To ask about your worst mistakes at work to make me feel better about my own?

Once had a spreadsheet with everyone’s address on it for a mailmerge, so each line of the address in a different column, but didn’t highlight the postcodes when I sorted it by name so every singles address had the wrong postcode. They’d all been sent by the time I realised. Thank god the post office used the address and not postcode to deliver them. I’d been in the job six weeks.

If your manager said not to worry I'm sure it's fine, these things happen and it's possible there's something that can be improved in the processes to stop it happening again. Being open and honest so mistakes can be resolved is the best thing you can do although it's scary and sounds like you did that.

I was one half of a joint misinterpretion that cost about $500K+ to fix, it would have cost $Millions to not fix.

The guy who was the other half of the misinterpretion (for unrelated reasons 🤣) resigned soon after. He was gracious enough to offer to take the blame for all of it. I did not take him up on that offer and we both stuck to our shared misinterpretation story. It really was nobody’s fault, he asked a question that could legitimately be read 2 ways. Then he took my answer and read that in a different way than was intended.

Still employed and no lasting repercussions that I’m aware of.

@daisychain01 I bet you're fun at parties 😅 this is a light hearted, anonymous thread, nobody is giving ant confidential info away

I once accidentally sent a complaint about a colleague to a team inbox (of which the person concerned was a member) rather than their team leader. It was years ago but the thought of it still makes me cringe!

I worked in customer service for online retail. After a particularly tricky phone call from a disgruntled customer a new colleague of mine issued a refund. When prompted by the computer system to enter a reason he ticked 'other' and wrote 'entitled bitch'. Little did he know the refund and the reason were automatically emailed out to each customer! She rang back in an even more disgruntled mood (understandably) but actually managed to see the funny side after a mortified personal apology from my new colleague and our boss.

Sent out a mailshot to many, many schools in Hampshire but mistyped as Hampshite

Sent out a mass email to well over 100 customers but CC'd them all instead of BC'd. This was years ago before GDPR regs but I got quite a few angry replies.

So you don't want to give any details about your mistake, fair enough, but you're asking people to post about their biggest work mistake. Just to make you feel better ...

a bit double-standards. And it's pretty dumb capturing company specific information that really ought to stay within the four walls of the company not posted out on the internet.

I put the wrong signage (as in +/-) against something that was £955,845 (I will never forget that number) in a calculation, confidently presented my findings to the exec board and got the sign off. Luckily we found it right before things started as there was no way to recover that value.

This wasn’t me but a colleague, working in a bank when we had to key in all the paid cheques every day so they were applied to an account. If you made a mistake you had to reverse it out using the exact figures in the original mistake. If you did this wrong the original mistake went through and the reversal landed on a suspense account. We left customer’s account over £1million overdrawn overnight. The credit controllers n the bank were having kittens.

happily it was pre internet banking so it was all rectified before the customer found out. We did tell them as we typed out their statement so it never happened in their eyes but it would have showed if they ever ordered duplicates. They found it hysterical and asked that they could have the erroneous one too.

Cost my company over £10,000 because I made an error (can't say what as too niche a job) but I kept my job!

I completely forgot about about an exam one time. They called me from uni with 20 minutes to get there. I was not the student. Luckily we both did well in the end!

Oh the sharing the wrong screen in a teams meeting atrocity!

Was presenting and forgot and switched screens to reference something but it showed messages of us discussing the client....mortifying....

Oh my god - hahahahahha

A colleague paid out an insurance policy to the wrong person. Same name, different date of birth. She obviously didn't check.

It cost the company tens of thousands but she is still employed.

I farted loudly in the office. Pretended nothing happened

I know someone who sent an email to every employee in his multinational company saying "So are you coming out for a pint at lunchtime Brian you cunt?"

Failed to file something timeously at court, costing my client the opportunity to recover c. £10k in expenses.

My firm covered the cost to the client and were very gracious to me about it. They took the view that everyone makes mistakes sometimes and what matters is how you deal with them. I got credit for telling my manager as soon as I realised the mistake and for taking full responsibility. I haven’t made the same mistake since!

I took a group to the wrong airport (tour director rather than holiday rep, so we went all over Europe).

Blamed it on the company(well it was partially their fault, there was a process to ensure that this didn't happen and the process wasn't followed on this occasion) and the group believed me.

I sent an email to the wrong "Chris" lots of Chris' in my dept including a line manager like me and a head of service. Obviously sent it to the head of service. They got back to me straight away as it was discussing complaints our teams had. Thankfully it was professional but I sent it long after work hours and there may or may not have been a glass of wine next to me! 😩
It was all fine in the end but it taught me a few lessons.
OP, It sounds like your manager is as understanding as mine 😂🤦🏿‍♀️😉

When I was at Lloyds TSB back in the day, the staff used to fondly reminisce about the new guy who forced a CD into the wrong machine and melted said CD inside the machine, causing £10K of damage 20 years ago.

He kept his job!

A colleague sent an email to the whole company. Several thousand employees. The vast majority replied to say it wasn't relevant to them. It crashed the whole email system for midtbof the day. As soon as it was fixed, he did it again 🤣🤣