Work Mistakes

Deleted member 22389 · Oct 22, 2013

Carrying on from the Sacked thread, what is the worst mistake you have made at work.
How much disruption did it cause, did you own up to it?

Nibble · Oct 22, 2013

Luckily this wasn't my mistake but a few years ago I was working for a company in Brighton that decided as a marketing campaign to post out hundreds of branded pens to our mailing list. Sound in principle I suppose. Not very imaginative as marketing campaigns go but okay. Except that the company had a set up with the Post Office, an account that meant all we had to do was frank the mail in-house and post away. So far so good. Apart from the fact that the company hadn't paid their account so everyone on our mailing list got a post office note through the door saying they should go to the Post Office and pay excess postage for a parcel that was waiting for them. So a couple of hundred people would have trotted down to the depot, queued, paid 1.20 or thereabouts and I imagine snap a cheap pen in half while cursing our company.

Deleted member 22389 · Oct 22, 2013

Nibble said:
Luckily this wasn't my mistake but a few years ago I was working for a company in Brighton that decided as a marketing campaign to post out hundreds of branded pens to our mailing list. Sound in principle I suppose. Not very imaginative as marketing campaigns go but okay. Except that the company had a set up with the Post Office, an account that meant all we had to do was frank the mail in-house and post away. So far so good. Apart from the fact that the company hadn't paid their account so everyone on our mailing list got a post office note through the door saying they should go to the Post Office and pay excess postage for a parcel that was waiting for them. So a couple of hundred people would have trotted down to the depot, queued, paid 1.20 or thereabouts and I imagine snap a cheap pen in half while cursing our company.

lol

daveinprague · Oct 22, 2013

When working in the NOC at American Express, was learning to play Sax, and practiced in the back room of the NOC on nightshifts. .where all the drives, tapes, master console was, and managed to hit the stop button on the master console with the bell of the sax, taking down American express's entire data network...Realised something bad had happened when my shift colleague flew throught the door with the look of a hunted cat...was never mentioned funnily enough....

Arthur · Oct 22, 2013

A few years back I worked for one of the cash back sites. We always had instances where rewards didn't track properly so once month or so we'd process all missed transactions and manually reward the members their points. It was one of my minions tasks to collate these and process them this was done by generating a spreadsheet with all the info in and uploading it into the system. This month the lad in question got the field for the amount rewarded mixed up with the date. The script that processed these wasn't very sophisticated to say the least and didn't throw up a wobbly that it had been given a date and not a numeric value so everyone near enough got awarded the same amount which was vast amount more than they should have done.

Every morning we'd get an email with our liability report. The CFO nearly had a heart attack when it had gone up by about £6.5m from the previous day!! It was a stressful few minutes trying to work out what had gone on. Thankfully we were able to reverse all of those transactions and fella in question who had made the booboo kept his job. It also kicked our arse into improving allot of the code base to ensure **** ups like that didn't happen again.

Mellotron · Oct 22, 2013

Allowing myself to go on NSC.

TWOCHOICEStom · Oct 22, 2013

I once made a monumental cockup, then posted about it on a football messageboard, detailing every bit of incriminating evidence in the process.

My boss reads the same board so he sacked me.

Then I posted on the Sacked thread.

hans kraay fan club · Oct 22, 2013

TWOCHOICEStom said:
I once made a monumental cockup, then posted about it on a football messageboard, detailing every bit of incriminating evidence in the process.

My boss reads the same board so he sacked me.

Then I posted on the Sacked thread.

I have never made ANY mistakes, in my current job. Ever.

turienzo's lovechild · Oct 22, 2013

I broke a laminating machine (a quite expensive one). It was for a marketing company and a large chunk of their business came from making posters....which they couldn't do without the laminating machine

Racek · Oct 22, 2013

I was changing a plate on a printing press and cross threaded a bolt. The minder could not get it off and the press was down for hrs.

I was not really supposed to be doing it, but he gace me a chance. I was only 16 and that was the last time he let me anywhere near it!

Deleted member 22389 · Oct 22, 2013

Steve2244 said:
I was changing a plate on a printing press and cross threaded a bolt. The minder could not get it off and the press was down for hrs.

I was not really supposed to be doing it, but he gace me a chance. I was only 16 and that was the last time he let me anywhere near it!

The joys of machinery. When I worked in Mechanical Engineering I was loading castings in to a jig ready for machining on the CNC. I accidently loaded the casting the wrong way, sent it in for machining and instead of the mill taking 2mm off the face it tried taking about 50mm.

Next thing I heard was a really loud bang as the component hit the side of the milling machine. The bang was so loud everyone came rushing up from the other end of the factory floor to see what had happened. The milling head was screwed along with the inserts. I also buggered up the jig that the compents sat in. Not my best day.

TWOCHOICEStom · Oct 22, 2013

Oh actually I just thought of one.

During a premesis move I dropped a Victorian Marble Fireplace Shelf. Daddy wasn't happy.

hans kraay fan club · Oct 22, 2013

TWOCHOICEStom said:
Oh actually I just thought of one.

During a premesis move I dropped a Victorian Marble Fireplace Shelf. Daddy wasn't happy.

Ugh. Is that what your boss made you call him? That's creepy.

Mellotron · Oct 22, 2013

TWOCHOICEStom said:
Oh actually I just thought of one.

During a premesis move I dropped a Victorian Marble Fireplace Shelf. Daddy wasn't happy.

I think your main work mistake was taking up employment as a prostitute.

Janbha · Oct 22, 2013

I knowingly sold boar meat as beef when i helped out in a butchers many years ago , the strange thing about it was people remarked just how much they liked it on thier next visit , so the feeling guilty feeling diminished somewhat , still wrong i know , but i would imagine we were not the only butchers pulling this fast one at the time .

The Large One · Oct 22, 2013

I was designing a front cover of a magazine, and put the previous month's barcode in the corner.

Irrespective of the fact that there were check and balances in place, the magazine was printed with the wrong barcode, and I - and I alone - got the blame.

It meant that none of the barcode readers in the shops could process a sale.

dougdeep · Oct 22, 2013

I started work as an apprentice mechanic back in 1968 and I needed a new van bringing in from the car park, so I could give it a PDI. As I wasn't old enough to drive I was supposed to get a senior employee to do it for me, but I thought it would be a good idea to do it myself. So I started it up, selected what I thought was first gear and gave it some welly. Anyway this brand new van shot backwards into a brand new Vauxhall Ventora causing a lot of damage to both. For some reason I wasn't sacked.

shaolinpunk · Oct 22, 2013

When I worked behind a bar I was once in the cellar changing a beer barrel over. One clumsy moment later and I'd snapped the head or the tube going into the new barrel - cue a fountain of beer hitting me in the face and hitting the ceiling, covering the whole room in Carling while I wrestled with it trying to get the broken piece out so the fountain would stop

Hillian1 · Oct 22, 2013

I once supplied 500,000, 4 colour, gummed envelopes to a company when they ordered a self seal envelope.

Quite a fair few thousand that cost.

edna krabappel · Oct 22, 2013

I was going to put mine here.

Might save it for Simon Mayo's confessions though. Anonymity and all that

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