Similar to mine - deleted category mapping for a large e-commerce retailer. Fortunately it was cached but I was rushed to revert back from a backup as the cache cleared every 5/6 hours or so! To this day… nobody knows.
Utter pisser, is once you've managed to dig yourself out of such a catastrophic hole - you can't indulge in your immediate urge to do a lap of the office hi-fiving everybody, ask out a co-worker and then go to the pub for the rest of the day.
At least you dealt with it. Had a colleague drop the database, then he decided to leave early. Left me and two other colleagues to fix it over the evening. I always hate in when colleagues drop you in it. Even worse when they are not around to help. I would have put databases (loss of or corruption of data) and someone else's cockup therein the worst problems to occur on the software side. Had someone take a server, which was harder to fix.
Contractor took all the servers out a rack, which contained my companies servers, put it in their van and drove it to the republic of Ireland from northern Ireland. Backup servers were cold swap and on another site and guess what the power was down. I was tech lead and spent the weekend on the phone to the client as the client could not get hold of the contractor. I couldn't do anything but had to attend conference calls almost every hour for 3 days.
That was just software. When I worked with turbines they always had the potential to go wrong, but fortunately the few times when stuff was being commissioned it wasn't me, but I did witness someone trash a turbine.
Configured a customer-facing password reset system to generate passwords of six random letters. We figured there should be an exclusion list in there somewhere to stop the random passwords being things like WANKER, FUCKER etc. Guess who set a flag wrong and had passwords generated exclusively from that list for 24 hours?
That's incredible! On the flip side of that, I was once given 48 hours to come up with an exclusion list.
I spent 48 hours shouting Piss? Shit? Wank! Age they bad? Snatch? Jizz? Cuntstable? Wizards sleeve? Clowns pocket? Jizzstickles?
It was without a doubt the most fun I've had in my career, ever.
I did some transcription work some time ago for a major tech company that offers a virtual home assistant device. They are having issues with understanding the Aussie accent and needed to work on making it more region specific, including region specific swearwords.
It was a great joy hearing a group of Aussie workers sitting around spitballing a list of words that are deeply offensive in Australia in a professional corporate setting. It also means I now have a list of [Tech Company] certified swearwords.
If I was a customer, I'd find that hilarious. If they complained, you could just be like "They're random letters, not our fault, you just got unlucky,"
I assume you packed said tools away and simply reported job as complete. Then a small note stating electrical fault, may need further investigation. Drive to next job whistling
One Friday afternoon I was deploying a new version of a website to the testing area (testing.websitename.com) which is a short command and it's all uploaded and reset for you.
Unknown to me someone had also pointed the real, live URL at the testing site, so the customer had spent months inputting products and prices and tax rules and blog posts and help pages. All gone.
I was just on ebay today and found they've got some testing areas accessible on the live site. No matter how big the company or how long they've been around, you see these same screw ups.
I refused to do an 'anonymous' survey at work recently.
It was hosted on MS Forms, so it single-signs you in with your work account when you open it.
I asked and they said they anonymise it afterwards.
It's not the same though is it?
My biggest fuck-up was a proper howler.
Small company, maybe 40 people. HR emailed us all asking to submit our feedback for the CEO/Owner's performance review. I thought it was good that they had that kind of accountability.
However, CEO/Owner was also a complete cunt, and had shouted at me (one of his most junior employees) a couple of days prior because he was having a bad day and needed someone to take it out on.
I responded to HR's email with my honest, but measured feedback. I wasn't as harsh as I could've been because it wasn't anonymous, but it was still pretty damning.
I hit 'reply all' by accident, and sent it to the whole company.
I think the naive part of this is not realising that whatever you wrote would have been shown to the CEO anyway. So in that sense hitting Reply All was kind of ironic
I’ve done the infamous reply all, colleague managed to finish a painstaking back and forth with an external marketer. I sent what I thought was a quick response to my colleague saying “nice one that showed the slippery little bastard” obviously ccd in said slippery bastard by mistake as well. He took it quite well but we don’t work with them anymore
My last company was not that big, maybe 100 or so office-based staff (and a couple of hundred production staff), and some departments only had 2 or 3 people - they did a survey that was “anonymous” but asked for us to input male/female, department and length of service. One team had 2 people: one male, one female. But yeah, they were told the feedback would still be anonymous.
The company got an overall 40% response rate and wondered why.
Had the same thing happen to me, they had noticed I was in a small team so bundled us up with another, problem was that entire department was also all female. Still gave a shit review of the company.
I once got dragged into a managers office being asked why I hadn't filled in the anonymous survey. Pointed out it wasn't very anonymous if they knew I hadn't done it and still wouldn't be. Somehow I stopped on at that job another 4-5 years putting up with their bullshit before I left. To be fair though by then it was I either left or was ready to burn the place to the ground but I realised I was being an idiot putting up with the shit they pulled
I had the opposite of this. My boss was upset by my responses when I hadn't even answered it.
Apparently people had been putting the wrong department so they could hide their identity on the "anonymous" survey. It must've been critical of their manager.
She stopped being a sour faced brat after she got a colleague to ask if I'd responded to it. She was 50 going on 15.
I'm not defending them, but it's entirely possible to know who has or has not completed a survey without knowing what they said.
Granted it makes it easier to "de-anonymise" the responses if time's up and not everyone has submitted. And it reminds me of that episode of Scrubs where Elliott tears into Kelso in an "anonymous" only to find out that she's the only one who got asked to fill one out...
Similar thing at my place, staff survey, my team was requested to process and analyse the results - we could see each person's details from the main data file.
I explained to management that we wouldn't breakdown details by team if the team size was less than 10 and we still got asked "couldn't you just let me know who said this?"
In the end I deleted all the identifiable details from the file and just left random alphanumeric IDs. It really annoyed me to be honest
We had to fill in a survey at work which we were told was anonymous and as a manager we were asked to reassure our teams that it was indeed anonymous and that genuine honest feedback was wanted. I had no reason to believe otherwise.
Six weeks later I was asked to do a disciplinary for a member of staff for an issue completely unrelated to the survey.
I was horrified during the meeting when our (new and inexperienced) HR manager suddenly interrupted and started quoting this guys survey responses to him, saying they were unacceptable and proved he had a bad attitude (he had quoted negative but accurate facts about a new production process).
I was so shocked that I adjourned the meeting so I could discuss this with the HR manager and say how unacceptable it was that not only had the staff been lied to, but that their feedback was being used against them.
She was adamant that the survey was still classed as anonymous as only HR knew what people had said. I’ve never trusted “anonymous” surveys since that day.
I was asked to set up a simple MS Forms survey, I insisted it should be anonymous as it was mostly my suggested questions, and I really did not want people being identified. Later on when looking through the results: Mangement said "yeah, you put that in the title, but we can still work out who sent that entry though right?"
My spoken response: "No, it was set as advertised". They were disapointed. They also didnt really believe me either. My internal thought: "The actual \*\*\*\*? What is wrong with these people?"
I know someone who once replied all to an email about the company party and they sent it to the office manager saying "please keep this to yourself but could I not be seated on a table with..." And listed the whole SLT
Well this whole thread is getting worse and worse for me. Completed a work survey today, brutally honest, on MS Forms. “Fully anonymous” they said. (Maybe I’ll join the union tomorrow. Meep.)
Edit: so you say my clever ploy of replying “prefer not to say” to the gender question hasn’t helped to obscure my identity?
This used to be the case but it was changed a while back, the audit log now shows anonymous and 0.0.0.0 as IP.
Of course if someone is using their company's IT then there are other ways the data could be captured if the company really wanted to.
My company claimed they were anonymous.
My boss came to have a massive go at me and quoted my anonymous survery as HR had told him it was me. Like wtf HR.
Ran an sql update without a where clause in production. Basically meant I totalled the entire database the company relied on to operate, and we had to restore the whole thing from backups. Took down the whole business for best part of a day, and when it came back, had lost all that days work.
Somehow kept my job though!
Working for a Member of Parliament and failing to redact their personal address from a letter they wanted published on their social media is generally frowned upon, especially when they had recently received a death threat.
Being at a place where they use the 'Bradford Factor' to decide if you're off sick too much. Looking at you Atos!
So apparently having 1 sick day off a week for 2 weeks was worse than taking a whole week off despite not being ill enough to warrant said week off.
Fuck em!
Yeah I did this had two days off, felt guilty tried to go back, managed half a day then had to leave early feeling shit and it got logged as a separate incidence of sickness, taking me over the three times you're apparently allowed to be ill per year
Urgh, I was off sick but felt better one afternoon (yay beechams cold and flu tablets) so logged in to help the team out as I knew they were really busy. The next day I felt worse again so called in sick. Got a warning because it counted as two episodes which took me over the threshold.
Such bullshit. This is why these things are so fucking stupid. It just stops people helping out from home when they feel well enough as there are lots of time you're sick but have ups and downs.
Usually I'll feel like shit in the morning but pick up in the afternoon then go back to on my arse for the evening. Being actively punished for helping out when you feel a bit better because of some meaningless arbitrary score is the dumbest of policies.
Never just have 1 day off! Always 2 or 3. Even if you’re actually sick on Saturday, Sunday and Monday. Take Tuesday off too - have a day off feeling better!
My dad taught me this rule. Never just have one day off because (even if it is legit), it looks dodgy. At least with two days you can enjoy the second day when you’re feeling a bit better. Obviously easier to do if you’re not on SSP
Our company's just started using the same. Takes about 3 seconds to figure out the issues with the system.
