Biggest Mess Ups in Work

Wabbit Ears · 07-09-2015 09:18PM

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 · 07-09-2015 09:20PM

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 · 07-09-2015 09:29PM

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 · 07-09-2015 09:45PM

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 · 07-09-2015 09:51PM

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 · 07-09-2015 10:24PM

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 · 07-09-2015 10:46PM

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! · 07-09-2015 10:56PM

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 · 07-09-2015 10:56PM

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 · 07-09-2015 11:00PM

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 · 07-09-2015 11:01PM

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 · 07-09-2015 11:01PM

you're all just a big bunch of fcuk ups

tomwaterford · 07-09-2015 11:13PM

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 · 07-09-2015 11:18PM

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 · 07-09-2015 11:26PM

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 · 08-09-2015 12:01AM

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 · 08-09-2015 12:12AM

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 · 08-09-2015 12:15AM

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 · 08-09-2015 12:45AM

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 · 08-09-2015 08:25AM

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.

Aglomerado · 08-09-2015 08:44AM

Worked in a cash and carry, a customer came in buying a case of rolling tobacco which was shrink-wrapped in plastic. I scanned a barcode and he ended up being charged for one instead of 48! :eek:

I was hungover... our systems were so ancient they probably didn't pick it up until 2007....

Barely There · 08-09-2015 08:57AM

Providing quantities to a Client for pricing a job for a tender.
Divided a number by 4 instead of multiplying it by 4, so the 'answer' I gave him was 1/16th of what it should have been.
Cost him over €65k.

He was pissed off.

razorblunt · 08-09-2015 10:13AM

Not me but some support lad in the States in the company I work for.
My login id was quite similar to a system id so everynow and then it would fall over and the joke would be that it was me that caused the outage/slowness (my boss initially read it as me and was asking what the hell I was doing, I'd actually been building an excel macro off system which is how the similarity got noticed).

Anyway some lad in San Fran would be monitoring the servers and saw the id tracked it to me and rang my work mobile, this was on a Friday evening his time, and I was just in the door after been out on a session. Took about 15 minutes to assure him through slurred, sleepy Irish accent it wasn't me. He rang back a fortnight later with the same issue, which he got a shorter, sharper response but it was around midnight on the Sunday. A week later he rang at 4:30am when I hadn't been out with the exact same misread, I went mental, got so mad I couldn't relax and get back to sleep.
Saw the funny side of it by Monday morning but as I was lying there at 5:05 on the Saturday thinking "I'm getting this guy fired ... and then I'm going to kill him". He was a good guy though, ended up doing a lot of work with him on projects and he sent me an NFL jersey by way of apology which wasn't needed but kudos to him. I thought he'd have the system id name printed on the back but he missed that open goal.

BattleCorp · 08-09-2015 10:51AM

In my defence, I was 16 and shouldn't have been driving this machine but I was driving a huge Volvo front end loader in a grain store years ago during the Summer holidays.

I was pushing grain with the bucket of the machine into a huge hopper which is basically a large funnel in the ground. From there it went underground and up into a grain dryer.

Anyway, I must have drifted off, whether day dreaming or falling asleep, but I didn't stop at the end of the hopper. I drove the 30+ tonne machine straight into the hopper. There was some smack. Knocked down a wall at the rear of the hopper too. Some effort to get that machine out. It took 2 other machines to pull it out. If that didn't work, we would have had to remove a section of the roof and get a massive crane in.

Lucky I wasn't killed I suppose.

cbyrd · 08-09-2015 02:45PM

Back in the day when it was popular to have hair tattoos.. This skanky guy comes in, he wasn't a regular and was a bit pissed..and asks me to shave 'Celtic' across the back of his head... It was about 5.30 pm on a very busy Saturday evening and I was knackered. I duly start and I'm almost finished when my dad ( who owned the shop) called me over to the sinks which were a bit private and said " look at your spelling "
I nearly died, dad was having a great laugh
I had shaved 'CETLIC '.. No way of undoing it.. I showed him, quickly waving the mirror around so he could kinda see it, but thank christ he was too pissed to notice..

myshirt · 08-09-2015 02:49PM

Removed the wrong kidney (the healthy kidney) from a patient once. Hard weekend had preceded.

diomed · 08-09-2015 03:05PM

Not me. Someone ordered a large part. The supplier on the west coast of the USA asked do you really want this? Yes. It was shipped overland to the USA east coast in a container, then by sea to Europe. When it arrived the guy who ordered it was confused. He was expecting something about the size of a paperback. Instead of shipping it back and taking a hit, he put it on a shelf and hoped nobody would notice. It was a five figure cost. Didn't work.

eviltimeban · 08-09-2015 03:09PM

My brother broke Facebook once. He worked there and did something wrong and shut the whole thing down for a few minutes. Common occurance apparently.

mahoganygas · 08-09-2015 03:21PM

Not me but my buddy. He worked in a bank.
It was 6pm on a friday and I convinced him to come drinking with me. He said he had to hang around counting cash in the safe before locking up. I put the pressure on and told him if he wasn't in the pub in 10 minutes I was going home.
He finished up and frantically ran out the door.

Fast forward a few hours and we're on the dance floor in coppers. Things were wrapping up and we fancied a kebab so we went looking for our jackets. We had shoved them down down behind a sofa in the corner.
My buddy reached into his jacket pocket and felt something. It was the key to the safe....

smash · 08-09-2015 03:23PM

eviltimeban wrote: »

My brother broke Facebook once. He worked there and did something wrong and shut the whole thing down for a few minutes. Common occurance apparently.

Except their server balancing means that the site doesn't ever go down. Must have been years ago.

Biggest Mess Ups in Work

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