What's the biggest mistake you've made at work?

The Roach

I'm still fairly new in my job, but since I've started I know a few people that have made COLOSSAL mistakes!

The largest of these that I can think of was when an engineer analysed data from a piece of equipment incorrectly. The equipment was then used in the production line for a few weeks, and it was only when the first products reached the final testing phase that a problem was seen. It was traced back to that piece of equipment, which was adding severe defects to every product it processed. EVERYTHING that had been processed on that piece of equipment had to be scrapped - approximate commercial value of product that had to be scrapped was about €120million.

The engineer in question only got the "be more careful next time" speech.

From what I gather from most of the guys I work with, everybody has screwed up at least once. But accidents happen; it's only if you keep repeatedly making the same mistakes that you're likely to get in severe trouble.

Fracture

I've done quite a few stupid things in my time,
I used to work for my uncle when i was 12 - 15 selling petrol at a station, more often than not there was only 2 of us there. I was a bit of an edjit and i kinda had a thing for fire, so out at the back of station on a warm summers day i decided to light one of the bushes on fire, before i knew it there was quite a few of them on fire and getting a bit close to the petrol. Luckily the other lad i was workin with came outside and seen me throwing sand on it and kicking it to try and put it out, so he grabbed the fire extuinguisher and put it out. THANK GOD!!

I also got caught by the same uncle one day playing with all the takings near the end of the night, i was havin a laugh while throwing all the notes up in the air to have a money shower effect, was fun i must say. He wasnt too impressed tho lol.

Black Swan

Signing a contract without qualified legal representation. Not smart!

Siogfinsceal

I used to work in a v big global finance company. their quality department spent over a year developing their changeover to the euro- you would think they had back ups of the disks. Anyway in addition to my own server maintenance work they used to get me to retore files, wipe disks etc at night. One night I was very busy and instead of restoring a file I wiped the disk.......they had no back up, the entire euro conversion had to be stalled while the disk was sent to Wales to be reconstructed....it then got lost on the way back and ended up coming back via germany 2 weeks later. The only reason I didnt get fired was that my boss told their boss it was their own fault for not having a back up! Lets just say I was nto popular after that.......


Another time in college during the summer I was working for a similar global company and one the first day I decided for the laugh to photocopy my face in the massive photocopier. I heard a voice behind me and thought it was the lad who sat next to me so just laughed - only to discover it was the head of european business over from the UK

The Sweeper

One week into a job, I once assigned the same piece of work to two different freelance staff. It cost us £30 (yes, thirty pounds) on a million dollar project. The guy who was doing the handover to me went mental and swore at me and told me I had to get my goddamned act together. (This same guy, who was based out of New York, later said to me "I can't believe you and the team were working until 4.30am. When I managed this project we never, ever worked past midnight." Yes, moron, in New York, which is five hours behind us.)

The biggest mistake I ever made was not telling him at that moment to shove his job so far up his hole it was waving out his mouth.

ferdi

i was working for a logistics company in Germany which dealt with booze...moving liquor around for big hotels, airlines etc and i was processing order forms (mind numbing drivel). long story short, i photocopied over one of the incoming orders (worth in excess of 10,000DM) making it unreadable. panic. i looked left...i looked right...i looked behind me....all clear. i scrapped the form and kept my gob shut. never got cought.

tibor

el rabitos wrote:

when in doubt , just blame everything on that foreign guy Tebor

cамое меньший, котор вы смогли сделать должно получить мое право имени!

cormie

tibor wrote:

cамое меньший, котор вы смогли сделать должно получить мое право имени!

According to babelfish that means:

camoe smaller, you is which we could make must obtain my right of name!

Numina

Pighead wrote:

Pighead doesn't really do any work so unfortunately I wouldn't be the best person to ask. Anyway just popped in to say, great thread buddy.

theres a mistake right there

Archeron

A few years ago, a girl in accounts kept ringing me and going "BEEP" before giggling and hanging up. She done this about 40 times in one day and I was freaked. So my phone rang, I picked it up and shouted "Would you ever f*** off and leave me alone or I'll come down there and kill you" (as you do)
It was the MD of the company calling me from the boardroom where he was on speakerphone and surrounded by all the senior board members.

is_that_so

Nothing major personally but one guy in a company I was in ran
rm *.* as part of a script on the main server.
A whole day lost .:rolleyes:

Binomate

Some of these stories are priceless.

The only accident I've ever had while working was when I was working in a little shop and I was bringing about 40 or so, two litre bottles of different soft drinks on a trolly from the store room to the shop to stock the fridge. The store room was across the road from the shop (stupidly enough) and the road in between the shop and the store room was on quite a steep hill, and to top things off, there was a peir at the bottom of the hill. I heard a noise and noticed the trolly lift thingy was getting a lot lighter. I looked back and saw all 40 of the 2L bottles rolling down the hill and off the peir in to the water. Had to get a rowing boat and go out and collect all of the bottles. : /

phantom_lord

Binomate wrote:

I looked back and saw all 40 of the 2L bottles rolling down the hill and off the peir in to the water. Had to get a rowing boat and go out and collect all of the bottles. : /

lol, that takes the biscuit!

User45701

i made a 10,000+ euro mistake in my 2nd week

joe_chicken

I left the keys to a forecourt petrol station in the middle of the aforementioned forecourt... overnight... with the ligths on... beside a pub

Woke up the next morning and it somehow dawned on me what I did

Luckily they remained... but god was that stupid

okidoki987

Heard of a girl who worked for HR in a major bank.
Was sending a memo out to her boss about new recruits and how much they were on and what the job spec was but she sent it to the whole company :eek: and there was war.
People went straight to the MD complaining that the new recruits were earning more then they were etc, cost them a fortune!
Girl handed in her notice that day.