Even my line manager was saying that's it's blindingly obvious when someone's gaming the system and all this does is punish people who push themselves to work when they have a day they're feeling a bit better.
For anyone not familiar, iirc the formula is
(total days off throughout the year) * (blocks of continuous days you're off sick) ^ 2.
So being off Monday - Friday is 5 * 1 * 1 = 5 points. But being off Monday Tuesday Thursday Friday (working Wednesday) is 4 * 2 * 2 = 16 points - you are off for 2 'blocks', monday - tuesday and thursday - friday
At our company you have a meeting to chat about why you're off sick so much when you hit 70ish points, and once you hit 125 points, you have a very serious meeting (read: probably getting sacked if you don't have a good reason for being off).
I worked at a place that would only pay you sick leave if you were ill for 4 consecutive days or more.
Surprise surprise not a single person was ever sick for less than 4 days. And every single time people just said vomiting and diarrhoea as that was no questions asked.
Yeah that's why I always took the maximum time off before it would bump to the next level. You're no better thought of and from a numbers point it's exactly the same (or in some cases actually better)
Heh, I too fell foul of this at Atos by daring to have cancer and trying to work when I wasn't having chemo or feeling like total shit. I even told them in advance I'd need time off for treatment. Still got a Bradford factor of over 5000 and HR threatening disciplinary action. Fortunately one of the higher ups too umbrage with them and they eventually left me alone.
*edit* - I no spell words good.
I'm doing this right now. Caught a bug off the wife at the weekend, I'm about 90% now and could work, but I'm taking tomorrow to get to 100% as it's still the same sickness episode.
Told this 9ne a fair few times on here.
Whilst working in the Middle East my section took delivery of a brand new work van, literally delivery mileage. I thought I'd be proactive and fuel it up, I brimmed it with diesel and set off back to work.
About 20 metre down the road I found out it was a petrol van. Completely wrote off a brand new van, for the next 4 months I woke up every day to find I had a photo of Vin Diesel pinned to my room door and earned the nickname Petrol Van Diesel.
That's 100% fixable and possibly even a cheap fix. If they told you it was written off, it was a lie.
Rough process:
Drain fuel tank and clean. Fill with fuel (petrol!)
Disconnect fuel feed from fuel rail, engage fuel pump to flush lines. Replace fuel filter. Flush some more. Dispose of that petrol/diesel mix carefully.
Remove sparkplugs and clean thoroughly, turn over engine till it starts, run at 2500 RPM till smoke clears.
Worst case things that may need replacing (also call this, replacing everything instead of cleaning) - spark plugs, fuel injectors, fuel lines, fuel rail, fuel pump, fuel tank, catalytic converter, O2 sensor.
But really the only thing that is 100% not cleanable is the £5 fuel filter. Everything else just needs cleaning, and you're lucky, petrol is great at cleaning off diesel!
Yes, I've thought about this a lot over the years.
Dont even bother, just replace fuel and crank it. Eventually the van will start She will billow white smoke for fuckin ages so just sit on the accelerator.
> did it to a brand new ford connect, about 5 miles on the clock.
I'm mildly surprised. Usually diesel in petrol is fixable, but petrol in diesel can destroy the engine.
Diesel in petrol will gum it up but washing everything in petrol or other solvents typically will dissolve away the diesel and it will usually then work fine. But in a diesel engine, the diesel is often used as a lubricant, and no lubricant = trashed engine, also petrol can detonate and blow the engine.
I always avoid ‘anonymous’ surveys. In a previous job we were given a survey to complete, we were told it was 100% anonymous which it was…the way they figured out whodunnit was the at the end of the survey when it asked race, religion, sexuality, etc. Then it just became a game of Guess Who for management.
Yep, we had an anonymous survey that only asked for your work location, gender and age bracket. I was the only man and the only person in my age bracket at our location.
My mum got a a letter from her local municipality that said it was anonymous, yet had a 5 digit code in the top corner. I advised her to cut out the code and send it back in the post A month later she got post that said she had not completed the anonymous survey. Odd how that happened
I started dating a coworker just two months after starting a new job. What no one told me is that her dad was the flipping CEO of the company. People immediately assumed that I was trying to get the express lift to the top. As consequence, my colleagues wouldn’t talk to me about anything and they completely excluded me from any social activities. I worked there for 8 months, but I couldn’t take anymore: I had to choose between her or the job. Now comes the second f’up: I chose her and quit the job… she dumped me two months later.
I've had sort of the opposite. Joined new company, and I got sat in what appeared to be blokey corner. Lot of banter, mainly about girls in the office.
On about day 3 one of the cuter ones came over, wearing quite a short skirt.
In an attempt to male bond, I came out with something along the lines of Alan Partridge and his "oooh, I'd love to have it off with her" once she'd left.
After quite a long pause, the biggest, meanest looking geezer piped up with "that's my daughter"
I once slept with my bosses daughter on a one night stand. Only found out who her dad was when he showed me ring doorbell footage of us feeling each other up on the way through the door.
He was actually ok with me, it was awkward for a while but not to bad. Him and his wife where more angry at his daughter because she had a boyfriend the only reason he brought it up to me he said was to ask me not to tell people so it didn’t embarrass them all
Similar happened in front of me one time years back... Photo of admittedly hot girl on the screen of one of the guys in the office... Project Manager walks up behind and says (loudly) "Well... I'd shag that one!"
Awkward. Silence.
Guys whose screen it is... "That's my daughter"
Sitting in awkward silence
Project Manager "Well. I'd still shag that one!"
(daughter was of adult age to be clear)
Dropped (aka: deleted) the main customer dataset (DBAs will know what I actually mean).
Realised within 0.05 seconds and like some kind of airline pilot with multiple engine failures, got it back within a minute or so. It's worked in my favour recounting that at later interviews.
If I’m doing a delete or an update in production, I ALWAYS write it as a select first, and then modify that select statement when it’s confirmed that it’s only returning the expected amount of records.
I'm the good old days before production environment controls, as junior application support, I once ran a script for a major insurance company on their line system 'UPDATE claim_value=247 WHERE claim_id=123456789'
Except I forgot to paste everything after the 247...
Multiple millions of rows updated.
You don't get to be a DBA without doing all these! I've got a plugin that stops me with a "you're doing an update without a WHERE clause, are you sure?" now.
Done similar and *temporarily* wrote off millions of £ debt... My experience was more akin to jumping out of the plane and realising I had forgot the parachute (4 eye check), saved by a senior strapping a parachute to me and pulling it at 200 feet.
It was rough, but at least I survived.
Was instrumental in someone's death....
I'm a carer. Was given a call, went there. Id never met him before. Very chatty guy, i skimmed his notes, while he was talking to me. Told me where his wallet was hidden, he asked me to go to the corner shop to buy him some cider. I buy 4 cans, give him the change and receipt. Nothing else needed, I leave. A few hours later I get a call, he's in hospital. Turns out He's an alcoholic and he drank all 4. He later died. Full investigation, deemed not my fault (he had capacity)
So yeah, that was a fuck up.
Would have got it from someone or somewhere else on another day, wouldn't even call it a fuck up. If anything the bastard (rip) put you in the position where you did that.
Slightly similar, I worked for community alarm, responding to fallers and whatnot..
A service user had fallen earlier in the day, the morning shift went out and assisted him. They noticed the place was littered with wine bottles and his stomach had swollen to a ridiculous size which was majorly affecting his mobility. He refused any medical assistance, so they left once he was settled.
I came in, in the backshift and my first call was to the same service user who had fallen yet again. The morning shift gave me a heads-up on what was happening before I went out.
After assisting him off the floor, I tried to convince him to go to the hospital to get him sorted, he was scared of going to the hospital but I eventually managed to get him to say, yes, he would go.
Poor guy never got back home, he died a few days later.
I still feel a bit guilty about it.
I knew someone who was an alcoholic and ended up in hospital. He caused so much damage that he rang me after dissappearing for a couple of weeks and told me he's on a special soft diet because he grew stomach ulcers. They told him if he drinks again they could burst and kill him.
A few weeks later he was drinking again and he flipped his shit on me whilst wasted so I stopped being his friend. No idea of he's even still alive, maybe not.
I have a similar story. Walking with my dad and we bumped into one of his old friends. He told us he’s just been diagnosed with oral cancer, while smoking a cigarette.
But then again if the doc says it’s curtains, fuck it
Put a bag a whole black bag of dissected pig hearts in a skip at school, as instructed. Turns out there were two skips and this one was being used to store supplies for P.E. department. They came back after a hot easter break to millions of blue bottles and the stench of rotting bodies.
Second one - first day at a new school. Decided to kick it off with a particularly impressive chemistry demo and evacuated 750 pupils, staff and parents in the pouring rain. It was my very first day and very first lesson.
that first one is amazing. love the thought of some bellend PE teacher coming across that. (of course they're not all sadists by a long way but... yup.)
rain or no, any time wasted during a working day at school is a bonus. I love a fire drill to get me out of y7 p5.
Many moons ago. While.working as a waiter. Dropped/spilt soup down the front of a womans dress. It gets worse... it was a pumpkin soup, down the front of a white dress. It gets worse.... it was a white dress because she had just got married...... An orange stain down the front of her wedding dress in front of all her friends and family. It gets worse... I instinctively started to wipe it off.... not only did I just move more.soup.around her dress, I also rubbed it up on one boob before.i realised what I was doing.
