Ever fff...mess up in work so bad its embarassing

Truncheon Rouge

I have about hmmm 10 1/2 hours til I receive a phone call from a supervisor who will first rightly berate me for idiocy and then go on to tell others who will actually genuinely question if I have some form of early onset dementia/alzheimers.


Something like this.

Boss: A+B=C. Me:ok ..A=C
Boss: no no A+B=C. Me: right sorry, A=B

One week later.
Boss: Sit down here, You got A right, you add B and you get C.
Me: not a problem A+B=C

Colleague Last week: he's got it wrong again but no damage.
Boss: don't do it again.
Me: how could I have been so foolish, i was such an idiot, ill make sure it never happens again.

This week A+A=W

Im going to look like this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioYJNjFBs24

Similar experiences anybody?

Mr Benevolent

Umm... ok?

Where To

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

donvito99

Da fuq did I just read.

Princess Consuela Bananahammock

Are you alan Shatter, by any chance?

lkionm

Anyone up for some holy bread?

Seachmall

I once wiped a live database because I didn't thoroughly test code (I had a stupid deadline).

Of course there were backups and it didn't last long but it was a stupid mistake in the code.

However I've been told by multiple people that it happens more than we'd like to admit.

Boombastic

Where To wrote: »

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

You forgot the '+' and '='


You're fired :eek:


:pac:

Where To

Boombastic wrote: »

You forgot the '+' and '='


You're fired :eek:


:pac:

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ+=

Happy now?

Boombastic

Where To wrote: »

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ+=

Happy now?

That's better, you get a raise and some holy bread:)

Celly Smunt

"better send this email off to [insert name]"
*add address in gmail*
*gmail adds everybody*
*send*
"NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!"

i71jskz5xu42pb

Truncheon Rouge wrote: »

Boss: A+B=C. Me:ok ..A=C
Boss: no no A+B=C. Me: right sorry, A=B

One week later.
Boss: Sit down here, You got A right, you add B and you get C.
Me: not a problem A+B=C

Colleague Last week: he's got it wrong again but no damage.
Boss: don't do it again.
Me: how could I have been so foolish, i was such an idiot, ill make sure it never happens again.

This week A+A=W

You'd think Alphabetti Spaghetti was the easiest thing in the world to make?

IrishExpat

Not embarrassing, but not smart.

Back in 2010, while working in an English school in Spain. Was in no mood to teach the set material and it got on to me ranting on (along with the students) how the classroom method is horrible for learning a language and spelling out 101 ways to learn faster and more efficiently at home, using online tools etc

6 of them opted for the independent learning, asked for the balance on the rest of their course and just never came back. The boss could never figure out why, and I didn't go out of my way to explain.

Jesus, thinking back, keyword here is 'tact'.

I've changed my opinion since then on the whole learning process and courses etc, but yeah, bad move.

hames

OP Are you new in your job/ that aspect of your job ?

Don't worry, it's normal.

Employers are usually not looking at this the same impatient way you are. The fact that you have started a thread about it means you are sensitive to your mistakes; you probably just have a lot to deal with at the one time.

A lot of typical employment tasks require more habit than any inherent intelligence. Give yourself some time and don't stress about it.

pragmatic1

All the time. I have a tendency to go on autopilot and wouldn't be the most observant person.

risteard7

Never done a days work in my life true story

PhlegmyMoses

The fact that you're identifying the mistake and are showing some level of self-awareness is a good sign. That kind of thing is in short supply, unfortunately.

Gummy Panda

Blame it on the guy who can't speak English. Ah, Tibor, how many times have you saved my butt?

missingtime

Yup. Ran a delete query without the where clause. Removed all the sales reports in our database. Not a fun week.

****ing up is fine most of the time, repeatedly ****ing up is not fine.

Sauve

Where To wrote: »

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

I liked it better when you did the song thing.

MadsL

I once emailed a bunch of people on boards.ie whose email adresses we weren't supposed to have.

Ruudi_Mentari

dropped a can of white paint. all over a fcukin drive....

and it was running down onto the path, n out onto the road and i do believe I got relieved of any further duties sir right there.

token101

Did my college work experience on a local tv station in the UK. Whilst working one morning on the live breakfast show, as I was fixing camera cables, I unwittingly bent over in front of a live camera. The presenter couldn't help but acknowledge it and laugh, I looked like I was presenting to the camera man. I then got screamed at for about a full minute by the director and laughed at by every other crew member.

antodeco

Working for one of the largest radio stations in Ireland about 12 years ago and I had to get something from the server room. I was going in and out and decided to leave the door open.
Obviously I didn't realise it was a temperature controlled room and after a short period of time the station went off air as the machines shut down. I got a severe bollocking off the operations and IT guys.
Luckily all the hot girls who worked there defended me and said there shouldve been a sign on the door saying to keep it closed. The girls then became my very close friends and all the guys hated me.

