Tell me your work mistakes that you can laugh about now!

I once took my class to the British Museum in London but we were supposed to be at their venue in Tring! Some how bluffed my way through - parent helpers none the wiser!

Jesus. 😬 A cold shiver just went down my spine reading that.

I recently read a CV that said the he had lots of experience at the 'cold face'.

Years ago I got an admin job at a very posh auctioneers in London, typing up the catalogues. The first part of the catalogue was pre-typed and I just had to press some buttons on a very complicated word processor and then type the details of the particular auction. I got stuck and didn't want to ask the other girls for help as they weren't very nice to me so I just decided to type all of it. I checked it and all seemed good but after the auction had happened I saw a copy of the catalogue and in the bit where it should have said "There will be a storage charge of £5" I had typed "There will be a strange charge of £5". I can imagine the confused look of the customers, puzzled about a strange charge.

Too many to mention (I'm amazed I'm still employed)
First day in New job
Had been there less than 20 minutes,managed to throw a full tray of red hot,fresh out of the fryer nuggets all over my new boss
I left a year later and he said he'd never forget me

I'm forever saying 'be careful with your fries,they are fresh out of the freezer'
I do mean fryer

I get mccrispys mixed up with mcdspicys as they are very similar colours to my eye

We had the main boss in the other day and I accidentally caught his bollocks with my fist as I turned round (I didn't know he had come up behind me)
Poor bloke just bent double in front of me
He seems to have forgiven me but does give me a wide berth

@BlumminFreezin I am a financial services director and this is AMAZING. Compliance would say the system should never have allowed that to happen! Poor you!

Similar to a PP, and not me but DH who was a chimney sweep at the time. He'd had a hell of a job one day - he'd sheeted up but the giant clump of debris that came crashing down with years of soot had rather breeched the protective sheets, so he was diligently cleaning up the customers rather posh sitting room with his powerful hoover. He went thoroughly to every corner of the room and then carefully hoovered the soot and dust from around the hearth, including clearing dust off a large, rather ornate ornament that he had thought was a carved piece of wood.

He was scrubbing his hoover brush over a cured ham.

My first museum job was in a huge military museum. One day I was doing some exhibit maintenance in the military vehical display - mainly light cleaning (in another zone I'd treated a polaris missile with a giant feather duster) . The dust was pretty thick as it was set up on packed soil and I managed to get halfway round a tank with a damp cloth before I twigged that the mud splashes were supposed to be there as part of the scene. It looked a bit odd half clean, half splattered!

A minor one that I’ve posted this before but it still makes me cringe.

I temporarily worked for a company called Harry Fairbairn, only I kept getting tongue tied when people called and saying "Hello. Hairy Farnbarn. How may I help you? I just couldn't say it right. Who knows what sort of establishment they thought they'd called instead of a car dealership?

Wow @BlumminFreezin - that's amazing, it made me feel sick reading it!

That reminds me of sending a birthday present to a friend via Amazon - and then also sending her my next order of Fungal Nail Treatment....

She sent me a somewhat baffled text as it arrived with her first in time, so looked like her bday present 💝

I once texted DP while he was at work to tell him all about the naughty things I was going to do to him when he got home. My sister replied and said well thanks all the same, but I think this message was for someone else 😳

It wasn't an invite as such, more information about the event and no response needed as it was in work time and all were expected to attend. Staff knew an event was happening at some point, but didn't know the date, I had booked it all and neglected to tell everyone.

When I was a newly qualified accountant and moved to a new job in a countryside accountancy practice, one of my first client meetings was to do a livestock analysis/reconciliation for a farm, where you have to balance out the opening numbers of each kind of animal, the numbers sold/died, the numbers born, to balance with the end stock numbers. I thought I'd cracked it with the different descriptors of different ages of sheep/cows, etc as I'd tried to do some basic research as I didn't want to appear a complete prat in front of a client in my new job (never done farming clients before). The meeting went well, and I was thinking I was doing OK. Asked a few pertinent questions, but at one stage the husband/wife farmers looked at me funny and I saw them give a sideways glance to each other, but they just answered the question and remained pleasant and polite to me. It stayed on my mind, so I asked one of the other accountants afterwards why I'd had a strange reaction to what I thought was a simple question. The whole office burst out laughing. The question was "how many of your tups were female?" All credit to the clients for not either laughing in my face or storming out claiming I was incompetent! They just quietly answered "none" and left it at that.

