Biggest Mess Ups in Work

titan18

I'll assume everyone has messed up once, but what was your biggest mistake. Today I overwrote 4 years of data and don't have a backup. Anyone else have anything spectacular?

donutheadhomer

titan18 wrote: »

I'll assume everyone has messed up once, but what was your biggest mistake. Today I overwrote 4 years of data and don't have a backup. Anyone else have anything spectacular?

I sent 4 x 40ft containers to collect 4 x 5kg boxes once. Tied up the whole street in London for hours. It was a genuine error

Same job but not my error - guy in the warehouse read the part number on a pallet and sent the whole pallet to someone. They were to get a single graphics card.

alpha_a

titan18 wrote: »

I'll assume everyone has messed up once, but what was your biggest mistake. Today I overwrote 4 years of data and don't have a backup. Anyone else have anything spectacular?

Nightmare. Lose your job?

Ruu

Summer job on a farm. Was washing the top of a cooler full of meat, some water spilled down the side and onto the power switch/electrical/cooling components. It made a loud buzzing for a while and I tried to dry it off but gave me a bit of a shock. I turned off the power and I legged it home and hoped for the best.

Next morning, the owner said she nearly lost a few hundred pounds worth of meat because the power was turned off but luckily all was okay!

Stheno

My team accidentally deleted every user account in the company

titan18

alpha_a wrote: »

Nightmare. Lose your job?

Well, I hope not.

titan18

Stheno wrote: »

My team accidentally deleted every user account in the company

I could see myself do that

Mint Sauce

Awaits Dav.

Peregrine

I only have an almost mess up. I scanned a barcode while manually inputting the price for something else. It took the code as the price and I nearly made a ~€160,000 sale in a small shop.

I do hope there was an upper limit for transactions in case I hadn't realised my mistake.

The_Valeyard

Once a mutated radioactive spider got loose and bit a kid. Hopefully he is okay.

Yurt

Was working in the billing section of a well known electricity provider on my college placement and I had to manually put in the rates of electricity when billing a commercial account.The rate should have been something like 0.0087 and it was a long day and somehow i managed to put in 10.0087 and the bill that should have went out for a few hundred went out for a few million.Luckily the system noticed something fishy and didn't apply it but the paper bill still went out.

dodderangler

Took an engine out of a 08 audi but took engine out of the wrong car and car I took engine out of was only in service
Both audi were 08s black and a4
Customer wasn't too happy

actuar90

One time i accidently dated a file 11/12/15 rather than 12/11/15, mortified i was

gramar

It wasn't the biggest mess up but I had to order mirrors once for a clothing store.
I ordered them in cm's but they took the measurements to be in mm.
I went to collect them and got three mirrors handed to me the size of a match box.

littleteapot

I accidentally deleted the entire database for the shop i was working in when I tried to add a new employee to the till system. We had to close the shop for an hour because we couldn't process sales. Eventually we had to gear up all the staff with calculators, receipt books and open till drawers while the IT department tried to fix the database. To make matters worse, it was a Sunday so all the IT staff were off, and they were based in Dublin while the shop was in Galway, so they had to send someone the whole way down to Galway that day. I really thought I was going to get the sack but I didn't.

ThisRegard

titan18 wrote: »

I'll assume everyone has messed up once, but what was your biggest mistake. Today I overwrote 4 years of data and don't have a backup. Anyone else have anything spectacular?

The biggest mistake here was made by your sys and DB admins, unless you're also that person?

Icaras

Ordered some equipement (with the suppliers sales rep) for £8000 - was the wrong size and didnt fit the machine, sent them back to be resized at cost because the sales rep had a hand in the order which was about another £2000, still didnt f#cking fit. Had to get an other company to come in and do some work to make them fit, another £1000 give or take.

I walked with a limp for the next few months.

KERSPLAT!

Working as a sparks and we were pulling in Cat V cables, they're numbered on each end so you know what cable has gone where and what it'll be used for etc.