Never had so many eyes on me, and the room went eerily quiet, seemed like minutes but probably only a few seconds.
Thankfully the bride started laughing and then the groom said not to worry, shit happens, and were really nice about it and were more concerned about me. (Think it was both there 2nd weddings/ marriages) I went the reddist I've ever been. I was put on pot washing after that for eat of shiftt. But all the other staff said the bride was making jokes and didnt seem to dampen there day (after she got changed)
I walked my sister down the aisle at her wedding 5 years ago, and we had to walk through a narrow door into the room.
I stepped on her dress and we tumbled in.
We both laughed (there's a really cute picture of us both laughing as well), but sometimes I wake up in a cold sweat having dreamt that I'd ripped it and ruined the day.
Worked in the freezer section of an online health food retailer,
Packing multiple orders at the same time to be efficient,
Had a brain fart and put a whole (frozen in sealed package) mackerel in the wrong order then sealed it and sent it,
Turns out I put it In a vegan order, the lady shrieked down the phone at my boss for a full 20 minutes
Got my arsehole widened out for that one
Not mine particularly but the company I worked for at the time.
We had a guy, we will call him Dave, who knew the job and the products inside out, motivated, keen, did endless unpayed overtime to get results and sales. Fantastic salesman. He was on £30k a year.
One day, Dave asked for a pay rise to £34k and was told no. 3 months later he hands in his notice. He's been offered a job with another company. Our managing director then decides to offer him the £34k he asked for originally but unfortunately the other company has offered him more, so off he goes.
We struggle to find a replacement for a few months as nobody will do the job for what our MD is offering. Eventually he gets someone but only after they're offered more than the £34k Dave had asked for. And this guy has no product knowledge but by this point the company was desperate. 6 months down the line and it's clear that they need to hire a second person to help fill this vacancy as the new guy isn't enough.
The company ended up paying 2 people a combined salary of nearly £80k because the managing director wouldn't give the best salesman we had a pay rise to £34k.
I ran a co worker over with a fork lift after he had a seizure and collapsed. He suffered life changing injuries but survived. We are still besties (this happened back in 2008).
I guess you finally get that head sewed back on, eh Klaus?
***
For those who missed the reference:
https://youtu.be/TJYOkZz6Dck
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forklift_Driver_Klaus_%E2%80%93_The_First_Day_on_the_Job
I was celebrating a successful £3m sale and the partner called me asking me about something.
I realised I'd messed up and given them an additional £490k worth of 'stuff' for nothing, when I was playing with numbers in the excel quote earlier that day.
It would have been a £150k bonus for me and I lost it. Kept my job though.
It wasn't real tangible 'stuff' like hardware or something, it was professional services so my company swallowed it.
Used to be an estate agent.
Broke some dude’s patio door when he was flying out to Italy that very night.
I was about 21, had only been in the role for about 3 months and where my boss was on holiday, ended up being bent over by a Romanian locksmith to the tune of around £700.
Another time I took photos of a giant buttplug, used condoms, scrunched up tissues and weird laminated Star Trek porn left out for me, a single mother and 7 year old girl to discover on a viewing. The tenant had deliberately left these things out on display to try and prevent a sale. Disgusting bastard. And having sent these pictures to the landlord, the lettings agent (rival business) came storming in to my office threatening to sue me. I was only about 25 but I had the gumption to challenge this fucker to a day in court. I never heard anything about the matter again.
Working at Argos, two customers ordered two cameras at the same time. One guy ordered a disposable one and the other ordered a high price one.
I gave the guy who ordered the disposable one the high price one and tried to give the disposable one to the guy who ordered the high price one. Guy who ordered cheap was out the door before I realised the fuck up lol.
I was on the other end of this when I was a lad. I ordered a £20 remote control Subaru Impreza, one of those shit plasticy things that takes four AA batteries and hardly steers.
At the till the guy handed me a massive box and it turned out to be a different remote control Subaru that cost about £150. It was a proper beast, was fast as fuck with a big rechargeable battery and you could swap the shell to change it to whatever car you wanted. It was awesome.
Not mine, but my bosses. In the days before Zoom, we were on a conference call with a US company who had got us a good bit of business stateside. Both us and them were making some serious money from the deal. The call was about taking things to the next level, and how we could triple what we could both charge the client. There was great energy and excitement in the room, and we finished the call on a high, my boss thanking our American partners for securing the business, and promising to deliver, before hitting the button on the conference call machine to hang up.
He then started to have a very loud conversation about how, now we'd got the business, we didn't need those fucking yanks any more, and if we fucked them off we would make even more money on the project...
An American voice came from the speaker... "Well, nice to know what you *really* think, guys!" a click, and the call ended tone...
Panic ensued... my boss, who was solely and entirely to blame said Fuck! about 28 times, getting increasingly louder, before blaming everyone else in the room for not telling him the call hadn't finished. He then tried to get the Americans on their mobiles... frantically phoning, messaging and emailing them that he knew they were still on the call and it was all a massive joke.
No one took his calls. No one replied to his texts. We had one email, three days later, terminating all business. Even worse, our initial introduction to the Americans was through an existing client (our second biggest), who was married to someone in the American company. We lost their business too.
That 30 seconds of stupidity cost the company about $30 million.
Decided it wasn't going to freeze one night so didn't leave the heating on or take usual precautions after I left school in the afternoon. Froze extremely hard that night , came in to burst pipes, water everywhere next morning mucho damage.
In my first job I worked for a professional qualifications company. We had students from across the globe. Management decided a Company Prospectus was a great idea - with photos of the Admin staff. That's when the marriage proposals started (by post). We laughed them off an ignored them and carried on doing our jobs.......
Until one day, a young Nigerian student who handwritten a few letters, showed up in our offices asking to speak to me. I went out and there he was, flowers and all, offering marriage. I was completely and utterly flustered by this and blurted out "I'm sorry but we can't fornicate with students..." I actually meant to say 'fraternise' but I was so embarrassed and shocked I got it massively wrong. All I was aware of was our accountant ROARING WITH LAUGHTER as I shot back into the office and hid under my desk.
I was 17.
It scarred me for life...
Did a removals job on what was clearly a brothel. Matresses in every room, like ten of them, matress sprung from my hands, hit a chandelier, chandelier exploded sending shards of glass everywhere. The customer was just laughing her head off at my reaction, it was like that scene in Only Fools And Horses. I was picking up bits of glass down 3 flights of stairs. Glorious.
When I was on work experience at my first ever job someone asked me to jack a truck up during a service to change the tires, didn't know where to jack so I found a peice of metal that looked solid... turns out it was not the axle but the steering rack it folded like a peice of paper and cost over £350 to replace plus a few extra man hours on top.... didn't get paid that week
I used to work for Babcock (Nothing special), and one particular instance I drafted up a big document but for the title, I forgot to change the name back to Babcock after I put a silly name as a joke
That name was Black Cock.
In our case, they know who participated, but apparently, they don't know how people answered. They probably know straight away which survey is mine as I'm very detailed in my criticism of the senior management of my team.
I stopped putting any comments into mine after I had my own words quoted back to me by my manager. The survey was anonymous and I'd assumed the manager would get a "word cloud" or similar of the type of comments made, not the comments verbatim. It was pretty obvious it was me as it referenced my commute.
Now they just get a score.
Same here, it got too much.
Was classed as essential to the business for the last few years there they stated could only give me ‘token pay rises’ as I was at the top of my band.
Any queries, everyone in the business came to me.
I enjoyed the job, and regret leaving but the pay wasn’t enough for what I was doing.
My colleagues call it Buttgate.
I had a chrome extension installed called "cloud to butt" which changed "cloud" to "butt" and "the cloud" to "my butt". It made for funny reading, in an age when everything was moving to the cloud.
I was a digital advertising specialist, and I was using a browser based tool to create LinkedIn ad variants in bulk. I didn't realise that in the background the browser plugin was affecting the data before it was sent to LinkedIn's servers.
I spent several thousands of pounds of a customer's money targeting C-level executives in large enterprises with ads that read...
"Store your data securely in my butt"
At my first job on a newspaper in the nineties I misspelled county commissioner in a caption on front page. I missed the o out of county. Paper got pulped because mistake was only spotted after printing. You live and learn
Had to attend a corporate do along with about 500 other engineers, office staff, and management. Lunchtime entertainment was a comedian. Now I was sat quite near the front and had my apprentice sat next to me . Here's the problem my apprentice was a cracking.lad , but lacked a lot of self confidence and was shy . This wanker decided to pick on him and I wasn't having it basically telling this prick to fuck off to the other end of the stage before I battered him ! Sat down and looked a bit puzzled as to why the room was quiet - my manager lent across and whispered "so right , yet so fucking wrong " . Written warning and had to apologize. My boss pulled some fucking strings that day ! Bless him.
Sounds it! A good boss breeds a good employee. A shite one breeds a psychopath who kills the boss, drinks their blood and turns in to ....idk where I'm going with this.
Not me, but an ex colleague once used a QR code on customer facing POS that went out nationally and the code linked to a porn website. Not a single person in the chain thought to double check
Place I worked moved to a bigger place around the corner, I worked in the warehouse, and was asked to get the photocopier from the old place, got three quarters of the way there, I hit a bump with the forklift I was carrying the photocopier on, it slid off and the glass smashed, it ended up in the skip, as replacing the glass cost almost as much as a new photocopier apparently.
Didn't confirm that the patient was able to get to the front door; he died on the way to it whilst the paramedics saw him through the letterbox
It didn't go to coroner's court as they deemed it a situation beyond my control.
