Can you beat my colleague's mistake?

I once worked in a restaurant and decided to water the plants.
They were plastic. I realised when there was a puddle on the floor.

I love the one from@NoSquirrels. Can you wipe your bum with a bap?

This thread is great - I am remembering more and more as I read (and procrastinate).

As a teenager I worked in the coffee shop of a very large and well known garden attraction. A colleague was sweeping the floor and when she was finished she leant the broom handle against the upright freezer which displayed those little tubs of ice cream with the plastic spoon in the lid. She accidently leant the broom handle against the off button and all of the ice cream started to defrost. We all took home a bin bag each of different flavours of ice cream which we shoved in our own freezers and were pretty much ok, but obviously couldn't have been sold to the public. Great day for us, not so great for her the next day.

I did a paid summer placement at an estate agents whilst at college about 10 years ago. Every month they sent out a newsletter with properties for sale/let to all the potential buyers/vendors on their contacts list. I printed, enveloped, addressed and franked the entire batch using the previous months newsletter instead of the current months. It was printed on that expensive thick glossy type paper in colour, the printing alone was to the value of about £600, let alone the postage costs after they had all been franked and the time taken for me to stuff and address envelopes.

My Dad runs a country store selling stuff for farmers, horsey people, pets, gardeners etc. One of his employees was asked to order 18 25kg bags of peanuts (for bird feeders). They ordered 18 pallets. Each pallet load equates to 1 tonne of peanuts, i.e. 40 x 25kg bags. 720 bags of peanuts to shift before they start going mouldy and aren't fit for sale.

The office stationary order got dumped on me and while I did my best with it it was easy to make mistakes. The best one was ordering twenty boxes of specially printed (expensive)forms specific to that office when I'd meant to order twenty in total as it wasn't something we needed very often. Can still remember my horror as the things just kept coming

I kind of scattered the boxes nonchalantly round the stationary cupboard and kept very schtum until I left left a few months later.

Apparently, they built a new Olympic sized swimming pool in Luxembourg some years ago. For official timings, world records etc the pool has to be exactly the right length. Which it was, until they tiled inside.

I once forgot to lock the front door where I worked. On a Friday night. At an auctioneers. Eight days before a hugely valuable sale.. . (It was fine thankfully.)

The woman I replaced should have ordered 3 boxes of lot label stickers just after she started. She ordered 30. They lasted all of her 6 years there and only ran out at the end of my 7!

My old boss once gave us all a long lecture about personal mobile phone use and how none of us should have phones on us during work and they must be kept in lockers or desks, switched off and only used during official breaks. He briskly and officiously asked "Any Questions...?"

And right on cue, his mobile rang in his pocket.

As a teenager, I had a summer job washing up in a care home.

The milkman would deliver about 100 pints of milk at lunchtime and it was my job to put them in the (massive) fridge.

One day I was putting away pint 99 when the shelf collapsed, smashing every last bottle. The entire building shook.

The chef, who was out of the kitchen on a fag break, poked his head round the door and saw me clutching the one remaining bottle.

"Guess milk pudding's off the menu for tonight" he said.

And Irish MNer's - wasn't the tunnel built under Dublin for lorries to get to the port without having to go through the city centre, originally build not high enough for HGV's to drive through, or is that an urban myth?

Not a myth. And it's still not high enough for the super-HGVs. So some trucks can bypass the city centre. But you know, not the really big ones

Yes. A long time ago when internet shopping had just started I did a Tesco online shop.

I put "1" next to brocolli, and expected a floret. I actually had ordered 1kg. 3 full carrier bags. That delivery man knew damn well what I'd done and I realised soon too. I didn't flinch- totally cool.

The whole lot ended up in the bin.

I once snapped a customer's SIM card IN the sim slot of their iPhone... £799 iPhone had to be replaced out of the store budget i.e: everyone's bonus for the month - gone!!!!

I have an embarrassing number...

1. Bought my first flat. Came to winter and the heating wouldn't come on. Many conversations with my dad on the phone about tapping various pipes with spanners, etc, flipping switches, etc. Nothing worked. My dad then drove the 400-odd miles to come to mine and fix it. His first morning there he phoned me at work to tell me he'd fixed it. How? He'd turned the thermostat up. This was around 20 years ago and still gets brought up at family gatherings.