Well it was my first week and I had just bought a new snips. After pulling in about 150/200 cables I thought to myself, wouldn't it be a great idea to cut all those cables to the same length, to tidy them up like... ended up cutting all the numbers off one end and had to spend hours belling them out and figuring out which was which. Told the boss I hadn't a clue what happened

Buona Fortuna

Not me but someone who used to work for me back in the day.

The chap was sending a confidential report (like really holy sh1t confidential) by e-mail. I know not the greatest plan. To make matters worse we were all on dial up and had Lotus Notes as the e-mail agent.

The guy looks up the HR guy who should have had the report, and for some reason he added @Company. The result was that this thing went to everyone.

He phoned me as he'd realised there was a problem because he put a reciept on it. After the first 1200 he realised he wasn't going just bluff it out. He then got all the replies from people saying why have I got this.

I phoned my boss, who thankfully went to voicemail and pointed out that we may have caused him a little embarrassment. He left me a rather caustic voicemail too.

But as they say "Ya can't put the sh1t back in the donkey".

banquo

Part of my Newsagent job in college was to refill the Slush Puppy machine in the morning. Like Ribena etc, you had a big jug of concentrate you'd add water to. We kept it under the sink.

One day we had a new, green jug of concentrate under the sink. Long story short, I accidentally made a full Slush Puppy mix based on Flash Floor Cleaner.

Nobody died. Thank Christ.

Stheno

Buona Fortuna wrote: »

Not me but someone who used to work for me back in the day.

The chap was sending a confidential report (like really holy sh1t confidential) by e-mail. I know not the greatest plan. To make matters worse we were all on dial up and had Lotus Notes as the e-mail agent.

The guy looks up the HR guy who should have had the report, and for some reason he added @Company. The result was that this thing went to everyone.

He phoned me as he'd realised there was a problem because he put a reciept on it. After the first 1200 he realised he wasn't going just bluff it out. He then got all the replies from people saying why have I got this.

I phoned my boss, who thankfully went to voicemail and pointed out that we may have caused him a little embarrassment. He left me a rather caustic voicemail too.

But as they say "Ya can't put the sh1t back in the donkey".

Ha that reminds me one place I worked in the head of infrastructure decided to move across to development

A few months later there was a big infrastructure outage and I sent an update email to the entire company

The now developer decided to reply saying "that wouldn't have happened when I was head " but instead of sending it to me he hit reply all lol

Stheno

banquo wrote: »

Part of my Newsagent job in college was to refill the Slush Puppy machine in the morning. Like Ribena etc, you had a big jug of concentrate you'd add water to. We kept it under the sink.

One day we had a new, green jug of concentrate under the sink. Long story short, I accidentally made a full Slush Puppy mix based on Flash Floor Cleaner.

Nobody died. Thank Christ.

Did you accidentally sell some?

banquo

Another one. I once almost deleted all of a very well known tabloid newspaper hours before it was due to go to print. Few DB admins were able to come in and save the day.

5W30

I needed to print 40 An Post shipping labels and ended up printing the exact same label 40 times (same tracking code, etc).

Robsweezie

nudes on the office computers

Sofa King Great

Hit a wrong button and sent a batch of letters for automatic print and distribution to 17,000 customers. The emails weren't supposed to be in use as they were contrary to various consumer codes and this particular place had been told not to use them by the ombudsman.

Luckily the guys stuffing envelopes looked in to it when their daily workload increased to 34 times its usual amount.

My excuse was that it highlighted a system issue as I shouldn't have been able to do it

tomwaterford

Seen a lad putting the forks of a forklift through a full 1000litre drum of oil one day

Worst I did myself years ago when I doing apprenticeship dumped e500 worth of parts-taught it was rubbish :O

Wanderer78

scraped a couple of grands worth of product in one go. nice! fook it they can afford it

dellas1979

Biggest mistake?

Hooking up with people from the office.

Elessar

Worked in an internet cafe (remember those!) when I was a naive 18 year old . This german chap came in one evening to send a 12 page fax to Germany. Not knowing how to properly charge him I charged him the full 2 euro per page. He nearly dropped dead but paid up anyway.