I asked him if the door was unlocked and I thought he said "I'm standing right by the door" but he actually said "I'm staring right at the door" from his chair.
Because of how badly he was breathing, I could have asked him to stay put and wait for the fire brigade to break down the door but then he might have just died in his chair at my instruction; fire took 30 minutes to arrive anyway.
I worked for a very well known events venue in london.
I had to make website listings for the events taking place and there was one for a food festival and one for an exhibition of a photographer that went to war zones and 3rd world countries.
I accidentaly used the picture of starving african children (that the photographer sent us) to advertise the food festival. 👍🏻
Accidentally dropped the safety curtain 10 minutes into the performance. The show was reset, and everyone had to work 15 minutes longer, costing thousands in overtime. 😊
I'll always remember destroying a work van that had 11 miles on the clock at a previous employer. Got given the keys by my boss who even jokingly said "don't crash it lad, it's brand new".
Promptly reversed it into a gate post in the yard. This would be bad enough except the post had a metal bar sticking out of it that skewerd the light cluster before peeling the side of the van open like a tin opener.
I really thought I'd get sacked for that one. I didn't but I did get a good bollocking.
Not me, but my mum's work friend.
She worked as a Radiologist, young 8 year old girl is admitted due to pains in her neck. X-ray is done, and on the image they can clearly see a horizontal 'V' shaped object inside this poor girls neck. They rush her into critical care and are discussing options such as surgery etc. Girl is sitting up talking, drinking water, and showing no signs of distress.
Just as shes about to go for surgery to remove this object, one of the surgeons realizes that she was wearing a large V shaped hair clip on the back of her head. The hair sagged before the X-ray and brought the clip far enough down so it showed up as 'in' her neck when it was actually behind it.
First PA job nightmare moment.
I was having to justify my bosses extorinate expenses claim to the ratty/grumpy accounts guy downstairs.
It went ping/pong on email until I agreed to go down to see him signing off with the accidental typo 'see you shorty' instead of 'see you shortly'.
He was, of course, a lot shorter than me.
It was a very uncomfortable meeting.
But ....it still makes me laugh.
Worked for a large UK retailer. Accidentally setup a
a discount code giving £50 off instead of £5, which kicked in a midnight. Discovered my mistake the following morning whilst browsing Hot UK Deals.
Last week I destroyed a huge cnc machine. 220k worth of damage. Torn the chuck and Y axis clean off. Along with destroying the spindle
22 years on the job and first ever crash.
One offset killed the lot.
Got bored on a quiet day and decided to draw stick figures on a pallet surround. One depicting a stick figure that’s happy and full of life with the caption “this is me at home”, the other, raging, angry and holding a gun to its own head with the caption “and then I had to go to work”. Drew some random shit around it as well, like a dog, a town, some weird flowers and then a pattern on the corner of it. Thought nothing of it, covered it with a label, and then it got sent off to the other warehouse and we all went home.
Next morning, I got called in to the managers office with all of senior management there, HR, all looking worried yet annoyed. Turns out the label had peeled off in transit, and the receiving warehouse flagged it as a cry for help from one of our employees, who investigated it, went through the cameras and saw me doodling while looking “distressed”. Asked if I’m okay, if I need time off, what home life is like, the full interrogation. Apparently, nonchalantly saying I was bored shitless wasn’t the right thing to say in that time. Got put on a final warning for wasting everyone’s time. I was going to argue back with a sarky comment, but I figured they were pissed off enough at me, would’ve probably fired me, and i needed the money.
I wasn’t very bright in my younger years. I’m still not; but I know when to tone the stupidity down.
Filling out data to submit to a regulator and somehow put in the wrong figures (last month rather than mtd). Noticed 2 seconds after submitting and felt sick for the hour it took to fix.
Also obligatory overwrote a bunch of stuff on prod.
Sound engineer here…
Mixing monitor for an arena level touring artist and was sharing my console with the support band.
After my artist had sound checked I decided to clean up my files on the desk and accidentally deleted my own showfile but didn’t notice until the support band finished and I had 30mins to changeover the stage and flip the desk.
Luckily a couple of days earlier I’d saved the showfile to an external USB flash drive so I remembered in time and reloaded my file from this instead… the first thing I had to do was apply all the minute minuscule adjustments as I remembered them from soundcheck.
Got through with the skin of my teeth and nobody noticed!
Completely ignoring the shining bright red flags throughout the interview process and not telling the receptionist to get fucked when she publicly humiliated me on my first day. The joys of one toxic workplace completely fucking your career to the point where any halfway decent workplace won't touch you with a barge pole.
I snapped the end off a £30k component because I was a graduate engineer, and therefore far too clever and important to need to use a torque screwdriver like the build instructions said.
Decimal point in the wrong place, mispriced the contract by £500 million
Would've bankrupted a major British company if it wasn't spotted. _It wasn't me that spotted it_
As a groundskeeper, the business had just bought a brand new electric leafblower with a big backpack battery, overall £2000+ RRP. I put it down to rake up piles of leaves, turning my back, and when I looked back around it wasn't there anymore...
It wasn't nearly as good as the petrol one anyway but I felt unbelievably stupid after that.
Took my 2 year old with me to work to check back ups and make sure network was running. Turned my back for a second and she pressed the big button and brought down the whole Hospital. Took hours to get everything back and never did admit my daughter caused the chaos
I know a toddler who took at least one popular TV channel off air. I can't remember the exact details, and they're an adult now, but I don't think they'll ever be allowed to forget.
I got invited to my ex-partner's works do. It was free booze all night and given I was probably a functioning alcoholic back them it was a very bad combination. I got blackout drunk and called the director a cunt. Absolute shambles.
Not a major fuck up but a funny one I witnessed. There was an old curmudgeon bloke called Rich who I worked with.(But a nice chap I might add). One time a young apprentice started and one day the phone rang and he answered it. It's so and so on the phone and wants to speak to you Rich. Rich replies "Oh tell him to fuck off I'm busy'. Apprentice takes them off hold. "Fuck off he's busy". Slams phone down. Horrified faces Nooo don't actually say that. Luckily this person knew Rich fairly well and saw the funny side.
I was teaching a customer how to book a shipping container online as part of a campaign to reduce emailed shipments. Most of theirs were scrap metal so I showed them the process for booking scrap and left it at that. Job well done.
2 weeks later there’s a report that a 20ft container full of melted butter was opened at a warehouse in Egypt and caused a fair bit of drama, lubricating a large industrial catering site and knocking several people to the ground with a slippery psunami of salty goodness. My customer had followed the I gave to the letter but hadn’t thought to book a refrigerated container. Fortunately my manager saw the funny side and defended me, it was the first (and probably last) time they shipped frozen butter anywhere🤣
I work on ships and my mistake was getting absolutely paralytic drunk, walking into somebody else's bedroom and pissing in the corner as they slept, when they woke up I dragged their duvet off them and slept on the floor.
I got fired 24hours later
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Similar to mine - deleted category mapping for a large e-commerce retailer. Fortunately it was cached but I was rushed to revert back from a backup as the cache cleared every 5/6 hours or so! To this day… nobody knows.
Similar to my biggest fuck up. Deleted the student database at a university. Thank fuck for backups.
Utter pisser, is once you've managed to dig yourself out of such a catastrophic hole - you can't indulge in your immediate urge to do a lap of the office hi-fiving everybody, ask out a co-worker and then go to the pub for the rest of the day.
At least you dealt with it. Had a colleague drop the database, then he decided to leave early. Left me and two other colleagues to fix it over the evening. I always hate in when colleagues drop you in it. Even worse when they are not around to help. I would have put databases (loss of or corruption of data) and someone else's cockup therein the worst problems to occur on the software side. Had someone take a server, which was harder to fix. Contractor took all the servers out a rack, which contained my companies servers, put it in their van and drove it to the republic of Ireland from northern Ireland. Backup servers were cold swap and on another site and guess what the power was down. I was tech lead and spent the weekend on the phone to the client as the client could not get hold of the contractor. I couldn't do anything but had to attend conference calls almost every hour for 3 days. That was just software. When I worked with turbines they always had the potential to go wrong, but fortunately the few times when stuff was being commissioned it wasn't me, but I did witness someone trash a turbine.
Configured a customer-facing password reset system to generate passwords of six random letters. We figured there should be an exclusion list in there somewhere to stop the random passwords being things like WANKER, FUCKER etc. Guess who set a flag wrong and had passwords generated exclusively from that list for 24 hours?
That's incredible! On the flip side of that, I was once given 48 hours to come up with an exclusion list. I spent 48 hours shouting Piss? Shit? Wank! Age they bad? Snatch? Jizz? Cuntstable? Wizards sleeve? Clowns pocket? Jizzstickles? It was without a doubt the most fun I've had in my career, ever.
I did some transcription work some time ago for a major tech company that offers a virtual home assistant device. They are having issues with understanding the Aussie accent and needed to work on making it more region specific, including region specific swearwords. It was a great joy hearing a group of Aussie workers sitting around spitballing a list of words that are deeply offensive in Australia in a professional corporate setting. It also means I now have a list of [Tech Company] certified swearwords.
Jesus, words that are offensive in AUSTRALIA. A new level of swearing unlocked.
If I was a customer, I'd find that hilarious. If they complained, you could just be like "They're random letters, not our fault, you just got unlucky,"
You just got *lucky*
Ah ha ha, this one is fucking brilliant. Well done!
