Can you beat my colleague's mistake?

My Mum who was a nurse once tried to take an elderly lady to the toilet to toilet her as she was on a ward where people needed help. The lady resisted and started shouting which was not unusual on this ward as lots had mental Health issues and dementia.

The shouting woman attracted the attention of another nurse who came over to help only to inform my Mum that the lady she was trying to toilet was a volunteer not a patient.

My dad works on a building site and each Friday they all take turns or buy cakes so 1 of the new starts offered to go to the shop my dad k my bad his bank so sent him for a cake & said get yourself something too, he came back half an hour later with a cake, a 'now' cd and a new pair of trainers.

loo rolls x 100 bread rolls

I once got a job at a hotel and the woman I was replacing had just bought a new car but as she hadn't driven in a while asked if I would go with her to show her how to put petrol in it. It started to rain and she panicked and said would I drive back which I did.
She wanted me to park were it would be easy for her to drive out without reversing etc which I duly did.
We then ran from the car park back into the hotel to avoid getting too wet.
All was great until we heard an almighty bang followed by the receptionist screaming. We shot out of the office to discover that in my haste I had forgotten to put the handbrake on and the car had rolled down the hill, smashed into the double doors and ended up in the hotel reception area!
Amazingly I kept my job

I had to arrange a meeting between all the members of the company board and a Very Important Client. It took me weeks to sort out everyone's schedules and find a day and location that worked for everyone. Imagine my horror when on the day of the meeting I got a call from my boss that all the extremely busy board members were sitting in the room and waiting for the VIClient... who had failed to show because I had completely omitted to confirm the meeting with her. Nearly got fired over that!

Hector That reminds me of a place I once worked, where the IT staff were scratching their heads for weeks as the server kept going down overnight and rebooting itself, and it meant that the automated backups were being aborted half-way through. Nobody could figure out why it was happening.

One evening, somebody was working very late in the office when the cleaners arrived, one of them armed with a vacuum cleaner. My colleague watched as she walked over to the corner behind the server, pulled out the plug, used the socket for her hoovering and then replaced the plug back in the socket again....

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.

First day temping in the tax office years ago. In the afternoon I was being shown how to do their filing and was handed a huge pile of A4 folders and promptly dropped them, scattering papers everywhere. I assumed it was also going to be my last day but the person showing me said, "don't worry" and started sticking papers back in files, any file, not checking them. I suspect that the tax officers were still sorting out the mess years later. Clearly not for some time as I not only finished the co tract but was asked to go back!!

Not sure who was to blame, but this is true not an urban myth, a I was one of the lucky customers.

We accept any vouchers against any product...

A brand new supermarket did this, took 3 days for them to get a court order to remove the promotion , you have never seem anything like it, and some little old lady came in too buy something with £10, everyone gave her £10 of vouchers, we filled her trolly and she used the £10 to take a taxi home with her shopping.

I always wondered why, in our local modern hospital, that there was a slope/ramp that everyone had to walk down or be wheeled down into the X-ray department. All of the other departments and offices in the area were level with the corridor except that one.

It turns out that when the hospital had been built, the Architect had forgotten to take into account the height of the imaging equipment and there had to be emergency excavations to lower the floor so that the hospital could open in time!

So so many....

First job in the 1980s - no PCs but a bank of green screen ICL word processors on one wall which people took turns to share. First time I used them, I sat down confidently, crossed my legs, caught the plug and pulled it out the wall, taking out the whole set. Cue wails from very senior staff on either side who had just lost all their work. Cue me quietly putting it back in with my feet and denying all knowledge as the screens sprang back to life ...

In a previous job, I drafted a letter to a client telling them that we'd do all we could to help them minimise their tax liability.

The typist typed it saying "maximise" your tax liability and passed it to the partner to sign, who didn't notice her typo and it was signed and posted.

Next day, a very irate client phoned up the partner, who in turn started to berate me for "my" drafting mistake. Luckily, I had a copy of my draft letter so very easy to deflect the vitriol back to him and the typist.

I used to work in a cafe with two wonderful owners who were both mad but awesome. One was very very batty. Every week she faxed off the food order to the wholesalers, one day they phoned laughing because she kept writing Arsehole rather than aerosol cream...

I was a Saturday girl in bookshop.
The other Saturday girl never got a book on the correct shelf. The best day was when she moved the whole Judaism section to martial arts.

Once a friend of mine who worked in a large tax department had finished a tax review and sent the email to her manager for his review- saying at the end of the email - "Can you get the partner to look at it?" - but she was typing so fast she messed up the spacing and typed - "can you get the partner to look a tit?" - mortified when she realised, until her manager responded - "I don't need to, he does it all by himself usually" 😁

I took a whole year group of Year 6 children to the theatre on the wrong week!

Miraculously, it was nowhere near full and they found us alternative seats, still more or less altogether. The amazing steward even said, 'don't worry, it happens all the time.' I was thinking, 'thank you so much but ... yeah right; no other teacher in the history of teachers could ever be this idiotic.

And forgot to include the obligation to repay...

A company I worked for was in serious financial straits and decided to let a load of people go. One department was shut, having opened only a few months earlier (Director's pet project). One of the newly laid off people read their contract quite closely and told their colleagues to do the same.

Three dozen people turned up at arbitration and were told yes, your contracts do say that you're to be paid X amount for 12 months. No mention made of any impediment such as not having a job. So the company had to pay 8 or 9 months of salaries times 36.

I spend an hour's criminal law tutorial talking about penile colonies

I used to be an operating theatre nurse. One day I was working as the circulating nurse in the orthopaedic theatre, where the first case was a hip replacement. All our instruments came prepacked on trays, from the central sterile services unit (CSSU), and there were a series of trays needed for a hip replacement.

As the first phase of the operation came to a close, I removed the first tray of instruments, and put out the second one for the scrub nurse to open (I opened the outer layer, so she could get to the sterile layers).

When she unwrapped the tray, there, nestled into the corner of the tray, was a pair of glasses, in their case! Clearly whoever had been packing it had been called away, and had, in an absentminded moment, bunged their glasses into the tray - and no-one had noticed before wrapping it all up and sterilising it.

The glasses case had gone all manky, in the heat of the steriliser, and the glasses had melted somewhat - and when we told CSSU what we had found, none of their staff owned up to the mistake.

You can never have too many envelopes

Or parcel tape. I ordered 36 boxes (I think there were 36 in three boxes!).

I ordered what i thought was a normal ball of string out of the stationery catalogue (at work). Nearly died when it came as it was almost the size of a football! It was about 10 years ago and we still have it.

Im a TA in a school and managed to mark a very similar Y1 number sentence correct when it was actually wrong right in front of an Ofsted Inspector...not my finest moment!

At school a girl brought spaghetti in as she thought it was long grain rice!

My worst was typing address labels for Virginia, and yes I did miss the second I out , but apart from the embarrassment, the laughter that came when the poor engineer had to try and tell me what I'd done. 😂

Another one. PA to the CEO (not me!) booked a lavish and complex routed holiday for her CEO, booked hotels and flight and forgot to book any flights etc for his wife