What's the biggest mistake you've ever made in work?

mikemac

In light of the recent story of the rogue trader in France this is a relevant topic.

Come on, own up?
Ever hit your bosses car in the car park?
Fecked on some software project? There are people working for the state here, was PPARS your fault?
Cooked the accounts and get caught.

To start, I lost the price of a new car (can't tell the exact amount) for my employer but my boss (legend imo) saved my ass.
Oh and working in a cosmetic factory, I put the wrong label code on 10,000 lipstick cases. No money lost but the night shift spend weeks cursing me as they has to relabel them all by hand.

Can ya beat that?

briantwin

I was working on a golf course, i was working as a chef in the club house. And during the summer months during the evening i'd take one of the golf buggies out for a spin. one evening when i was a wee bit baked, i took the Captain of the members buggy out for a spin. It was slick, had GPS and all sorts of gizmo's on it. When i was driving it around one of the stable areas i didn't notice the a huge mental bar sticking out of the wall and as i turned the corner it caught under the back wheel arch. I hit it at such a speed as to tear the whole back faring the car. I had to take the buggy back which was barely driving because all this plastic and stuff was jamming the axel. I had to leave it in behind the club house and one of the Caddies said he'd seen one of the construction workers hit it with a JCB. Thank christ, it cost about 2000 euro to repair.

Stercus Accidit

No.

I'm not thick.



Um my worst is getting up in the morning and going in at all.

TestTransmission

A mate of mine lost his company 200,000 euro in one day,it was a clerical error or something.

ScumLord

Once or twice at work, years ago instead of rolling a cigarette I've started rolling a splif and it only dawned on me when I went looking for me hash to put into it.

Pighead

Pigheads worst mistake he ever made in work was back in 96 when he worked in Supermacs in Galway. The mistake involved undercooked chicken burgers, little children, vomiting, diarroeha and salmonella.

Don't want to get into exactly what the mistake was as thats not really important right now.

Stercus Accidit

Pighead wrote: »

Pigheads worst mistake he ever made in work was back in 96 when he worked in Supermacs in Galway. The mistake involved undercooked chicken burgers, little children, vomiting, diarroeha and salmonella.

Don't want to get into exactly what the mistake was as thats not really important right now.

You vomited and had diarrhoea in the burgers, gave them too the kids, and they subsequntly developed salmonella?

You made it obvious duh

ScumLord

Pighead wrote: »

Pigheads worst mistake he ever made in work was back in 96 when he worked in Supermacs in Galway. The mistake involved undercooked chicken burgers, little children, vomiting, diarroeha and salmonella.

Don't want to get into exactly what the mistake was as thats not really important right now.

The hot plates where on the blink so you cooked all the food on radiators??

WannaST

Worked with a guy who was trying to move cables from under a machine, so he pushed the machine back a few inches, forgot he had a floor tile up... weeee, crash! bang! wallop!
250(ish) spinning disk drives got a side-ways sudden jolt and had to be sent back to manf re-work/re-test (crashed heads etc).
At 1.5k a drive (back when disk we're expensive), it was a pretty costly re-work but most of the drives were ok. To say he sweated on the out come was an understatement.

funk-you

After a night out on the beer went into work still drunk and got sick into customers server that was worth 2.1million. Spent quite a long time that day fixing that one and covering it up. Messy stuff.

-Funk

Gillo

Didn't make the mistake but failed to stop it happening (Yeah, lets play the blame game- it's been done on me!!!). Managed to cost the company over €100,000- even before it had settled a member of senior management told me off record he thought it was hilarious (what had happened) and every so often slagges me off about it.

I'd actually started looking for another job because I thought I was about to be fired and managed to find a much better job, when I found out that all I was going to get was a good bo!!ocking and a warning I figured I might as well stay in the current job since for some strange reason they must like me.

FunkyChicken

Inadvertently deleted logs of important stuff going back five years, which is kind of important. No one knows yet though..

FunkZ

It was work experience, but one time I left for my lunch break from a guitar shop and never came back...