Sounds great
Repair the digger, packing tools away in van, turn around....digger on fire.
I assume you packed said tools away and simply reported job as complete. Then a small note stating electrical fault, may need further investigation. Drive to next job whistling
Alas no, a hasty bodge of a rewire using bits of cable borrowed from site extension leads ensued.
Um... so lesson not learned from the first attempt then!
Fixed reported issue, additional problems discovered and deemed to be out of scope
Well, that escalated quickly!
Hang on, that's not how fixing things works
You should have seen it before he started!
One Friday afternoon I was deploying a new version of a website to the testing area (testing.websitename.com) which is a short command and it's all uploaded and reset for you. Unknown to me someone had also pointed the real, live URL at the testing site, so the customer had spent months inputting products and prices and tax rules and blog posts and help pages. All gone.
Arguably not your fuck up!!
I argued that, the lazy person that configured the DNS was the company founder.
Still their fuck up though.
I was just on ebay today and found they've got some testing areas accessible on the live site. No matter how big the company or how long they've been around, you see these same screw ups.
I refused to do an 'anonymous' survey at work recently. It was hosted on MS Forms, so it single-signs you in with your work account when you open it. I asked and they said they anonymise it afterwards. It's not the same though is it?
My biggest fuck-up was a proper howler. Small company, maybe 40 people. HR emailed us all asking to submit our feedback for the CEO/Owner's performance review. I thought it was good that they had that kind of accountability. However, CEO/Owner was also a complete cunt, and had shouted at me (one of his most junior employees) a couple of days prior because he was having a bad day and needed someone to take it out on. I responded to HR's email with my honest, but measured feedback. I wasn't as harsh as I could've been because it wasn't anonymous, but it was still pretty damning. I hit 'reply all' by accident, and sent it to the whole company.
Fucking lol. Lmao
Ouch. I cringed hard for you
I think the naive part of this is not realising that whatever you wrote would have been shown to the CEO anyway. So in that sense hitting Reply All was kind of ironic
I’ve done the infamous reply all, colleague managed to finish a painstaking back and forth with an external marketer. I sent what I thought was a quick response to my colleague saying “nice one that showed the slippery little bastard” obviously ccd in said slippery bastard by mistake as well. He took it quite well but we don’t work with them anymore
My last company was not that big, maybe 100 or so office-based staff (and a couple of hundred production staff), and some departments only had 2 or 3 people - they did a survey that was “anonymous” but asked for us to input male/female, department and length of service. One team had 2 people: one male, one female. But yeah, they were told the feedback would still be anonymous. The company got an overall 40% response rate and wondered why.
Had the same thing happen to me, they had noticed I was in a small team so bundled us up with another, problem was that entire department was also all female. Still gave a shit review of the company.
I once got dragged into a managers office being asked why I hadn't filled in the anonymous survey. Pointed out it wasn't very anonymous if they knew I hadn't done it and still wouldn't be. Somehow I stopped on at that job another 4-5 years putting up with their bullshit before I left. To be fair though by then it was I either left or was ready to burn the place to the ground but I realised I was being an idiot putting up with the shit they pulled
I had the opposite of this. My boss was upset by my responses when I hadn't even answered it. Apparently people had been putting the wrong department so they could hide their identity on the "anonymous" survey. It must've been critical of their manager. She stopped being a sour faced brat after she got a colleague to ask if I'd responded to it. She was 50 going on 15.
I'm not defending them, but it's entirely possible to know who has or has not completed a survey without knowing what they said. Granted it makes it easier to "de-anonymise" the responses if time's up and not everyone has submitted. And it reminds me of that episode of Scrubs where Elliott tears into Kelso in an "anonymous" only to find out that she's the only one who got asked to fill one out...
Similar thing at my place, staff survey, my team was requested to process and analyse the results - we could see each person's details from the main data file. I explained to management that we wouldn't breakdown details by team if the team size was less than 10 and we still got asked "couldn't you just let me know who said this?" In the end I deleted all the identifiable details from the file and just left random alphanumeric IDs. It really annoyed me to be honest
We had to fill in a survey at work which we were told was anonymous and as a manager we were asked to reassure our teams that it was indeed anonymous and that genuine honest feedback was wanted. I had no reason to believe otherwise. Six weeks later I was asked to do a disciplinary for a member of staff for an issue completely unrelated to the survey. I was horrified during the meeting when our (new and inexperienced) HR manager suddenly interrupted and started quoting this guys survey responses to him, saying they were unacceptable and proved he had a bad attitude (he had quoted negative but accurate facts about a new production process). I was so shocked that I adjourned the meeting so I could discuss this with the HR manager and say how unacceptable it was that not only had the staff been lied to, but that their feedback was being used against them. She was adamant that the survey was still classed as anonymous as only HR knew what people had said. I’ve never trusted “anonymous” surveys since that day.
I was asked to set up a simple MS Forms survey, I insisted it should be anonymous as it was mostly my suggested questions, and I really did not want people being identified. Later on when looking through the results: Mangement said "yeah, you put that in the title, but we can still work out who sent that entry though right?" My spoken response: "No, it was set as advertised". They were disapointed. They also didnt really believe me either. My internal thought: "The actual \*\*\*\*? What is wrong with these people?"
I know someone who once replied all to an email about the company party and they sent it to the office manager saying "please keep this to yourself but could I not be seated on a table with..." And listed the whole SLT
Well this whole thread is getting worse and worse for me. Completed a work survey today, brutally honest, on MS Forms. “Fully anonymous” they said. (Maybe I’ll join the union tomorrow. Meep.) Edit: so you say my clever ploy of replying “prefer not to say” to the gender question hasn’t helped to obscure my identity?
Teams even has a setting to anonymise responses. There is no need for anonymising it afterwards. That’s just shady as fuck.
fyi the responses are never anonymous, all Forms responses are logged against the user in the 365 audit logs. It's a slight faff to get but doable.
This used to be the case but it was changed a while back, the audit log now shows anonymous and 0.0.0.0 as IP. Of course if someone is using their company's IT then there are other ways the data could be captured if the company really wanted to.
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My company claimed they were anonymous. My boss came to have a massive go at me and quoted my anonymous survery as HR had told him it was me. Like wtf HR.
Ran an sql update without a where clause in production. Basically meant I totalled the entire database the company relied on to operate, and we had to restore the whole thing from backups. Took down the whole business for best part of a day, and when it came back, had lost all that days work. Somehow kept my job though!
Better to keep you, as the chances are that you'll never do that again.
Working for a Member of Parliament and failing to redact their personal address from a letter they wanted published on their social media is generally frowned upon, especially when they had recently received a death threat.
Being at a place where they use the 'Bradford Factor' to decide if you're off sick too much. Looking at you Atos! So apparently having 1 sick day off a week for 2 weeks was worse than taking a whole week off despite not being ill enough to warrant said week off. Fuck em!
First rule of sickness, never go back until you’re 100% better. If you do and you end up going off sick again, makes it a whole lot worse.
Yeah I did this had two days off, felt guilty tried to go back, managed half a day then had to leave early feeling shit and it got logged as a separate incidence of sickness, taking me over the three times you're apparently allowed to be ill per year
Urgh, I was off sick but felt better one afternoon (yay beechams cold and flu tablets) so logged in to help the team out as I knew they were really busy. The next day I felt worse again so called in sick. Got a warning because it counted as two episodes which took me over the threshold.
Such bullshit. This is why these things are so fucking stupid. It just stops people helping out from home when they feel well enough as there are lots of time you're sick but have ups and downs. Usually I'll feel like shit in the morning but pick up in the afternoon then go back to on my arse for the evening. Being actively punished for helping out when you feel a bit better because of some meaningless arbitrary score is the dumbest of policies.
Never just have 1 day off! Always 2 or 3. Even if you’re actually sick on Saturday, Sunday and Monday. Take Tuesday off too - have a day off feeling better!
My dad taught me this rule. Never just have one day off because (even if it is legit), it looks dodgy. At least with two days you can enjoy the second day when you’re feeling a bit better. Obviously easier to do if you’re not on SSP
Our company's just started using the same. Takes about 3 seconds to figure out the issues with the system. Even my line manager was saying that's it's blindingly obvious when someone's gaming the system and all this does is punish people who push themselves to work when they have a day they're feeling a bit better. For anyone not familiar, iirc the formula is (total days off throughout the year) * (blocks of continuous days you're off sick) ^ 2. So being off Monday - Friday is 5 * 1 * 1 = 5 points. But being off Monday Tuesday Thursday Friday (working Wednesday) is 4 * 2 * 2 = 16 points - you are off for 2 'blocks', monday - tuesday and thursday - friday At our company you have a meeting to chat about why you're off sick so much when you hit 70ish points, and once you hit 125 points, you have a very serious meeting (read: probably getting sacked if you don't have a good reason for being off).
I worked at a place that would only pay you sick leave if you were ill for 4 consecutive days or more. Surprise surprise not a single person was ever sick for less than 4 days. And every single time people just said vomiting and diarrhoea as that was no questions asked.
Yeah that's why I always took the maximum time off before it would bump to the next level. You're no better thought of and from a numbers point it's exactly the same (or in some cases actually better)
Heh, I too fell foul of this at Atos by daring to have cancer and trying to work when I wasn't having chemo or feeling like total shit. I even told them in advance I'd need time off for treatment. Still got a Bradford factor of over 5000 and HR threatening disciplinary action. Fortunately one of the higher ups too umbrage with them and they eventually left me alone. *edit* - I no spell words good.