Tl;dr?
Broke server room, radio off air, girls flocked

mikemac1

Working in a cosmetics factory and put the wrong label on 10,000 lipsticks.

Managers were cursing my name for weeks.

My teammates loved me as it was overtime shifts to peel them off and label them again.
I worship at the shrine of double time!

Fingers were raw and sore by the end.
You have to peel them all off, no machine can do this for you.

matt-dublin

antodeco wrote: »

Working for one of the largest radio stations in Ireland about 12 years ago and I had to get something from the server room. I was going in and out and decided to leave the door open.
Obviously I didn't realise it was a temperature controlled room and after a short period of time the station went off air as the machines shut down. I got a severe bollocking off the operations and IT guys.
Luckily all the hot girls who worked there defended me and said there shouldve been a sign on the door saying to keep it closed. The girls then became my very close friends and all the guys hated me.

Tl;dr?
Broke server room, radio off air, girls flocked

I call BS...

Server room wouldn't have overheated that much if the ac was on.
And....

No hot girls like guys who have access to a server room!!!!

Truncheon Rouge

Live update:
So you see children its wrong to lie, one should always tell the truth and face up to ones errors and become responsible adults.

That said... I've just bluffed my way out of it loooooooooool, I don't look like a complete buffoon before my work colleagues (today at least) and have only to worry about my inevitable future stupidity of similar scale.

s.m.r.t .s.m.r.t

Gee_G

Not me that messed up. But somebody in a very big accountancy firm in Ireland did.
Obviously had the wrong email address for either her PA or someone like that and instead I was getting emails. About some outgoings etc, meeting agendas, weekly agendas. I eventually had to mail back and say they are not for me and ya have the wrong "Gee_g"

kylith

I foolishly clicked OK on the 'are you sure you want to delete this file, it's got a whole load of important and irreplaceable information on it?' button. We all have brain farts now and then.

tbh

The year is 2008, the city...Montevideo. I'm at the end of an upgrade thats been going on for 12 hours, and which started two hours after getting off a 14 hour overnight flight. In short, I'm. Tired, hungry and hot. The last thing I have to do is dump four databases hosted on four machines named server1, server2 etc. I open securecrt, create a session, dump the database, all good. I then copy my session but rename it host2 and dump the next database. All good, and I proceed to db3 and 4. We then delete the databases and switch everything on - it doesnt work. Troubleshoot for about two hours, its now about 7am and the call is made to rollback. Its then I discover that I didnt change the hostname in my copied sessions, only the session name. So I've dumped db1 four times and lost db2 3 and 4. I ask the customer if they have backups but they only have one, and its the useless data. The scrip to recover the old data takes eight hours.

Imagine how popular I was when I told them

You can be pretty sure that everyone who thanks this post (if anyone) works in IT

Interceptor

I once pressed the wrong button on a machine which crashed a load of robots and did €64m damage to a wafer fab. It *might* have been near Leixlip...

'c

Truncheon Rouge

tbh wrote: »

The year is 2008, the city...Montevideo. I'm at the end of an upgrade thats been going on for 12 hours, and which started two hours after getting off a 14 hour overnight flight. In short, I'm. Tired, hungry and hot. The last thing I have to do is dump four databases hosted on four machines named server1, server2 etc. I open securecrt, create a session, dump the database, all good. I then copy my session but rename it host2 and dump the next database. All good, and I proceed to db3 and 4. We then delete the databases and switch everything on - it doesnt work. Troubleshoot for about two hours, its now about 7am and the call is made to rollback. Its then I discover that I didnt change the hostname in my copied sessions, only the session name. So I've dumped db1 four times and lost db2 3 and 4. I ask the customer if they have backups but they only have one, and its the useless data. The scrip to recover the old data takes eight hours.

Imagine how popular I was when I told them

You can be pretty sure that everyone who thanks this post (if anyone) works in IT

Im not in IT but ouch, that sounded like a kick in the brain balls.

Worst bit in all these events is when you put it all together and your face just goes... :eek:

In that moment its like a first person view incoming mortar scene from a war film. no sound. everything moving slow. work colleagues silently screaming. lol

I may not be good at maths, but I do know that A+B doesn't equal C. I r learnding.