!

whatsgoinon

years ago, before those fancy machines for paying with credit cards were introduced, I was working in a fancy restaurant, mega money for teeny portions kind of restaurant, a table of 4 ran up a big bill, handed over the flexible friend to little old me who was only dying to get out of there to go on the lash, wasn't paying attention, and didn't slide the slidy bit of the old fashioned credit card machine thingy back over the slip of paper to confirm it or whatever, oh oh, didn't bother going back ever again after that, about IR£400 it was

biko

Biggest mistake at work?
Dating someone at work...

0ubliette

erased a board members blackberry with nothing to restore it from. lost all phone numbers, contacts, emails for years of stuff..that was a bad week i tells ya

User45701

Construction, wrong concrete used, several months of work ****ed as the mistake was 6 months ago before it was discovered and it was the foundation level.... (all building work done since was taken down and the foundation was redone.) It was a crap job anyway, run by a recist kunt and they had a web blocker so i didnt have boards. But im serious what a recist ****. i doubt your a boards user but if you are or you work in the construction industry im sure you know who i am and the kunt im talking about... hint: He does not work there anymore

Adam

Stole 512MB of ram. But that was 5 years ago so it was more significant then! Imarebelyeah!

MarkR

Some golden ones in this thread. Great minds think alike. Pissing myself at silverfish's one..

Originally Posted by Silverfish
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.

Gumbyman

Came back to the office one night to pick up my umbrella. Was pretty hammered. My boss woke me up the next morning. I was asleep on the floor of her office.

MOH

My first week in my first job, department secretary was on a half day, everyone else was in a meeting. Her phone rang a couple of times, I answered it, turned out it was someone looking for one of the business managers who sat in my area who was also away. The guy was in south america or somewhere trying to close a half million pound contract, got me to forward his call to someone else, and I lost it. Plus I then couldn't remember his name so couldn't get anyone to call him back.

Of course he eventually called back and got someone less clueless than me, but I learned a valuable lesson: never pick up anyone else's phone.

thelordofcheese

I took the key to the server room with me to a weekend festival once.

That'd have been...erm...interesting if anything had gone wrong.

monkeyfudge

Last year I spelled the word 'history' wrong an advert that was put on over a 1000 buses across Dublin.

Adam

monkeyfudge wrote: »

Last year I spelled the word 'history' wrong an advert that was put on over a 1000 buses across Dublin.

And the rest, as they say, is hostory.

Morlar

I remember being on call once and waking up in the middle of the night to take a leak. The fuse went so I used the mobile as a fold out (v3) torch and took a leak. Half way through this I heard what sounded like a radio in the distance - took me while to realise that was japaneese voices down the phone and I had dialled 'Asia Pacific Operations' ie the 'A' - first number on my phone. So from their perspecive they got a phone call from somone who was on call who held the phone out to record pissing noises.

monkeyfudge

Mirror wrote: »

And the rest, as they say, is hostory.

Histroy actually...

Adam

monkeyfudge wrote: »

Histroy actually...

-_-

Cool_CM

One Christmas Eve, I gave somebody who was buying a guitar for their teenage son a left handed one instead of a right handed one. Just before the shop closed there was an angry phonecall, the owners husband had to drive a fair few miles to swap it!
Also a few years later in the same job(i work there when Im back from college) I had gotten paid the day before Christmas Eve and proceeded to go out on the almighty piss, waking up at 9 o clock, the very time I was supposed to be the only person upstairs in the Instrument area until half 9, got in at 9 but by then the person who had opened up(who also would like to think she is a manager but isn't, but still has a lot of pull and has an intnse dilike for me) was faced with one upstairs customer during that time and put on floods of tears because it was "a disaster". According to my manager who was having a coffee nearby and came in early, the customer was more pissed off at her making a scene than he was about nobody being there to serve him and promptly got sorted out.
I haven't worked there since.....
Thank Christ!
And Yes, that is a few peoples Christmasses I've ruined, which I suppose makes me a bit of a grinch!

carveone

monkeyfudge wrote: »

Last year I spelled the word 'history' wrong an advert that was put on over a 1000 buses across Dublin.

Excellent! You'd think someone would pick up on it at some point in the printing process...
Don't worry - they have ads all over the place now telling you how much CO2 buses "omit".

