Your Costliest Errors At Work

MiciG91

I've only had one real job with all this recession lark.Was working in a hotel in town.A woman came up with a dinner from the carvery She refused to pay for the dinner i started laughing at her,all the other staff were laughing too but not for the same reason as me.She owned the hotel.

Using the words ****,Stupid ****,And Retard made sure it was my last day of work

epgc3fyqirnbsx

Working in a hotel and pouring a pint of guiness all over a ladies lovely white dress at a wedding.

And also had one of those text msg mishaps. An old work mate text me to ask how things were going and I said grand but xxxxx (the area manager) is still wrecking my head. And I sent it to the bloody area manager...

Sea Sharp

Bursting a water pipe and accidentally crushing 2 wheel-barrows with a jcb

Dravokivich

Any bankers here? Sure they'd beat everyone elses story...

starbelgrade

I worked in a shop when I was a teenager & nicked 300 quid from the till. It was a costly error for them letting me near the dosh!

m5ex9oqjawdg2i

Taking cement off a truck and bringing it into the warehouse in woodies, 2 tons of cement on a wooden pallet, the yard was uneven so when I hit a bad patch the pallet broke and a lot of cement bags burst, it was pissing rain so the sludge went off down the drain to solidify over the comming days and creat total mayhem for all the shops in the retail park. Didn't cost me a penny though

Edit: Prob shouldn't talk about a job I'm still in when everyone knows my username.

Standard Toaster

Had sex with co-worker.
Also never made the same mistake again.

tony1kenobi

I taught a small group of Islamic fundamentalists how to fly planes about 9 years ago.

Standard Toaster

^^
How did that work out for you?

tony1kenobi

Standard Toaster wrote: »

^^
How did that work out for you?

I work in the garden centre in Woodies.....it is what it is....but I refuse to sell fertilizer to anyone with a hint of a tan.

Antar Bolaeisk

Dropped a film.

Not only did I have to spend all night fixing it but I think the cinema was fined as well.

Orange69

Overwrote a bunch of files in a cvs repository once. Forgot to update before committing. Embarrassing..!

Lu Tze

Instead of regulating the banks, i spent all my time on boards, cost me my job

CrazyRabbit

Didn't happen to me, but to someone in the same company at one of our manufacturing plants.

Some very expensive components where placed in a huge oven as part of the manufacturing process.
There was a fairly new guy whose job was basically to clean the oven after every run & before the next batch went it. So, he cleaned the oven with some specialised cleaning fluid and it was loaded up with the next batch of components. Turns out he forgot to wash out the cleaning fluid and the batch was destroyed.

Total damage was a little under £100,000. He didn't get sacked though...as the company had just payed a heavy price for his education.

No idea if this is all true...it's just something that has been passed around work many times over the years.

Standard Toaster

CrazyRabbit wrote: »

Didn't happen to me, but to someone in the same company at one of our manufacturing plants.

Some very expensive components where placed in a huge oven as part of the manufacturing process.
There was a fairly new guy whose job was basically to clean the oven after every run & before the next batch went it. So, he cleaned the oven with some specialised cleaning fluid and it was loaded up with the next batch of components. Turns out he forgot to wash out the cleaning fluid and the batch was destroyed.

Total damage was a little under £100,000. He didn't get sacked though...as the company had just payed a heavy price for his education.

No idea if this is all true...it's just something that has been passed around work many times over the years.

^^^
Squibs?

Hyperbullet

Antar Bolaeisk wrote: »

Dropped a film.

Not only did I have to spend all night fixing it but I think the cinema was fined as well.

Have seen this happen. Seriously not cool!!!

CrazyRabbit

CrazyRabbit wrote: »

Didn't happen to me, but to someone in the same company at one of our manufacturing plants.

Some very expensive components where placed in a huge oven as part of the manufacturing process.
There was a fairly new guy whose job was basically to clean the oven after every run & before the next batch went it. So, he cleaned the oven with some specialised cleaning fluid and it was loaded up with the next batch of components. Turns out he forgot to wash out the cleaning fluid and the batch was destroyed.

Total damage was a little under £100,000. He didn't get sacked though...as the company had just payed a heavy price for his education.

No idea if this is all true...it's just something that has been passed around work many times over the years.

He had his chips so!

Standard Toaster

Some of ye know where I work but doesn't effect me. I did hear of one guy who lost the company a couple of million in one day but managed to recoupe it back before the end of trading. Nuts

Adyx

Most recently I lost (honestly!) €300 that I collected from one of the tills. Some dirty scumbag must have nabbed it.

Before that, I was down in the keg room one day and noticed a Heineken line not tapped up. Tapped it up and went out to the bar to check it. There was Heineken everywhere! :eek: Turns out the tap had been removed but the line was still there. What's worse is that it was pointing directly at the till. At first I panicked and just pointed it down the sink until I copped on and ran back to the keg room.