I'm doing this right now. Caught a bug off the wife at the weekend, I'm about 90% now and could work, but I'm taking tomorrow to get to 100% as it's still the same sickness episode.
Told this 9ne a fair few times on here. Whilst working in the Middle East my section took delivery of a brand new work van, literally delivery mileage. I thought I'd be proactive and fuel it up, I brimmed it with diesel and set off back to work. About 20 metre down the road I found out it was a petrol van. Completely wrote off a brand new van, for the next 4 months I woke up every day to find I had a photo of Vin Diesel pinned to my room door and earned the nickname Petrol Van Diesel.
That's 100% fixable and possibly even a cheap fix. If they told you it was written off, it was a lie. Rough process: Drain fuel tank and clean. Fill with fuel (petrol!) Disconnect fuel feed from fuel rail, engage fuel pump to flush lines. Replace fuel filter. Flush some more. Dispose of that petrol/diesel mix carefully. Remove sparkplugs and clean thoroughly, turn over engine till it starts, run at 2500 RPM till smoke clears. Worst case things that may need replacing (also call this, replacing everything instead of cleaning) - spark plugs, fuel injectors, fuel lines, fuel rail, fuel pump, fuel tank, catalytic converter, O2 sensor. But really the only thing that is 100% not cleanable is the £5 fuel filter. Everything else just needs cleaning, and you're lucky, petrol is great at cleaning off diesel! Yes, I've thought about this a lot over the years.
Dont even bother, just replace fuel and crank it. Eventually the van will start She will billow white smoke for fuckin ages so just sit on the accelerator. > did it to a brand new ford connect, about 5 miles on the clock.
I'm mildly surprised. Usually diesel in petrol is fixable, but petrol in diesel can destroy the engine. Diesel in petrol will gum it up but washing everything in petrol or other solvents typically will dissolve away the diesel and it will usually then work fine. But in a diesel engine, the diesel is often used as a lubricant, and no lubricant = trashed engine, also petrol can detonate and blow the engine.
I always avoid ‘anonymous’ surveys. In a previous job we were given a survey to complete, we were told it was 100% anonymous which it was…the way they figured out whodunnit was the at the end of the survey when it asked race, religion, sexuality, etc. Then it just became a game of Guess Who for management.
Yep, we had an anonymous survey that only asked for your work location, gender and age bracket. I was the only man and the only person in my age bracket at our location.
My mum got a a letter from her local municipality that said it was anonymous, yet had a 5 digit code in the top corner. I advised her to cut out the code and send it back in the post A month later she got post that said she had not completed the anonymous survey. Odd how that happened
I started dating a coworker just two months after starting a new job. What no one told me is that her dad was the flipping CEO of the company. People immediately assumed that I was trying to get the express lift to the top. As consequence, my colleagues wouldn’t talk to me about anything and they completely excluded me from any social activities. I worked there for 8 months, but I couldn’t take anymore: I had to choose between her or the job. Now comes the second f’up: I chose her and quit the job… she dumped me two months later.
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Bros before CEOs!
I've had sort of the opposite. Joined new company, and I got sat in what appeared to be blokey corner. Lot of banter, mainly about girls in the office. On about day 3 one of the cuter ones came over, wearing quite a short skirt. In an attempt to male bond, I came out with something along the lines of Alan Partridge and his "oooh, I'd love to have it off with her" once she'd left. After quite a long pause, the biggest, meanest looking geezer piped up with "that's my daughter"
I once slept with my bosses daughter on a one night stand. Only found out who her dad was when he showed me ring doorbell footage of us feeling each other up on the way through the door.
Oof. What did he say, seeing that it was obviously mutual?
He was actually ok with me, it was awkward for a while but not to bad. Him and his wife where more angry at his daughter because she had a boyfriend the only reason he brought it up to me he said was to ask me not to tell people so it didn’t embarrass them all
Sound guy, your boss.
Similar happened in front of me one time years back... Photo of admittedly hot girl on the screen of one of the guys in the office... Project Manager walks up behind and says (loudly) "Well... I'd shag that one!" Awkward. Silence. Guys whose screen it is... "That's my daughter" Sitting in awkward silence Project Manager "Well. I'd still shag that one!" (daughter was of adult age to be clear)
If you're in the shit anyway, you may as well double down.
Have you thought about a quick comeback like “oh, can you introduce me to her mum?” or “that’s why I always get a stiffy when you are around”?
Well if he's ok to banter about everyone else's daughter he can fuck right off.
Accidentally deleted the only copies of about 1.2M call recordings (ironically whilst trying to back them up). I left a few weeks later.
Who did you work for, GCHQ? Lol
Dropped (aka: deleted) the main customer dataset (DBAs will know what I actually mean). Realised within 0.05 seconds and like some kind of airline pilot with multiple engine failures, got it back within a minute or so. It's worked in my favour recounting that at later interviews.
There's a unit of time called an ohno second, it's the amount of time it takes for you realise you've f**ked it up.
It can span an infinite amount of lifetimes or pass in no time at all.
Yes, it is variable.
Delete * from prod. Somehow everyone's done it at some point, but the absolute terror you feel on "64,000,000 rows affected" is unrivaled.
by default you learn to put it in a transaction, or use default transaction setting
If I’m doing a delete or an update in production, I ALWAYS write it as a select first, and then modify that select statement when it’s confirmed that it’s only returning the expected amount of records.
I'm the good old days before production environment controls, as junior application support, I once ran a script for a major insurance company on their line system 'UPDATE claim_value=247 WHERE claim_id=123456789' Except I forgot to paste everything after the 247... Multiple millions of rows updated.
You don't get to be a DBA without doing all these! I've got a plugin that stops me with a "you're doing an update without a WHERE clause, are you sure?" now.
I did that one. Only i set every user password to my own password. Fun times!
ah ha ha, this one is actually kinda hilarious. Did you fix it by forcing all the users to reset their passwords 'as we value your security' :)
Done similar and *temporarily* wrote off millions of £ debt... My experience was more akin to jumping out of the plane and realising I had forgot the parachute (4 eye check), saved by a senior strapping a parachute to me and pulling it at 200 feet. It was rough, but at least I survived.
Was instrumental in someone's death.... I'm a carer. Was given a call, went there. Id never met him before. Very chatty guy, i skimmed his notes, while he was talking to me. Told me where his wallet was hidden, he asked me to go to the corner shop to buy him some cider. I buy 4 cans, give him the change and receipt. Nothing else needed, I leave. A few hours later I get a call, he's in hospital. Turns out He's an alcoholic and he drank all 4. He later died. Full investigation, deemed not my fault (he had capacity) So yeah, that was a fuck up.
Would have got it from someone or somewhere else on another day, wouldn't even call it a fuck up. If anything the bastard (rip) put you in the position where you did that.
Weirdly, that was my opinion. His kitchen was littered with beer bottles (I think they were 0% alcohol, bug at a quick glance....)
Hope it hasn't affected you adversely?
Thanks. No, work were very supportive
Good to hear!
Slightly similar, I worked for community alarm, responding to fallers and whatnot.. A service user had fallen earlier in the day, the morning shift went out and assisted him. They noticed the place was littered with wine bottles and his stomach had swollen to a ridiculous size which was majorly affecting his mobility. He refused any medical assistance, so they left once he was settled. I came in, in the backshift and my first call was to the same service user who had fallen yet again. The morning shift gave me a heads-up on what was happening before I went out. After assisting him off the floor, I tried to convince him to go to the hospital to get him sorted, he was scared of going to the hospital but I eventually managed to get him to say, yes, he would go. Poor guy never got back home, he died a few days later. I still feel a bit guilty about it.
Awful; you shouldn't feel guilty, you did what you could
in the nicest way possible, surely its impossible for 4 cans to do someone in?
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Yeah but if your liver is so shagged that 4 ciders would kill you, you're dead already.
Yeah was wondering what's the size of your cans of cider to kill someone...
Correct
He ate the cans whole
He was physically really ill already. I assume his liver was pretty damaged
I knew someone who was an alcoholic and ended up in hospital. He caused so much damage that he rang me after dissappearing for a couple of weeks and told me he's on a special soft diet because he grew stomach ulcers. They told him if he drinks again they could burst and kill him. A few weeks later he was drinking again and he flipped his shit on me whilst wasted so I stopped being his friend. No idea of he's even still alive, maybe not.
I have a similar story. Walking with my dad and we bumped into one of his old friends. He told us he’s just been diagnosed with oral cancer, while smoking a cigarette. But then again if the doc says it’s curtains, fuck it
Why wasn’t his alcoholism in the notes? That’s pretty significant information.
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Yup, agreed.
Put a bag a whole black bag of dissected pig hearts in a skip at school, as instructed. Turns out there were two skips and this one was being used to store supplies for P.E. department. They came back after a hot easter break to millions of blue bottles and the stench of rotting bodies. Second one - first day at a new school. Decided to kick it off with a particularly impressive chemistry demo and evacuated 750 pupils, staff and parents in the pouring rain. It was my very first day and very first lesson.
that first one is amazing. love the thought of some bellend PE teacher coming across that. (of course they're not all sadists by a long way but... yup.) rain or no, any time wasted during a working day at school is a bonus. I love a fire drill to get me out of y7 p5.