Conor.

BlitzKrieg

Histroy actually...

I still have a picture of that on my old camera phone I think...

monkeyfudge

Oh yes.. and not vetoing Blitzkrieg's employment here was a pretty big mistake of mine too.

BlitzKrieg

*wah* *wah* *wah*


My biggest mistake was letting slip I could do your job aswell as my own...now when nobody can find you they come and annoy me.

rmacm

I deleted a chunk of stuff from a VSS Database one day (thank **** my manager had a copy of the files on his machine). I also managed to bring down a production line about 20 minutes from the end of my shift by bumping into an emergency stop button...that was a pretty frantic 20 minutes.

Rozabeez

Vomitting all over the dairy aisle.

MLE

I deleted 3 years worth of data from a database before, And I also switched off a server that I shouldnt have and brought a very big call centre off line. oops :rolleyes:

jb91

Not checking the dates on milk cartons and arranging the accordingly, so cartons with a date 3 days away were at the back and dates 9 days away were at the front. No one noticed though, or at least no one said anything to me..... yet....

togster

vomitting all over a fat american customer. Sale didn't go according to plan after that.

Wertz

Hmmm...there was the time that a litre of gloss paint got kicked over onto 3 grands worth of new carpet (right in the middle of the room) while we were laying drop sheets. No amount of cleaning could hide the white patch. I was the kicker.
Or the time I dropped a filling knife from a height into a brand new designer sink and took a huge chip out of it.
Then there was the time myself and a workmate painted an entire shopfront the wrong colour (not really our fault, the paint shop gave us the wrong mix).
Had a mate that stood on the neck of a worktop (thin bit around the sink) and cracked the polished granite...5K worth of worktop fit for a skip.
Insurance is a great invention.

IanCurtis

My old boss in my old job left to go to one of those internet banks.

He was useless and ended up coming back, with the bank going bust.

He brought all his useless-tosser "dream team" back to us.

I, of course, told him all this by sending HIM a network message saying so, rather than my mate.

He shrugged it off, but was delighted when I left 2 years later...the useless prick.

Damn network messages.

ankles

Attempted (semi-successfully) to score my bosses' fiancee (who also worked in the office) in front of her father after boss had gone to bed (it was a party in her house). Never left a house so quick the following morning after passing out. Following Monday was a long slow journey to work but all parties in the know kept their traps shut. Phew

mick.fr

Append to somebody I now, sent a windows message to his new girlfriend colleague he spent the previous night with (MSN and other IM were not authorized in the company, so he used "net send" command from Windows), asking the girl if she was happy about the previous night bla bla, he wanted to surprise her with a pop up on her screen, but this dumb actually sent it to everybody in the company, over 500 employees...

No consequences though, just a good laugh in the company

stepbar

In 2003, I worked for 2 months in an IT dept for a bank. The week before I was due to leave, I fcuked up a pc in a branch. I tried to install a service pack (Windows NT) remotely using dial up!!! (I know :rolleyes:). Of course I got the blue screen of death. What was worse was that the PC I fcuked up was connected to the only printer for the branch. For the rest of the afternoon, nobody was able to print anything, no mortgage applications, nothing. After an effin and blinding from the branch manager, I eventually had to hop on the Dart with a PC and reinstall the whole lot. Needless to say a bit of business was lost that afternoon.

AckwelFoley

When i was a college student i worked in a video store, across from a real rough part of the area.

I got distracted during closing when a friend pulled up in the car and i left the keys in the front door all night!

They were there when i went back the next day!!

BuffyBot

Dumbest thing I ever did was access a secured file at work re: a former employee who had gone on to some notoriety soon after leaving. Even though I knew it would probably be set to trigger an alert if an attempt was made.

Alas so did half the company, includig my line manager's manager, so they couldn't actually discipline me without doing it to him and everyone else involved.

freewing

Years ago ( no really years ago !!) I worked on a building site in london as a labourer and the boss told me to remove all the old cables from the site including the ones on the perimiter wall .Anyway you would think he would get suspicious when i asked for a hacksaw to remove cable .So I cut this really big cable off a wall and it turned out to be a 200 core computer line to the really big bank next door and they were down for a day and lost about a mill in business ( back when a mill was a lot of money).
Well I got fired so hard that my ass is still a bit red .In my defence I was hung over which seems to be the all singing all dancing excuse for everything.
I feel better know

woodyg

i've had few crackin feck up's in my time!