Even longer ago, my first night working in a nightclub me and another lad got sent to another nightclub in our company to borrow some 3L bottles of vodka. Being a hero I tried to carry 2 boxes (8 bottles). The top one fell off right in the middle of the busiest street on a Saturday night (where Abrakebabra is now if you know Waterford).

Actually while I'm sure these incidents have cost someone money, I got away with them. :P

MayoForSam

Burnt a hole right through the first floor of a factory where I once worked by leaving on a piece of equipment overnight which overheated (a lot), just like a mini-nuclear reactor meltdown. I just went 'Oh!' the following morning as I met the fire engine coming back out the factory gates.

In the place I'm working now, some idiot forgot to put anti-freeze in the back of a cooler of a very expensive piece of kit. Cost savings meant the heat was turned off over the Xmas holidays, cue freezing pipes and about €25K's worth of damage.

Standard Toaster

^^
Did they find out it was your incompetent ass that done it?

starbelgrade

Standard Toaster wrote: »

Some of ye know where I work but doesn't effect me. I did hear of one guy who lost the company a couple of million in one day but managed to recoupe it back before the end of trading. Nuts

And that happened in McDonalds? Truly, that is nuts.

Standard Toaster

He's here all week folks. Try the veal.

DazMarz

Happened to a guy I knew, when we were working at a poker tournament together. He was cashing someone out of the cash game, and for some reason got his wires crossed and paid him out €750 instead of €250. Obviously, your man said S.F.A., took his money and legged it. Only when the guy realised what he had done... it was far too late to do anything. He was out €500... nashty...

Personally, probably breaking a bottle of vino in a place I was working parttime. Nice and handy, only a 30 quid job and the owner didn't even want to take it! So I'm lucky in that sense!

bluto63

Never done anything that horrible. First day working as a waiter a drink fell over on my tray, down the back of the neck of a customer. When he found it was my first day he gave me a fiver tip and told me to forget about it

Gyalist

I left £28,000 in cash in the boot of a taxi.

Mackman

One time i dodnt corralate the engineer's drawings with our own architectural drawings for a big school project, the builder ended up ordering a heap of wrong steel

Another time, i was working in a supermarket one summer and one of the guys didnt close the door on one of the freezer containers, next day it was all thawed out, cost about 30K, we all had a giggle over that one :pac:

Columbia

I left a whole pallet of dairy products in a heated room for a whole weekend, and left about 200 euros worth of bread out in the rain.

Steodonn

I worked in a spar last summer. I was bring the coke out and the packaging was a bit ripped but I taught it be grand. The thing ripped completely and half a crate of coke fell and the floor. Cue coke fizzing everywhere as most of the bottles burst

The only other mistake I ever made made more money. One of the scanners was a bit doggy so while trying to make sure everything was scanned I scanned stuff twice of occasion and if the costumer was buying a good few thing it would go unnoticed till afterwards

pajodublin

in my old job someone, who might have been me but it was never discovered who did it first, accidentally sent a file twice and bankrupt 3 companies and wiped the operating cash flow of several others for a few weeks until the error was fixed

I will not say where i used to work, and it wasnt a bank

zerohamster

A friend of mine worked in heatons and there was a massive display stand of Cadbury's Creme Eggs on offer.
One day he and his colleague noticed two of the eggs were damaged and therefor unfit for sale so they wrote them off as damages and figured instead of throwing them in the bin they would each eat one.
A week later both were fired for misconduct and stealing! It was the funniest story to hear but in reality i would be pretty pissed if it was me getting fired without warning.

Tar.Aldarion

Working in a nightclub I left the tap on and pushed it over so that it was just going on to the ground instead of the sink and hurried off to do more work/look at girls and well it was on the second floor of quite a fancy nightclub..it wasn't raining inside...that was me... 10k+ I think.

entropi

Was working one summer as a labourer on a site, happy days until I turn up at 7am one morn, my boss say wtf did you do last night? I didnt know so I ask him...he says "did you cover up the plaster before you left?" I told him no, he never asked me to.

As it turns out, it rained overnight and I got laid blame with destroying around 3k worth of plaster for some fancy penthouse apartments...told yer man he can shove his plaster and his job up his hole because I aint taking that blame...

Auldloon

Gyalist wrote: »

I left £28,000 in cash in the boot of a taxi.

Tell us more?

For weeks I was billing the wrong customer account for my man hours. Was discovered two late to rectify and the company had to write off the loss, about £9000. MD was not very fond of me for a while:o

jester77

Working on a project about 10 years ago during the dot.com boom. Company wanted to update their current sales software to a more modern CRM system. Software licenses and servers were purchased, sent on training courses to Washington, San Jose and London only to start wondering how the **** this companies software was going to work on the new CRM system. Questioned some project managers, flew into Frankfurt to meet some consultants, raised my issues and they immediately said, wrong software. Project ditched, over 300K down the drain and the nice servers were used for an intranet site.