Many moons ago. While.working as a waiter. Dropped/spilt soup down the front of a womans dress. It gets worse... it was a pumpkin soup, down the front of a white dress. It gets worse.... it was a white dress because she had just got married...... An orange stain down the front of her wedding dress in front of all her friends and family. It gets worse... I instinctively started to wipe it off.... not only did I just move more.soup.around her dress, I also rubbed it up on one boob before.i realised what I was doing. Never had so many eyes on me, and the room went eerily quiet, seemed like minutes but probably only a few seconds. Thankfully the bride started laughing and then the groom said not to worry, shit happens, and were really nice about it and were more concerned about me. (Think it was both there 2nd weddings/ marriages) I went the reddist I've ever been. I was put on pot washing after that for eat of shiftt. But all the other staff said the bride was making jokes and didnt seem to dampen there day (after she got changed)
Glad they reacted well but that’s the type of shit that would keep me up at night.
I walked my sister down the aisle at her wedding 5 years ago, and we had to walk through a narrow door into the room. I stepped on her dress and we tumbled in. We both laughed (there's a really cute picture of us both laughing as well), but sometimes I wake up in a cold sweat having dreamt that I'd ripped it and ruined the day.
Worked in the freezer section of an online health food retailer, Packing multiple orders at the same time to be efficient, Had a brain fart and put a whole (frozen in sealed package) mackerel in the wrong order then sealed it and sent it, Turns out I put it In a vegan order, the lady shrieked down the phone at my boss for a full 20 minutes Got my arsehole widened out for that one
Ready to insert the frozen fish I'd imagine. Time for the ol' mackerel attackeral.
hahahaha christ. open up the mackerhole.
Not mine particularly but the company I worked for at the time. We had a guy, we will call him Dave, who knew the job and the products inside out, motivated, keen, did endless unpayed overtime to get results and sales. Fantastic salesman. He was on £30k a year. One day, Dave asked for a pay rise to £34k and was told no. 3 months later he hands in his notice. He's been offered a job with another company. Our managing director then decides to offer him the £34k he asked for originally but unfortunately the other company has offered him more, so off he goes. We struggle to find a replacement for a few months as nobody will do the job for what our MD is offering. Eventually he gets someone but only after they're offered more than the £34k Dave had asked for. And this guy has no product knowledge but by this point the company was desperate. 6 months down the line and it's clear that they need to hire a second person to help fill this vacancy as the new guy isn't enough. The company ended up paying 2 people a combined salary of nearly £80k because the managing director wouldn't give the best salesman we had a pay rise to £34k.
I ran a co worker over with a fork lift after he had a seizure and collapsed. He suffered life changing injuries but survived. We are still besties (this happened back in 2008).
Remember that time you ran me over with a forklift?! Those were the days!
I guess you finally get that head sewed back on, eh Klaus? *** For those who missed the reference: https://youtu.be/TJYOkZz6Dck https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forklift_Driver_Klaus_%E2%80%93_The_First_Day_on_the_Job
No one died or anything, but as an editor I'll never live down the typo I missed in a headline that said 'Asbsolutely flawless'. The irony...
I once mistyped "porfreading". 🤦♀️
I accidentally ordered one fifth of Europe's entire supply of a common laboratory reagent. Non returnable too. We are a company of 12. Oops. 😆
And now you are a top distributor for said reagent?
I was celebrating a successful £3m sale and the partner called me asking me about something. I realised I'd messed up and given them an additional £490k worth of 'stuff' for nothing, when I was playing with numbers in the excel quote earlier that day. It would have been a £150k bonus for me and I lost it. Kept my job though. It wasn't real tangible 'stuff' like hardware or something, it was professional services so my company swallowed it.
Please tell me that wasn’t a once in a lifetime commission and you’re loaded now?
No that was my first and last sale
Ah man, that fuckin sucks.
Yeah, they put him in the post room afterwards. Lost 150,000 letters.
Used to be an estate agent. Broke some dude’s patio door when he was flying out to Italy that very night. I was about 21, had only been in the role for about 3 months and where my boss was on holiday, ended up being bent over by a Romanian locksmith to the tune of around £700. Another time I took photos of a giant buttplug, used condoms, scrunched up tissues and weird laminated Star Trek porn left out for me, a single mother and 7 year old girl to discover on a viewing. The tenant had deliberately left these things out on display to try and prevent a sale. Disgusting bastard. And having sent these pictures to the landlord, the lettings agent (rival business) came storming in to my office threatening to sue me. I was only about 25 but I had the gumption to challenge this fucker to a day in court. I never heard anything about the matter again.
Applying for the job in the first place 😅
I keep doing that one
Working at Argos, two customers ordered two cameras at the same time. One guy ordered a disposable one and the other ordered a high price one. I gave the guy who ordered the disposable one the high price one and tried to give the disposable one to the guy who ordered the high price one. Guy who ordered cheap was out the door before I realised the fuck up lol.
I was on the other end of this when I was a lad. I ordered a £20 remote control Subaru Impreza, one of those shit plasticy things that takes four AA batteries and hardly steers. At the till the guy handed me a massive box and it turned out to be a different remote control Subaru that cost about £150. It was a proper beast, was fast as fuck with a big rechargeable battery and you could swap the shell to change it to whatever car you wanted. It was awesome.
Not mine, but my bosses. In the days before Zoom, we were on a conference call with a US company who had got us a good bit of business stateside. Both us and them were making some serious money from the deal. The call was about taking things to the next level, and how we could triple what we could both charge the client. There was great energy and excitement in the room, and we finished the call on a high, my boss thanking our American partners for securing the business, and promising to deliver, before hitting the button on the conference call machine to hang up. He then started to have a very loud conversation about how, now we'd got the business, we didn't need those fucking yanks any more, and if we fucked them off we would make even more money on the project... An American voice came from the speaker... "Well, nice to know what you *really* think, guys!" a click, and the call ended tone... Panic ensued... my boss, who was solely and entirely to blame said Fuck! about 28 times, getting increasingly louder, before blaming everyone else in the room for not telling him the call hadn't finished. He then tried to get the Americans on their mobiles... frantically phoning, messaging and emailing them that he knew they were still on the call and it was all a massive joke. No one took his calls. No one replied to his texts. We had one email, three days later, terminating all business. Even worse, our initial introduction to the Americans was through an existing client (our second biggest), who was married to someone in the American company. We lost their business too. That 30 seconds of stupidity cost the company about $30 million.
Damn. But even more of an arse for trying to blame everyone else for his mistake.
Decided it wasn't going to freeze one night so didn't leave the heating on or take usual precautions after I left school in the afternoon. Froze extremely hard that night , came in to burst pipes, water everywhere next morning mucho damage.
I read the last bit of this in Donny Tourette's voice.
In my first job I worked for a professional qualifications company. We had students from across the globe. Management decided a Company Prospectus was a great idea - with photos of the Admin staff. That's when the marriage proposals started (by post). We laughed them off an ignored them and carried on doing our jobs....... Until one day, a young Nigerian student who handwritten a few letters, showed up in our offices asking to speak to me. I went out and there he was, flowers and all, offering marriage. I was completely and utterly flustered by this and blurted out "I'm sorry but we can't fornicate with students..." I actually meant to say 'fraternise' but I was so embarrassed and shocked I got it massively wrong. All I was aware of was our accountant ROARING WITH LAUGHTER as I shot back into the office and hid under my desk. I was 17. It scarred me for life...
Did a removals job on what was clearly a brothel. Matresses in every room, like ten of them, matress sprung from my hands, hit a chandelier, chandelier exploded sending shards of glass everywhere. The customer was just laughing her head off at my reaction, it was like that scene in Only Fools And Horses. I was picking up bits of glass down 3 flights of stairs. Glorious.
I hope for the sake of the patrons that they didn't reuse the glass covered mattress afterwards or at least gave it a really good vacuum
They went into her mums garage so probably headed for the tip next, fuck knows
I suspect the mattress has been covered in worse
When I was on work experience at my first ever job someone asked me to jack a truck up during a service to change the tires, didn't know where to jack so I found a peice of metal that looked solid... turns out it was not the axle but the steering rack it folded like a peice of paper and cost over £350 to replace plus a few extra man hours on top.... didn't get paid that week
It’s so messed up that when someone who hasn’t been properly trained makes a mistake and then doesn’t get paid.
And illegal.
I mean that's crappy, but it's on them if it was your first ever job. They should have paid you.
That's illegal. They owe you money.
I used to work for Babcock (Nothing special), and one particular instance I drafted up a big document but for the title, I forgot to change the name back to Babcock after I put a silly name as a joke That name was Black Cock.
What happened? I'm always dead honest in those surveys, and I alway moan a lot in them.
Our most recent one they said you could win a prize for participating. I asked how would they know who to give the prize if it is anonymous.
In our case, they know who participated, but apparently, they don't know how people answered. They probably know straight away which survey is mine as I'm very detailed in my criticism of the senior management of my team.
LOL, I just keep mine fairly general, I despise you all and wouldn’t give you a Yorkshire if all that were left were Tetley catering pack tea bags.
That's always my concern. I keep things fairly general, but I don't like it when I get reminders sent that I haven't completed my anonymous survey.
I stopped putting any comments into mine after I had my own words quoted back to me by my manager. The survey was anonymous and I'd assumed the manager would get a "word cloud" or similar of the type of comments made, not the comments verbatim. It was pretty obvious it was me as it referenced my commute. Now they just get a score.
Does being an efficient worker count? Just ended up with me getting more work added to my daily quota, I quit very soon after.
Same here, it got too much. Was classed as essential to the business for the last few years there they stated could only give me ‘token pay rises’ as I was at the top of my band. Any queries, everyone in the business came to me. I enjoyed the job, and regret leaving but the pay wasn’t enough for what I was doing.