1. In said new flat trying to be all grown up and have friends round for dinner. Recipe for beef bourguignon specified a large number of garlic cloves, like maybe 10 or 15. I bought about 15 bulbs of garlic. Was seconds away from adding them all before a friend stopped me.

1. Sat up for hours to bag 1p seats on Ryanair so me and boyfriend could go on a city break. Deed done I jubilantly woke him to tell him we were going to Italy, I was so excited as I had always wanted to go. Which is where I thought Barcelona was. was a lovely holiday all the same

1. Spent weeks driving around with 3 heavy bags of bark chips in my car because I had nowhere under cover to store them in my garden until I was using them. Until it was pointed out that they were designed to be used in a garden so if they got a little wet now and then they would probably be ok...

I used to work in an accounts role and had given out the bank details so many times I had memorised them. One day I checked my bank balance and had a mysterious payment in to my account, turns out I had given out my bank details instead of the business details!

This thread is brilliant!

I ordered a new multifunction printer last year but I can't figure out how the scanner works, so I've hidden it in a cupboard!

Years ago we had a young temp working for us and we had to send quite large parcels to our office in Italy. About 6 of them costing around £20/£30 each.

I left her to put them through the franking machine and when I came back, they were all franked, and in the bin were about 20 screwed up franked labels that she's thrown away because they were wonky.

Back in the days I used to actually be someone, my business took out a fairly hefty loan. Early days of online banking via dial up, so it'd take a while for things to refresh. Day of drawing down the loan, I was obsessively checking every few minutes whether or not it had gone through.

Turned out my relationship manager was too, and was a bit perturbed that the loan funds hadn't turned up in our account. So he kept hitting F5. £3,000,000 later, yes. Yes. That first payment instruction had gone through. As had all the others he had sent...

PMSL Arose. On my first day as a care assistant, a resident asked me to empty her bag. I took her handbag and emptied it out on the table. Of course, she meant her urine drainage bag

This one should make you feel much better, Yaela. NASA lost the $125million Mars Climate Orbiter because engineers failed to convert crucial acceleration data from Imperial to Metric measurements.
And Irish MNer's - wasn't the tunnel built under Dublin for lorries to get to the port without having to go through the city centre, originally build not high enough for HGV's to drive through, or is that an urban myth?

I was ordering a poster for work. I thought the website I found was dead cheap and was chuffed.

I ordered what I thought was an A1 sized poster. When it came it wasn't at all A1 size. Turned out I thought I was ordering in cms, I actually ordered in mms.

Twat

I was a new driver in a new car and in a new job. The car only had a key lock - before remote control! I was that used to being a driver that I hopped out - flicked the button down and rushed into work. Got a call later that my car was running with the engine on!! Had no key so someone had to drive me home for the spare. If that wasn't bad enough I then did the exact same thing 3 weeks later!!

I've done the wrong sort of crackers one, but the other way around. It was my first Christmas with my (now ex)ILs. For context, my family is a bit more . . . downmarket . . . than ex-es.

Then-H and I were sent to the supermarket with a last minute list, which included "crackers". I was absolutely certain it must mean the party-hat-containing kind - so certain, I carried the day (against suggestion of buying both sorts).

Nope. We were meant to be buying a nice box of biscuits to eat with post-meal cheese (They were very nice about it and we pulled the crackers though!)

My first job was computer programming, which was daft as I'd never really done any. So I played around with dated languages on a mainframe to learn how to sort records and so on. I put in a bit of test code asking for a search result.

A few hours later when nothing had happened, I assumed I'd made an error, until I got a phone call from the guy who'd spent all morning loading heavy magnetic tapes into a near-obsolete tape drive so the computer could search for the data. Apparently they were about a quarter of the way through...

They also made me a sysadmin despite me not knowing anything about it. So on my first morning my friends sent me the Bastard Operator From Hell stories, which was all the training I had.
Bloke phones up to say he's forgotten his password and could I please reset it?
I had no idea so I told him to think harder and try to remember it, and hung up.
Repeat for two more people.

The worrying thing is, the only other people who could have reset those passwords didn't. So they must have managed to remember...

A teacher I know got confused in a lesson between a naturalist and a naturist

@SocksRock ... Could've been worse ...

French rail company order 2,000 trains too wide for platforms
France's national rail operator admits it has already spent €50 million on 'shaving' 1,300 platforms that are too narrow to fit new trains

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/10845789/French-rail-company-order-2000-trains-too-wide-for-platforms.html