1 was i used to work part time in a very big D.I.Y. store while in college.
1 day i had to load this large pallet of paving slabd onto the back of a pickup using a fork lift, simple enough yea might think. No would be the answer as the builders hadnt finished tarring the back loading bay so i drive out load the pickup fine but then when i tried to turn the forlift began to sink into the soft ground so i gunned it, naturally i got stuck.

So a mate comes out jumps on a steam roller that was there to pave the tar and starts to ram the back of the fork lift as im giving it socks to try get it out.

Queue the Manager to walk out wondering were we have been for the last 20 minutes, the look on his face was priceless as he just shook his head in disbelieve. Took us a good 30 minutes to get it out.

The fork lift had a huge dent in the back from smashin it with the steam roller


2nd big one i had was when i worked for a large chip manufacturer, the task for the day was to update the cisco switchs in a comms room with the latest patch, again handy enough. AH No :rolleyes:
I managed to apply the patches the 3 swithces which controlled a hole block of the European head quarters and over load them and blow not just the power supplies on them but also the main boards them selves which ment the hole block was down for the day till Cisco shipped out 3 replacements.

Strangely enough i had a lot off overtime to do that night patchin up a hole office block. The boss wasnt to un-happy though cause he was on holidays and just laughed down the phone

Nody

Friend of mine was installing a Cisco router with a 2 MB connection in a remote office site, as a back up there was a ISDN line which was only due to kick in if the 2MB line was down. Due to the set up of the protocol though a package was sent every 30s to the back up line which meant it went up and the back up line had 60s with out activity to disconnect. After one month when the first phone bill arrived for over 10.000 the boss called my friend in asking him WTF he had been doing .

My personal worst one is from the military. I was working in one signal battalion in an IT department. As we could not get through all over the places to check PCs, set up access rights etc. we had remote access (VNC) installed on the PCs, servers etc. We had a standard DHCP set up for the networks and had .100 to .200 in the range for one of our networks used by the top brass (inc. a two star General).

As I'm in a hurry I take a random PC and need to connect to one of our servers with ip .10 to do some changes. I load my program, type in the address but miss I put .100 instead of .10 and I get up this big map program instead of the server information I was expecting but I moved up to the corner to minimize it to get my stuff done. Around the corner I hear "WHAT THE BEEP IS GOING ON HERE?! WHAT IS HAPPENING WITH MY PC?" from the two star General who was flown in from the HQ. I see my time in the military ending very quickly hearing that as I slowly walk around the corner and go "Err Sir, may I have a moment of your time?". To his credit he took it very well once I had explained the how and why.

Huggles

Got an email from a client one day bitching about something, so I decided to forward it to my boss adding in my own bitchy comments about her....

I sent it to her by mistake ....

pow wow

Shredding some customer cheques....along with the 'quicklodge' envelopes they came in

Oh, and the usual 'doing it' with a colleague.

Jackz

Sent a link to nicetits.com to some work friends and also without intending to, to the all distribution list of a multinational hosting and communications company. Luckily the site had pictures of the type of bird.

Barlow07

Jackz wrote: »

Sent a link to nicetits.com to some work friends and also without intending to, to the all distribution list of a multinational hosting and communications company. Luckily the site had pictures of the type of bird.

Its the thought that counts .

I remember when i worked in a Supermarket we where racing around on a saturday evening after closing on pallet trucks, one of the lads was coming towards the Fruit & Veg and i jumped out to scare him, he took off towards the weighing scales and smashed straight into two of the them, one was complete fook and the other was fine, of course we told the manager next some bullsh1t story which he believed and a few weeks later the one we thought was grand wouldnt work one day and they had to replace them at a cost of £2,000 each ( so i was told ). So that was the end of F1 season and start of the footie season which we played using oranges.