Dan133269

User45701 wrote:

i made a 10,000+ euro mistake in my 2nd week

care to tell us what it was?

whatsupdoc?

Not me (thankfully) but a colleague (since departed) made a major mistake and ended up costing the company 1 MILLION Euro :eek:

tj-music.com

Biggest mistake? Easy: Showing up

mountainyman

is_that_so wrote:

Nothing major personally but one guy in a company I was in ran
rm *.* as part of a script on the main server.
A whole day lost .:rolleyes:

I put something like that into a stored procedure in a place I used to work. I thought they were going to try to f ck me over when I resigned but they were really sound.

I had to ring my replacement and get him to swap the stored procedure for one that didn't have the kill line.

MM

danger_mouse_tm

i have done too many mess ups to mention. I will start with a couple and maybe add more later. I used to work for a steel company. we did cladding aswell. thats the stuff that industrial sheds are made out of. I took the orders over the phone from our belfast office and entered them into the computer in Dublin. Belfast would send the orders up in imperial measurments and i would enter them into the computer in metric. One time i sent a full 40' trailer load of the completely wrong size of cladding into production ( which took a week to manufacture) and down to Armagh to a site. There were big board meetings over that! (got sacked!)
Another time I was delivering a big heavy pallet of copy books to a school supply shop in Cork. Losing the head i was cos i couldn't find the place and when i eventually did find the shop it was a nightmare to find somewhere to stop my big lorry cos of the narrow streets. Eventually i decided to just stop in the middle of the street and work really fast to get the pallet off. So fast in fact that when i got into the back of the lorry i never brought the taillift up and rolled the pallet straight off the back of the truck into the street! Gosh, Cork people are patient!

Another time i was taking a heavy load from Dublin to Cork one night and decided to take a detour into Kildare town to see my freinds new house. Drove past his house by mistake cos it was a wet dirty night and ended up in the Curragh near the race track. Dumb as i was, i decided to reverse the truck onto the grass to do a turn around manouver and buired the back wheels up to the axel in the mud. Bless, some young girl stopped in her Micra and asked if i wanted a tow out People stopped in a mercedes van and tried to pull, another guy came along and threw loads of carpet under the back wheels to help. Some other dude came by in a truck similar to mine and he tried with no luck. Then the gardai arrived on the scene. Eventually i had to call a big 8 wheeler crane down from Dublin to lift me out. I don't know how i had a job after that!

Rabies

Carlsberg don't do mistakes, but if they did....

Silverfish wrote:

Possibly the time a part went on a machine that was the most important machine in the production line. Thousands of computer chips would be sitting useless unless this part was replaced. We didn't hold one in stock as it was extremely expensive. Year's salary expensive, kinda thing.

So, I ordered it from the manufacturer in Japan. Got it ferried to a plane. Got it flown to Ireland. Got a taxi to collect it from the airport and drive like the clappers to the plant.

Grabbed it at reception and ran down the hallway to hand it to the maintenance engineer....... and dropped it.

Edit:
I know of one major screw up. Lucky it wasn't me but I know the guy. His company was contracted to do work and over the year he ran over budget by nearly €2m.
His contract is now terminated

The Sweeper

What I loved most about Silverfish's story was that 'the engineer tried to save it with his foot'. I'm envisaging her setting up a drop kick that'd make an all Ireland finalist proud...

xzanti

One day, I thought it was 5pm when in fact it was only 4... I packed up all my stuff and sauntered out only to be followed by my boss.. He could see I genuinely thought it was 5 and he just laughed and told me to go on anyway.. I'm sure that was only so he could go up and have a good laugh about it with the other 6 people in the office That was soooo embarressing.. and it was a friday too so I had all weekend to cringe over it... Uuuuuuurgh

cormie

haha, as if you thought it was 5;) I'm onto you!

xzanti

cormie wrote:

haha, as if you thought it was 5;) I'm onto you!

Swear to god.. No idea how I thought it was 5, was just really busy that day and thought the day had flown by.. There are no clocks on the wall in the office, all we have are the digital ones on the bottom of our screens which I just glanced at and came up with it being 5 lol..

ScumLord

Rolling a 3 skinner was probably the stupidest thing I've ever done. Didn't even realise i was doing it, it wasn't until I went to burn the hash in and I didn't have any on me that I realised what I was doing. I was smoking allot back then, I ment to roll an ordinary ciggie. Lucily no one saw me.

Car Mad

xzanti wrote:

Swear to god.. No idea how I thought it was 5, was just really busy that day and thought the day had flown by.. There are no clocks on the wall in the office, all we have are the digital ones on the bottom of our screens which I just glanced at and came up with it being 5 lol..

i thinks you need a holiday:D this one time pulled into a petrol station to fill up van had a young fella with me told him to fill up when i went to pay anyway that was alrite 5 mins up the road chug chug chug boom i said what the flup did u put into it (petrol) its a diesel flupin car:eek: it all worked out in the end though:o poor young fella got a beating but u know sh!t happens:rolleyes:

Wacker

In the newsagent I used to work in, one of the lads said to a heavily preganant woman who was buying smokes: "You shouldn't be smoking while pregnant."
I'm not even going to post the reply; surely everyone here can see it coming a mile away?

I made some classic errors in my time banking. One mistake of mine resulted in a company paying fifteen members of staff who had all left six months ago! That cost thirty grand. I was able to sort it out though, so I don't know if it really counts. Bear in mind, this was a few days after my boss had given me a formal warning about all the mistakes I was making.

cee_jay

My biggest one was probably kissing one of the managers (luckily I didn't report directly to him or there would have been trouble) on a work night out - in front of all his managers and my supervisor who weren't very happy the following day - got quite a few dirty looks