Cake Man

A friend who worked with me in a supermarket a few years ago was packing Haagen Dazs ice cream in his first few days. The freezers were fairly full so he brought the full combi/cage back....to the fridge instead of the freezer.
About 800 euro worth of slush in tubs found the next morning, we ripped the p!ss outa him for that one for years after.

CrazyRabbit

I'm a programmer. I don't make mistakes.

People just don't use my software in the way it works. Stupid users.

seamus

I think everyone who has ever worked with databases has run a "DELETE FROM" command without a clause at some point. I did it twice before I developed the habit of writing the clause first and then the rest of the statement.

antodeco wrote: »

Working for one of the largest radio stations in Ireland about 12 years ago and I had to get something from the server room....

Wasn't me, but I worked briefly in an Irish supermarket chain's HQ;

The devs had obtained the access code to the server room and would frequently go in and out to log onto servers and reboot them (WTF). On more than one occasion they pulled out network cables and power cables belonging to other servers while "troubleshooting" issues with their development servers.

On another occasion a technician arrived in to fix a faulty AC unit in the server room. One of the server admins (so he has no excuse) showed him into the server room and went looking for the AC units. Finds a huge metal cabinet 8 feet long and four feet high, thinks, "This must be it, I'll just switch it off so you can start working on it", and presses the big red button. Boom, UPS has been switched off and every single server in the room dies simultaneously. Fun afternoon cleaning that one up.
They changed the code on the door after that so only 4 of us had access to the room.

Not a mess up, but as an example of my Grandad's craziness my Mum used to always relay one of his stories from work that he would bang on about. He was an ESB technician sometime in 50s (probably not called ESB at the time). Power was basically lost to all of Dublin for several hours. They had half the company out checking connections and relays, replacing bits left and right and centre and having no luck. So someone fetched my Grandad to ask him to take a look. And ten minutes after coming on the scene, standing in a dark corridor with a torch, he points it up at a switch on the wall, flicks the switch and presto, the grid lights back up again.

My Mum used to always laugh at that - "Wasn't he a silly old sod, always making up incredible stories". It was only when we grew up and 3 of started working in technology that we told her that it's probably the most plausible story he had told, that kind of crap happens all the time.

Seachmall

How come any time there's one of these threads it gets filled with I.T. stories?


Some might be lead to believe that I.T. departments are filled with somewhat incompetent individuals. And of course that's complete and utter bul... no, wait, yeah, that sounds about right.

cantdecide

Seachmall wrote: »

How come any time there's one of these threads it gets filled with I.T. stories?

I got ya, buddy...

I once spilled about €200 of diesel all over our yard while trying to fill a fork-lift. It took about 10 mins to fill so I went to make a five second call instead of standing there waiting. I got delayed and completely forgot about the fork-lift:o When I returned, the MD (who had a dickie ticker and only showed up for a few hours a week at that stage) was standing in the yard with a look on his face that just said 'you fcuking idiot':o

So FL+DSL=MD

tbh

My grandad once took a break from work to smoke a pipe and inadvertently started one of the biggest gorse fires ever seen in Wicklow. When he saw what was happening, he legged it.

Plot twist: he was a guard.

--Kaiser--

Wat

kylith

Cake Man wrote: »

A friend who worked with me in a supermarket a few years ago was packing Haagen Dazs ice cream in his first few days. The freezers were fairly full so he brought the full combi/cage back....to the fridge instead of the freezer.
About 800 euro worth of slush in tubs found the next morning, we ripped the p!ss outa him for that one for years after.

Did something similar once; completely forgot about a trolley full of frozen pizzas after I was emergency paged to the tills. Thankfully I wasn't made pay for them.

silvine

My manager asked me to change a number of mistakes in an important report including some basic arithmetic. I got my maths wrong and the report went to print.

They fired me several weeks later.

IrishExpat

IrishExpat wrote: »

Not embarrassing, but not smart.

Back in 2010, while working in an English school in Spain. Was in no mood to teach the set material and it got on to me ranting on (along with the students) how the classroom method is horrible for learning a language and spelling out 101 ways to learn faster and more efficiently at home, using online tools etc

6 of them opted for the independent learning, asked for the balance on the rest of their course and just never came back. The boss could never figure out why, and I didn't go out of my way to explain.

Jesus, thinking back, keyword here is 'tact'.

I've changed my opinion since then on the whole learning process and courses etc, but yeah, bad move.

Similar thing happened in a school where I worked. New teacher came in, just finished his CELTA, really cocky, thought he knew it all. He was in the room next to mine and I could hear him telling the students how rubbish the textbook was and what a waste of time classroom learning was and how he'd learned Spanish from reading a dictionary (??) and using flash cards at home.