10 mins later he storms back in saying his mate received the fax - but all the pages were blank. I put them in the wrong way! I thought he was going to go ape**** but he just calmly asked for his money back then left.

I still cringe whenever I think about it

eeguy

I worked in a chip van when I was younger.

At a particularly busy gig I was working at full tilt and accidentally knocked a large knife into the fryer.

I thought nothing of it until I noticed globs of melted black plastic stuck to the chips as they came out.
The knife handle melted.

We were so busy I couldn't stop cooking, so I just did my best to pick the large globs off the chips and hoped people thought the smaller bits were crispy chips.

No one said anything...

Wabbit Ears

Broke TV for about a million homes in the UK for half a day.

Swapped a keyboard that had a security dongle attached at a large print house and nothing would print as the dongle enabled the graphics server. People were freaking the fcuk out and screaming and I was clueless. Finally went home when the senior company guys took over but ended having to drive back as I had the keyboard in my van. What a horrible walk of shame that was.

titan18

ThisRegard wrote: »

The biggest mistake here was made by your sys and DB admins, unless you're also that person?

Nah, thankfully not. Although I do occasionally pretend to be them

sweetie

gramar wrote:

It wasn't the biggest mess up but I had to order mirrors once for a clothing store. I ordered them in cm's but they took the measurements to be in mm. I went to collect them and got three mirrors handed to me the size of a match box.

Spinal Tap moment!

SSLguru

Blocked a service on a server thinking it was an unnecessary risk to leave it open.


Resulting in the server that generates 75k per hour being out of action for 3.5 hours.

bisounours

Bore the brunt of this one: couple years ago company was participating in a global networking event which takes place yearly - that year was in HK or SG. Our marketing people decided it would be "cute" to have up on the company website "global cooperation" written in Chinese, and launched the new site a few weeks prior to the event. They must have it run it through some crappy online translation site and had "global conspiracy" blazing across our website. Had the head of our Beijing office scream down the phone at me to get the site changed. Woke the IT on-duty manager who crashed our site until Europe woke up and came into the office...

BrokenArrows

At work a guy asked me to restart a server. Gave me the IP address. I connect, hit reboot, ran a constant ping against the IP address so I could see it come back online. 5 minutes later it still hadn't come up. No sooner had I noticed this then one of the managers came around panicked. The server was controlling the restaurant systems of a bunch of London restaurants.
I should have checked what the server was before restarting. Took about 30 minutes to get the server back up and it was lunch time.

Also I used to work in a bank vault. Accentually knocked 50grand into a bin beside my desk. It got covered up by paper. Come the end of the day I was out 50k. Spent an hour looking for it. eventually looked in the bin.

Captain Slow IRL

Had a car in one time with a rough running problem that took ages to sort; it was the culmination of lots of small faults and resulted in a hefty parts/labour bill (air hoses, ignition coils and eventually a head gasket)

Anyway, we had the car for over a month and the customer was crying for it. I had just finished putting it back together after the head gasket and went to start it - the battery was dead from being parked up for so long.

It was approaching 6 o'clock and I was in a rush to get finished up so I ran over and grabbed the battery charger to start the car. I failed to see it had been switched to 24 volts to charge a truck battery earlier that day. There was a loud pop when I turned it on; I'd then realised the mistake I made:o

It took another month to sort, nearly every electronic module in the car had to be replaced which cost a f*cking bomb.

KERSPLAT!

Captain Slow IRL wrote: »

Had a car in one time with a rough running problem that took ages to sort; it was the culmination of lots of small faults and resulted in a hefty parts/labour bill (air hoses, ignition coils and eventually a head gasket)

Anyway, we had the car for over a month and the customer was crying for it. I had just finished putting it back together after the head gasket and went to start it - the battery was dead from being parked up for so long.

It was approaching 6 o'clock and I was in a rush to get finished up so I ran over and grabbed the battery charger to start the car. I failed to see it had been switched to 24 volts to charge a truck battery earlier that day. There was a loud pop when I turned it on; I'd then realised the mistake I made:o

It took another month to sort, nearly every electronic module in the car had to be replaced which cost a f*cking bomb.