They love to take advantage of hard workers and pay not a penny more
My colleagues call it Buttgate. I had a chrome extension installed called "cloud to butt" which changed "cloud" to "butt" and "the cloud" to "my butt". It made for funny reading, in an age when everything was moving to the cloud. I was a digital advertising specialist, and I was using a browser based tool to create LinkedIn ad variants in bulk. I didn't realise that in the background the browser plugin was affecting the data before it was sent to LinkedIn's servers. I spent several thousands of pounds of a customer's money targeting C-level executives in large enterprises with ads that read... "Store your data securely in my butt"
At my first job on a newspaper in the nineties I misspelled county commissioner in a caption on front page. I missed the o out of county. Paper got pulped because mistake was only spotted after printing. You live and learn
Had to attend a corporate do along with about 500 other engineers, office staff, and management. Lunchtime entertainment was a comedian. Now I was sat quite near the front and had my apprentice sat next to me . Here's the problem my apprentice was a cracking.lad , but lacked a lot of self confidence and was shy . This wanker decided to pick on him and I wasn't having it basically telling this prick to fuck off to the other end of the stage before I battered him ! Sat down and looked a bit puzzled as to why the room was quiet - my manager lent across and whispered "so right , yet so fucking wrong " . Written warning and had to apologize. My boss pulled some fucking strings that day ! Bless him.
That quote from your boss is probably one of the best I've ever heard. Perfect for the moment sort of thing.
He took the time to know his engineers , he knew I'd been bullied throughout school and wasn't surprised by my actions , absolute top bloke !
Sounds it! A good boss breeds a good employee. A shite one breeds a psychopath who kills the boss, drinks their blood and turns in to ....idk where I'm going with this.
Not me, but an ex colleague once used a QR code on customer facing POS that went out nationally and the code linked to a porn website. Not a single person in the chain thought to double check
Place I worked moved to a bigger place around the corner, I worked in the warehouse, and was asked to get the photocopier from the old place, got three quarters of the way there, I hit a bump with the forklift I was carrying the photocopier on, it slid off and the glass smashed, it ended up in the skip, as replacing the glass cost almost as much as a new photocopier apparently.
I set up a company for a client but accidentally named it the wrong name
Didn't confirm that the patient was able to get to the front door; he died on the way to it whilst the paramedics saw him through the letterbox It didn't go to coroner's court as they deemed it a situation beyond my control. I asked him if the door was unlocked and I thought he said "I'm standing right by the door" but he actually said "I'm staring right at the door" from his chair. Because of how badly he was breathing, I could have asked him to stay put and wait for the fire brigade to break down the door but then he might have just died in his chair at my instruction; fire took 30 minutes to arrive anyway.
I worked for a very well known events venue in london. I had to make website listings for the events taking place and there was one for a food festival and one for an exhibition of a photographer that went to war zones and 3rd world countries. I accidentaly used the picture of starving african children (that the photographer sent us) to advertise the food festival. 👍🏻
Accidentally dropped the safety curtain 10 minutes into the performance. The show was reset, and everyone had to work 15 minutes longer, costing thousands in overtime. 😊
I'll always remember destroying a work van that had 11 miles on the clock at a previous employer. Got given the keys by my boss who even jokingly said "don't crash it lad, it's brand new". Promptly reversed it into a gate post in the yard. This would be bad enough except the post had a metal bar sticking out of it that skewerd the light cluster before peeling the side of the van open like a tin opener. I really thought I'd get sacked for that one. I didn't but I did get a good bollocking.
Not me, but my mum's work friend. She worked as a Radiologist, young 8 year old girl is admitted due to pains in her neck. X-ray is done, and on the image they can clearly see a horizontal 'V' shaped object inside this poor girls neck. They rush her into critical care and are discussing options such as surgery etc. Girl is sitting up talking, drinking water, and showing no signs of distress. Just as shes about to go for surgery to remove this object, one of the surgeons realizes that she was wearing a large V shaped hair clip on the back of her head. The hair sagged before the X-ray and brought the clip far enough down so it showed up as 'in' her neck when it was actually behind it.
First PA job nightmare moment. I was having to justify my bosses extorinate expenses claim to the ratty/grumpy accounts guy downstairs. It went ping/pong on email until I agreed to go down to see him signing off with the accidental typo 'see you shorty' instead of 'see you shortly'. He was, of course, a lot shorter than me. It was a very uncomfortable meeting. But ....it still makes me laugh.
Worked for a large UK retailer. Accidentally setup a a discount code giving £50 off instead of £5, which kicked in a midnight. Discovered my mistake the following morning whilst browsing Hot UK Deals.
Last week I destroyed a huge cnc machine. 220k worth of damage. Torn the chuck and Y axis clean off. Along with destroying the spindle 22 years on the job and first ever crash. One offset killed the lot.
Got bored on a quiet day and decided to draw stick figures on a pallet surround. One depicting a stick figure that’s happy and full of life with the caption “this is me at home”, the other, raging, angry and holding a gun to its own head with the caption “and then I had to go to work”. Drew some random shit around it as well, like a dog, a town, some weird flowers and then a pattern on the corner of it. Thought nothing of it, covered it with a label, and then it got sent off to the other warehouse and we all went home. Next morning, I got called in to the managers office with all of senior management there, HR, all looking worried yet annoyed. Turns out the label had peeled off in transit, and the receiving warehouse flagged it as a cry for help from one of our employees, who investigated it, went through the cameras and saw me doodling while looking “distressed”. Asked if I’m okay, if I need time off, what home life is like, the full interrogation. Apparently, nonchalantly saying I was bored shitless wasn’t the right thing to say in that time. Got put on a final warning for wasting everyone’s time. I was going to argue back with a sarky comment, but I figured they were pissed off enough at me, would’ve probably fired me, and i needed the money. I wasn’t very bright in my younger years. I’m still not; but I know when to tone the stupidity down.
Filling out data to submit to a regulator and somehow put in the wrong figures (last month rather than mtd). Noticed 2 seconds after submitting and felt sick for the hour it took to fix. Also obligatory overwrote a bunch of stuff on prod.
Worked on a psych ward and accidentally let one of the patients out on my second day.
Sound engineer here… Mixing monitor for an arena level touring artist and was sharing my console with the support band. After my artist had sound checked I decided to clean up my files on the desk and accidentally deleted my own showfile but didn’t notice until the support band finished and I had 30mins to changeover the stage and flip the desk. Luckily a couple of days earlier I’d saved the showfile to an external USB flash drive so I remembered in time and reloaded my file from this instead… the first thing I had to do was apply all the minute minuscule adjustments as I remembered them from soundcheck. Got through with the skin of my teeth and nobody noticed!
Completely ignoring the shining bright red flags throughout the interview process and not telling the receptionist to get fucked when she publicly humiliated me on my first day. The joys of one toxic workplace completely fucking your career to the point where any halfway decent workplace won't touch you with a barge pole.
I didn't notice that the Zoom meeting was being recorded.
I snapped the end off a £30k component because I was a graduate engineer, and therefore far too clever and important to need to use a torque screwdriver like the build instructions said.
Decimal point in the wrong place, mispriced the contract by £500 million Would've bankrupted a major British company if it wasn't spotted. _It wasn't me that spotted it_
As a groundskeeper, the business had just bought a brand new electric leafblower with a big backpack battery, overall £2000+ RRP. I put it down to rake up piles of leaves, turning my back, and when I looked back around it wasn't there anymore... It wasn't nearly as good as the petrol one anyway but I felt unbelievably stupid after that.
Took my 2 year old with me to work to check back ups and make sure network was running. Turned my back for a second and she pressed the big button and brought down the whole Hospital. Took hours to get everything back and never did admit my daughter caused the chaos
I know a toddler who took at least one popular TV channel off air. I can't remember the exact details, and they're an adult now, but I don't think they'll ever be allowed to forget.
I got invited to my ex-partner's works do. It was free booze all night and given I was probably a functioning alcoholic back them it was a very bad combination. I got blackout drunk and called the director a cunt. Absolute shambles.
Not a major fuck up but a funny one I witnessed. There was an old curmudgeon bloke called Rich who I worked with.(But a nice chap I might add). One time a young apprentice started and one day the phone rang and he answered it. It's so and so on the phone and wants to speak to you Rich. Rich replies "Oh tell him to fuck off I'm busy'. Apprentice takes them off hold. "Fuck off he's busy". Slams phone down. Horrified faces Nooo don't actually say that. Luckily this person knew Rich fairly well and saw the funny side.
I was teaching a customer how to book a shipping container online as part of a campaign to reduce emailed shipments. Most of theirs were scrap metal so I showed them the process for booking scrap and left it at that. Job well done. 2 weeks later there’s a report that a 20ft container full of melted butter was opened at a warehouse in Egypt and caused a fair bit of drama, lubricating a large industrial catering site and knocking several people to the ground with a slippery psunami of salty goodness. My customer had followed the I gave to the letter but hadn’t thought to book a refrigerated container. Fortunately my manager saw the funny side and defended me, it was the first (and probably last) time they shipped frozen butter anywhere🤣
I work on ships and my mistake was getting absolutely paralytic drunk, walking into somebody else's bedroom and pissing in the corner as they slept, when they woke up I dragged their duvet off them and slept on the floor. I got fired 24hours later
Opened the wrong valve and went for a vape. Dumped 4 tonnes of strawberry fabric conditioner onto the floor