Another time, same firm, again, right at the start of working there, I crafted a brilliant tax planning report to a very wealthy client, lots of detail, in fact I thought it was a work of art. I read and re-read the report several times to check it was right, but unfortunately concentrated too much on the numbers and not enough on the wording. The report was typed up, signed by the partner, and posted out. Then a very irritated, valued client phoned to give me a right ear bashing. He hadn't got past the first paragraph! The reason was my introductory sentence saying the purpose of the report was to "maximise" his tax liability (should have said minimise), but I'd not noticed it, the typist hadn't noticed it, the partner hadn't noticed it. Lots of grovelling apologies and going through in great detail with the client to persuade him I knew what I was doing and the rest of the report was right.

Love it! Sums it all up really 😂

@ShiningforLeeBertie
Didn’t you wonder why you’d had no RSVPs?!!

Many years ago I did some contract work for a bank. Back office processing stuff.

One day I was on overdraft renewals for corporate customers. All admin really. Review the write up from the (onsite) business manager, check it was all crossed and ticked in the right places, reinput the overdraft limit, input the renewal fee (1%), press submit. I did loads, they only took 5 minutes, my eyes were going square by the end of the day.

The next morning a client was on the phone to one of the business managers screeching about fraud on a huge scale. He'd had £300k taken out of his account 😲 which had taken him £250k overdrawn. All of his payments, including all his staff salaries had bounced. Everyone was whispering, all the managers were dragged into a meeting, trying to work out how a fraudster had managed to take such a large payment and how, no one recognised the type of transaction.

Then I got called in. It was me 🤢 The day before, I'd processed the overdraft renewal. The overdraft limit was £300k, the renewal fee was £3k. I'd typed the figures in the wrong boxes - so I'd reduced the clients £300k overdraft limit to £3k and I'd charged them a £300k renewal fee 😂

The worst thing was, no one could fix it. Whilst the stupid system had allowed stupid me to charge a customer £300k, no one had the required level of authority to apply a credit of £300k...computer said no 😂😂 Not my manager, or their manager OR their manager. It took until lunchtime the next day to get hold of one of the execs in the USA, get him updated and get them to do it.

It cost them a fortune in compensation (think it was about £10k) and they had to launch a whole big risk/IT project to lock some systems down and stop it from happening again 🙈

Surprisingly they still renewed my contract for a further 3 months when it was up 😂

On my way to a company wide conference that i had organised years ago, driving with my boss in the passenger seat. Had about 2 hours to go of thr journey, would arrive and get set up and then approx 930am about 200 people would turn up ready for a day of mingling and schmoozing

Turned to talk to my boss and something on the back seat caught my eye and the realisation hit me, it was a box of invitations. Invitations that I should have handed out and posted out inviting everyone to the conference.

Me and my boss were on our way to a conference and no one else in the company had been invited.

I worked in HR many years ago. We worked in a group HR team supporting all the companies in the group. I was sending out salary increase letters to the CEOs and somehow managed to put the letter for the highest performing CEO getting the highest increase and bonus in the envelope for the lowest performing CEO who wasn't getting a pay increase or bonus. Caused a few issues to resolve.

Oh god, that's epic 🤣

I was organising a residential weekend in a rural location for a youth group. I somehow got the food shop delivered to our offices 300 miles away rather than the residential location.

We didn't have a car with us as we arrived by coach so had to take a very expensive taxi to the nearest supermarket, nobody went hungry but we did end up paying twice for food and the food we did have wasn't what was planned.

Not me but when I worked for a big organisation, someone in one of our satellite offices had devised a handy guide to a new process and it was sent company wide for us all to read. Bold as anything on page 15 was an empty table with "write more inane shite here" 🙊 I felt so bad for the person who had obviously forgotten to take that bit out and replace it with the real text

I accidentally told my boss I loved her. Don't know why I did it, I was hanging up the phone and thinking about someone else at the time and it was just force of habit somehow.

When I was much younger and had just started working in the building trade, a customer wasn't sure what diameter pipe he had so I grabbed a builders tape measure and wrapped it around the pipe, I quickly realised my mistake and was mortified! He was just staring at me!

I was working in a pub when I was a student, doing the morning clean while the owners went out for breakfast and when I finished I went upstairs to shower (live in position). The owners got back and were so mad at me because they had left the front door unlocked so anyone could have walked in with no staff around. They fired me and I lost my job and my home in one moment.
Ridiculous now I look back, because they never told me they were leaving the door unlocked and didn't say I needed to remain downstairs until they got back.

More recently I made a non-awful but pretty funny mistake in my current job. Spent all morning installing cable pulleys in a really difficult to reach place, then at the end of the day I was about to go home and someone looked in the plane and pointed out I forgot to install the actual cables in the pulleys. Had to uninstall the bastard things and do it all again. Almost cried