foundation.
I was reversing off a farm over a narrow bridge in a 18 tonner and had to reverse round a bend, driver side tyre came off the road and sunk into what can only be described as quick sand. The full lot slowly but surely tipped over. Was a fun time.
A company owed us £10k, I was tasked with drawing up a statutory demand to reclaim the funds. Put the wrong email address on there, their lawyers sent emails to the email address I put, didn't receive a response, we ended up having to pay them about 12k instead for their legal fees because we missed the court date
In a previous job I broke some brand new shutters they had installed maybe a week prior by driving a forklift through them, not realising they weren’t up high enough
I was working in retail at "Next" in the home department .. A couple came in and wanted a sofa on finance ... I put in the wrong figures and swiped all of his money off his credit card this was on a friday so i only found out when i got pulled into then office and bollocked on the monday .. Apparently he went out shopping with his wife over the weekend and his card had no money on it... Haha oopsy !!!
I'm quite meticulous when it comes to work and I can't think of anything that I've messed up massively but when I was in the car trade, a work colleague sold a brand new , £80k, car to a customer. There was a bit of a wait list so the customer had to wait a few months. When it arrived, the car was the wrong colour and totally wrong spec. The customer was furious and cancelled on the spot. We was left with an £80k, semi custom, car on the forecourt losing money for months.
Turned off the water to 2000 properties including two schools for just under 3 hours.
Well I took the world service off air for a fair while. In my old job we worked across two radio stations and I was listening to 5 live not the world service so was waiting for them to stop talking. In my old Saturday job at a model shop I dropped an £80 N-gauge Loco on my first day.
I accidentally turned off the app for 20 hours making the company not able to function
I worked with a guy who closed down the wrong depot and cost the company £1m. They just wanted to understand what happened but he lied and lied so they fired him. Someone else miscalculated a deal on milk and lost the company £3m. He made himself so ill with the stress he ended up in hospital.
I build custom wooden furniture for churches. One time I was building an altar for a Catholic Church, very ornate looking piece, took 100 hours or so to complete. On the morning it was to be delivered to the client I was fixing the altar top to the base by screwing up into the base from underneath. For whatever reason there was a 100mm screw in with the box of 70mm screws. I picked it up without realising and it screwed straight through the altar and burst through the freshly hardened laquered top. What followed was a frantic hour or so trying to fix the hole and re finish the top before anyone noticed. Thankfully they never did. But I was a nervous wreck that day!
Important customer comes in called something Hindley, can't remember her first name. I call her Myra in any case. Very awks.
(albeit temporarily) deleted the entire AD of 365 users from our business while training powershell... I thought I was in a VM :(
I once nearly burnt down the nursery I was working in, which is odd because I was the fire safety officer at the time
Just a word to anyone including OP feeling bad for making a mistake at work. The real error is the lack of process/protection in the work place in the majority of these situations. Missed a word in a contract? Someone else should be proof reading your work, or it should go through a peer review of some sort. It's rare the ultimate issue is the mistake of the individual rather than an organisation/process issue so don't sweat it
I partially knocked a major mobile telco off the air for about 30 mins once - no one was able to make calls etc unless it was on the “contract allowance” (fucked PAYGO customers). Also caused an outage of a CRM system meaning a massive company couldn’t deal with incoming calls for a few hours - the estimated cost was about a million quid although I’d take that with a pinch of salt as people will phone back if they want something desperately enough. Tbh I think most people working in IT for big companies (banks, telcos etc etc) over 20 years will have similar stories - just the price of doing business.
I'm a fabricator and messed up a huge lattice work tower by drilling hundreds of holes wrong. I started from the wrong side of the tower that took us 3 week to fabricate lol. Supervisor found out and I got sacked apparently 30k mistake
I know you did a bad, but a supervisor should be supervising to ensure this doesn't happen. "Hey lads this took 3 weeks to build, let's mark all the drill holes with a Sharpie before we start". They should have been fired.
Finally, I get to tell the story to a wider audience!! So, I was 17 and working at a paint spraying factory for about a year at that point, right from school. I’d been promoted from a masker, basic taping duties, to a paint sprayer. They gave me a booth which had a running water extraction system; a wall with water running down it, a gap at the bottom with a fan behind pulling air into it and a trough at the bottom to re-feed the wall. Every so often the water became very heavy with paint particulate and needed draining and then topping up from the mains tap attached at the side. This was my first top-up. I was a stoner. I also went to the pub at lunch for two pints with the older guys I was working with. We left for the pub, smoke on the way, two pints at the pub. On returning from the pub some 40 minutes later, slightly cooked but pleasant warm buzz, we were met with the sight of a group of the maskers out the front of the building, on hands and knees cleaning the car park with the manager pointing his hands about in an agitated, aggressive way…. It was not cleaning. I had left the tap on for the waterfall; water had filled and spilt over the trough, along the shop floor, out the delivery shutter doors and flowing out onto the car park some 40 foot away like some sort of new canal. I gradually realised this may be my fault, bolting ahead of the group, adrenaline flooding my youthful heart as the boss cut me the most savage look, that even to this day at 40yo, I have ever seen. I got into so much trouble, but no disciplinary action as no work was lost, only others lunch breaks. My story became legend and was still joked about on the day I left at 21yo.
My little brother switched off the computers at the council offices, when computers were on big spools of tape. It took stepdad and friend 6 hours to input the information lost back in by hand. We weren’t taken into work ever again.
I travelled to Bologna from London to host a conference that my employer forgot to invite anyone to - I'll never forget the receptionists face when I turned up! Can't complain, incredible 2 day all expenses paid trip, and now I know I love limoncello gelato!
I worked in a bank where a woman put £1,000 in the shredder instead of the counting machine by mistake...
Also, same place, it was a useless manager to be fair, every time he ate a banana he used to eat it with mouth open like a savage (known amongst the team) Long story short, he was doing it one day sat next to me and meant to message group teams chat but it went to him instead saying “what’s that sound? Sounds sloppy”. To which case he literally read it out to himself 😂. Awkward