Isn't that exactly what a fuse is for?

demanufactured

littleteapot wrote: »

I accidentally deleted the entire database for the shop i was working in when I tried to add a new employee to the till system. We had to close the shop for an hour because we couldn't process sales. Eventually we had to gear up all the staff with calculators, receipt books and open till drawers while the IT department tried to fix the database. To make matters worse, it was a Sunday so all the IT staff were off, and they were based in Dublin while the shop was in Galway, so they had to send someone the whole way down to Galway that day. I really thought I was going to get the sack but I didn't.

I hope they never let you near the pooter again.

eternal

I was a very poor waitress. One night I never verified any of the card takings so the people who paid by card all got free food hehe. Then the ones who ordered food at the counter for take away I forgot about so they were waiting around and got no food. I didn't last long there

The King of Moo

Was working for an international global service-management firm as a DB server technician.

One morning I was supposed to shunt a standard DNP request through a standard multivalent rotating address portal.

But for whatever reason that morning I routed it through a standard covalent non-modulating portal.

Needless to say, I got a call straight away from our regional manager reaming me out of it when the figures started coming in so skewed.

I was able to correct it straight away, but not before we lost 85K in that 10 minutes in unrealised transaction potentials .

Wanderer78

you're all just a big bunch of fcuk ups

tomwaterford

KERSPLAT! wrote: »

Isn't that exactly what a fuse is for?

A fuse burns out with too much current not voltage...that's why the same fuse will do a 12v and 24v system afaik


He/she is far from the first to make this mistake....rushing only slows you up

FGR

I submitted a piece of correspondence to the powers that be. A 20 page report on something incredibly exciting; so much so that I cannot remember. I never thought to follow up on it due to it being so exciting - cue five months later boss explodes wondering where said report was.

Turns out it was my fault for not following it up - even though they lost it. Ah well.

Senna

My biggest was under charging a customer €1000, surprising the owners weren't too bothered about it.

A mate of mine from college got an internship at Larne ferry port, he was given the OK to start loading the trucks and cars one day, unfortunately they have to go onto the ship in a specific order for weight distribution, which he didn't do. Cue a pile of lorry having to reverse back off the ship, everyone very pissed off and the ferry being delayed.
I did laugh when I heard.

GAAman

Did an apprenticeship in printing. Very early into the apprenticeship I was running machines on my own unsupervised. We were doing a run for bulmers and halfway through the run I noticed it had changed to a major **** up on the spelling.

Hammered the emergency stop button, paper everywhere, ink spills all over the shop boss heard the siren and came running down roaring at me.Takes four hours to recalibrate this old machine after an emergency stop.

What was the misprint?

Magners

I was 15 and hadn't a clue there was a different name!

Stheno

Stheno wrote: »

My team accidentally deleted every user account in the company

I should have expanded here, we did it in the middle of the day, shut down the entire business (1000+) users for three business days, and had no active directory backup, so spent an entire weekend manually recreating every single user.

Then we'd to reset 1000 passwords the next day

ancapailldorcha

I started working for a clinical trials company a few years ago. The consultant running the place had, after a huge amount of effort persuaded a certain very large European firm to conduct an early trail at our centre. They were reluctant to do so but eventually agreed. Anyway, muggins here manages to forget to add a key component to one of the assessment experiments leading to conference calls to make various apologies and lots of embarrassment.

jungleman

I used to work in a well known music shop when I was a teenager.

I asked a child, in front of his even younger sister, his parents, AND my boss, if he'd like to try playing a foreskin banjo.

I meant to say a four string banjo.

kylith

Accidentally credited a client with 30k once.

One time I decided to clean up my emails a bit so went into this folder where a load of stuff is routed that comes in automatically. I decided not to delete them in case I needed them later so I just marked them as read so I wouldn't have to look at the notification for 1,500 unread emails. Next thing I know IT bursts in and start yelling at me to turn my pc off. It seems that the emails I'd marked as read were all set up to automatically send a read report (fck knows why) and the server was having a meltdown over it.