IvyTheTerrible

I know of someone who had to do some experiments with sugar in the lab. He was just on work experience so technically he wasn't supposed to work unsupervised, but he thought he knew it all. He stayed late one evening, heated up the sugar, then forgot about it an went home. The sugar exploded, and an entire lab and hundreds of thousands of euros worth of equipment was destroyed. Needless to say, that was the end of his work experience!

Another one I heard on the French news this morning was about a group of people who wear bitching about their workplace on Facebook. While their profiles were private, one of their "friends" report the conversation to their bosses and they all got the sack.

Mister men

Working in factory driving forklift and went to take pallet of yougarts off the racking. Pallet fell and exploded as it hit the ground. 5500 euro worth of product down the drain.:o

sbsquarepants

Was moving some stuff into a storage warehouse but there was a rack of special double glazed units in my way, specialist glass, very expensive and also about 8 week lead time. Rather than go get the side loading forklift and do it properly, which would have taken all of 5 minutes, i tried to push it with the standard forks i was in, needless to say the forks slipped and went through 3 units at a cost of almost 3 grand each. :eek: Oops
Wasn't too bad though cos only about a week before i'd copped a major mistake that the boss had made, he was supposed to order 4000m of a certain profile and he actually ordered 4000 six meter lenghts, at a cost of almost 30 grand too much.
If it hadn't been for the timing i'd have probably been thrown out!!

gino85

****ed up about 18000 units at work only redeeming thing about it was that they were sample sized products so i wasnt as bad as it could have been, worst i heard was sumone ****ed up a batch of product worth about 100k

humanji

I was charged with delivering a tender application for a company I once worked for. I managed to fill in the date wrong and as a result we didn't get the government contract. It was worth about €14m. I'm no longer allowed near application forms.

helimachoptor

When I worked in Tesco years ago, the deputy manager asked me had i ever drove a forklift before, me being a 17 year old lad ... "yeah yeah course I have" The next day the back stores guys wondered why the forklift wasnt working, not sure what i did to it but they had to get a new one!

The same DM a couple of months later gave me the keys again, so spinning around the back yard and get a bit caught up in the moment nearly ploughing into his car, which was wrongly parked in the yard!!, anyway a few of the lads are laughing away and me laughing with relief, i slam my foot down on the accelerator forgetting that i hadnt taken the thing out of reverse, so i proceed to lift his car up onto to wheels.

He freaks out and i blame one of the bread delivery men:D

Kiith

My last job was in a large pharmaceutical company, and one of the guys in the prodcution suites made a mistake with a batch, which resulted in the entire batch having to by flushed. The batch was worth approx €68 million.

He still works there, but he's on a long probation.

Standard Toaster

gino85 wrote: »

****ed up about 18000 units at work only redeeming thing about it was that they were sample sized products so i wasnt as bad as it could have been, worst i heard was sumone ****ed up a batch of product worth about 100k

Hope you didn't work for Durex :eek:

Big Nasty

Some great stories here!

aDeener

Master of Nothing wrote: »

Was working one summer as a labourer on a site, happy days until I turn up at 7am one morn, my boss say wtf did you do last night? I didnt know so I ask him...he says "did you cover up the plaster before you left?" I told him no, he never asked me to.

As it turns out, it rained overnight and I got laid blame with destroying around 3k worth of plaster for some fancy penthouse apartments...told yer man he can shove his plaster and his job up his hole because I aint taking that blame...

in fairness you really shouldnt have been next or near a building site if you didnt realise that had to be done.

sbsquarepants

Kiith wrote: »

My last job was in a large pharmaceutical company, and one of the guys in the prodcution suites made a mistake with a batch, which resulted in the entire batch having to by flushed. The batch was worth approx €68 million.

He still works there, but he's on a long probation.

Unless Seany Fitz is on here, we have a winner!:D

Dravokivich

aDeener wrote: »

in fairness you really shouldnt have been next or near a building site if you didnt realise that had to be done.

I doubt he was the only 1 on site...

enda1

sbsquarepants wrote: »

Unless Seany Fitz is on here, we have a winner!:D

Probably €68m retail price.

About €5 in raw materials

billymitchell

I used to work for the HSE in payroll. I think in my 12 months there, I over paid various staff members something to the tune of €25k.
Is that costly enough??

m5ex9oqjawdg2i

aDeener wrote: »

in fairness you really shouldnt have been next or near a building site if you didnt realise that had to be done.

Off the high horse before you hurt yourself