After the class, 9 out of the 10 students went to reception and said they wouldn't be back (everyone got a free first class to see if they liked it). The Director of Studies told the new teacher he was no longer needed as he had no students (the one remaining guy was moved to my class). The teacher was really confused about why they all left. I just said, 'you do realise you just talked yourself out of your job there?' He genuinely didn't seem to get the link!

BASHIR

Worked in McDonalds years ago as a teen. Made about 8 to ten orders of the chicken sandwhich and sent them out. But instead of chicken they were hash browns. The bag there both in looks the exact same and so do they. Got roared at for a full minute but couldnt stop laughing. Had one for lunch then and it was good.

TOMP

What about the guy who caused the cockup in Ulster Bank IT last year? Is he still working for them?

pickarooney

I turned the tap the wrong way on an 8-tonne vat of vla (yocky Dutch custardy stuff) and went downstairs to switch on the machine. Cue eight thousand litres of thick dairy gloop gushing out of the vat, covering the floor, running down the steps and into the manager's office. People were drowning in vla and screaming for my head. All of Holland went without breakfast the next day.

Boombastic

Vla..nom, nom I would have cleaned that up with a spoon

Fluorescence

My first time ever closing up at night and I forgot to turn the hotwell off before I left. I dumped the washed cutlery for the next morning in there, and all the handles melted and congealed to the bottom of the hotwell. It took two hours solid scrubbing the next day to get it all off Ever since, I've always checked the hotwell is turned off 3 or 4 times before closing, as well as putting the cutlery in a heat-proof container :pac:

IrishExpat

Lillianna Gifted Teflon wrote: »

Similar thing happened in a school where I worked. New teacher came in, just finished his CELTA, really cocky, thought he knew it all. He was in the room next to mine and I could hear him telling the students how rubbish the textbook was and what a waste of time classroom learning was and how he'd learned Spanish from reading a dictionary (??) and using flash cards at home.

After the class, 9 out of the 10 students went to reception and said they wouldn't be back (everyone got a free first class to see if they liked it). The Director of Studies told the new teacher he was no longer needed as he had no students (the one remaining guy was moved to my class). The teacher was really confused about why they all left. I just said, 'you do realise you just talked yourself out of your job there?' He genuinely didn't seem to get the link!

To be young(er) again.

I've worked with a 'lot' of language teachers over the last few years, and there's a fairly consistent 50/50 split on the classroom versus independent learning preference.

And I can guarantee you that every teacher - at some point - has convinced themselves they have discovered 'the' method to learn/teach, and this does lead to cockiness.

The trick is to treat (private) language schools as a business first, education second. You're not an educator, per se, but a service provider. When I say this, I'm not referring to teaching children, as I have no experience there. I mean University level, adults and professionals.

I've copped on a bit since then, I like to think.

IrishExpat

IrishExpat wrote: »

To be young(er) again.

I've worked with a 'lot' of language teachers over the last few years, and there's a fairly consistent 50/50 split on the classroom versus independent learning preference.

And I can guarantee you that every teacher - at some point - has convinced themselves they have discovered 'the' method to learn/teach, and this does lead to cockiness.

The trick is to treat (private) language schools as a business first, education second. You're not an educator, per se, but a service provider. When I say this, I'm not referring to teaching children, as I have no experience there. I mean University level, adults and professionals.

I've copped on a bit since then, I like to think.

I'm amazed by how many people don't get that. Even my last DOS didn't really get it. It's a business. If the students are happy with the service, they'll come back.

I don't know that every teacher thinks they've discovered 'the' method. I always tell the students what works for me, but there is no one method that works for everyone, IMO. I always push independent learning, but obviously as something they should do as well as attending classes.

IrishExpat

Lillianna Gifted Teflon wrote: »

I'm amazed by how many people don't get that. Even my last DOS didn't really get it. It's a business. If the students are happy with the service, they'll come back.

I don't know that every teacher thinks they've discovered 'the' method. I always tell the students what works for me, but there is no one method that works for everyone, IMO. I always push independent learning, but obviously as something they should do as well as attending classes.

I've worked with some absolute cowboys, to say the least, so maybe it's not the same across the board.

One teacher had to be continuously transferred to different schools in the city (they had a chain) after sleeping with practically every (female) students that he could.

Another was a bar promoter on the side, and used his classes as a long sales-pitch, even handing out the cards with weekend drink offers. He didn't last long.

The stories I could tell ...