Can you beat my colleague's mistake?

alcibiades, it looks like the same thing caused the recent British Airways IT disaster. Except power wasn't returned in a controlled, staged manner...

www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-40159202

Someone I worked with decided to clean the medicines fridge, put all the expensive vaccines and insulins back in and then forgot to put the plug back in! Very expensive mistake.

I've turned up to the airport on the wrong day. In my defence my husband booked the flights. We had overslept somehow and rushed to the airport. We were stood at the check in and the man gave a very French shrug and said "mistake?" My husband practically had steam coming out of his ears.

Did wonder

Copy-paste fail

I mean they put their finger between my bum cheeks and touch my anus.

I was at Lancaster uni in the mid 90s. We had a massive extension built onto the library, which definitely could not be used as planned at first as the floors couldn't hold the weight of the bookshelves and books. I may even have some actual photos of the signs that were put up, warning us not to walk on the new floor sections yet. So it definitely happened here!

They also build new student accommodation which had loos which flushed with red hot water, due to plumbing errors. That smelled lovely, til it was fixed. And radiators that were stuck on, at full blast, 24/7, for a long time until they got fixed too. This was in June & July.

Come to think of it, the x ray department in my local hospital seems to be the only bit which is down a steep slope. I've wondered why before, maybe I know the answer now

United Utilities spent months and millions of pounds digging up and replacing loads of water pipes which unfortunately were mostly under the local ring road system. The only way in and out of the town, due to rivers etc, so it was a real ball ache and caused massive delays for everyone getting to work and school nearby for months and months. A week or two after it was all finished and traffic back to (still hellish but) - normal, we all got a letter through our doors. United Utilities regretted very much to inform us that an extremely expensive unique digger had accidentally been left behind and buried underground when they'd filled the roads back in again. So now they had to close it all off and dig it all up and re lay it again to get the machine out!

Only last year, my mother booked flights and accommodation for her, my dad, me, DSis and three grandkids to go to the Algarve for a fortnight in August. It was all booked in early January and we looked forward to it for months.

What none of us noticed, despite reading the booking emails several times each, checking in online and printing boarding passes out , was that whilst our villa was booked in the Algarve - our flights had been booked to Alicante!

My mum must have changed around the times/dates when booking flights, and not noticed that the page defaulted back to the first destination on the list (Alicante) when it refreshed...

That was a very expensive credit card bill after we realised at check in that we were flying to the wrong country and had to buy 7 new fights at no notice. In August.

The libraries sinking may well be apocryphal, but for real life structural failures where people making mistakes did cause issues I can thoroughly recommend the fabulous book "Why Buildings Fall Down". There are a couple in there where the engineer (architects don't determine loading, so it wouldn't be their mistake anyway) missed out loading, often snow, and it caused failure.

spinassienne and Andylion

It's actually Carleton Umiversity in Ottawa but I'm pretty sure it's apocryphal

Sinking libraries

I worked in a call centre for a few years and my friend who I sat next too had a proper knob head customer on the phone called Mr Minchin. Because he was such a knob we changed his name on his account to Mr Minge-chin and sent about 20 letters to his house with this name on. We thought we were hilarious

loo rolls = 100 rolls is one of the most memorable things I've read on here. Always makes me smile :)

@Thirtyrock39 - I remember reading a story on here from a MNer who ordered white wine, and got white grapes as a substitute! As she said, "I wasn't planning DIY wine!"

My fil used to work in a well known supermarket doing the Internet shop orders and has loads of howlers about his colleagues creative ideas for substitution items ranging from cherries instead of cherry tomatoes to an iron instead of iron tablets !!

In my first full time job. GM rang Reception and asked for 20 Marlborough for the Conference room where he was in a meeting with all of the Companies other GM. Told me to use the money in Petty Cash. I duly went over to cigarette machine and ran out of cash after 18 packets! (At The time they were £2 per pack) you can just imagine the hilarity when I entered the room with 18 packets of 20 per box😂My excuse was that I had never smoked so how wild i know that they came in packs of 20?😳

Sometimes when I've agreed a meeting with someone I'll put it in my outlook diary as "9am Dudsville". I never notice this until the day arrives, whereupon I sit and wait and see which surprise person I'm actually due to meet with.

And DP still gets that brought up any time he gets sent to the shop!!

That's ok

I have one of my own to add!

First week in a new job I used a code from my old job in error, resulting in the full company being paid 282 X their salary i.e. Instead of being paid £4000 people were paid £1.1 million
14 years later I still feel sick when I think about it!

@FortyFacedFuckers sorry to steal your thunder! Is the original thread anywhere? It's always stuck with me - so funny!

Yay - we've hit Classics!

@NoSquirrels that was my DP I came on to tell that story!

The architect who designed the maternity ward at my local hospital in Essex decided that the beds on the Labour ward would be directly opposite the doors of the labour rooms, and then out plain glass (and no blinds) in the windows in the doors! This was only noticed when they let the midwives onto the wards, who pointed out that women giving birth would probably not want any passer by to be able to look in, straight up their fanjos!!

In the hospital where I trained, they built a beautiful new Theatre suite. Each theatre had a hatch out onto the 'dirty' corridor, so at the end of each case, you wrapped up the instruments on the tray they had come on, bunged it through onto the dirty corridor, and it was collected, washed, repacked and resterilised.

Sadly the architects and the people specifying the equipment didn't bother to coordinate, because the instrument trays in the General theatre were too big to fit through the hatch!

Blah I also love gin and bitter lemon!

spinassienne The guy who designed the Toronto university library forgot to take the weight of the books into account. cue five floors of very expensive unusable library.

Which library?

Blobby10

Gin and bitter lemon is my go-to summer drink!