Please tell me other people have made expensive mistakes at work?

[Biancadelrioisback]

So, I might have just been involved in a very expensive mistake at work. It wasn't solely my fault, it was a mixture of miscommunication and lack of understanding (supplier).
I had been dealing with something and the final evaluation was to happen while I was on annual leave. Apparently my coworker didn't really know about it (despite me telling them) and the suppler got the wrong end of the stick. At no point did anyone tell me there was a problem until today.
Now it's going to cost us quite a bit to fix it and I feel awful.
Have checked all my correspondence and it's all very clear, but could be misinterpreted if skimmed I suppose.

Please tell me other people have accidentally (and indirectly) cost their company chunks of money??

No matter how bad it feels OP, it isnt Nick Leeson or David Cameron expensive.

Around 20 years ago I frazzled a chip board somehow that belonged to a machine I was meant to be repairing/servicing. I didn't think it was too bad on the whole at the time, but I did wince a bit when I found out that said chip board was around £700 each... Thankfully my boss chalked it up to my being very new in the job, and it was never mentioned again!

Hahahaha true! I might just use that when I'm justifying myself to my boss later....

Ahhh man, I'm having a squeeky bum moment

*squeaky

Many years ago I worked as a store man for a company making aerospace connectors for fighter jets. To pick the parts for an order worth about 10k. Turns out I’d put the wrong contacts in the box and sent it to the shop floor. They didn’t realise until the entire workforce had spent days assembling them. They needed to be scrapped.

Didn’t get the sack somehow

Not on a grand scale (yet) but twice I've ordered in a large amount of a product for regular customers (while it was on offer) only for them to sadly pass over within a week.

We're still working through the last lot, I estimate we'll sell the last of it next February...

I'm thinking about offering a curse service

It's really not that much tho... honest...

It's fine, everyone makes mistakes no matter how cheap or expensive.

I broke a golden rule of site engineering on my first ever work placement, aged 18. Left a very expensive piece of surveying equipment unattended on a concrete slab. Walked away from it, then one of the site operatives pulled a concrete hose line across the slab, didn’t see the tripod and the hose knocked in to at and pulled it over. Surveying equipment (an EDM) smashed on the concrete slab, damaged beyond repair.

Was a few thousand to replace the EDM, but worse, we didn’t have a spare so I couldn’t finish setting out the concrete pour. The next pour was delayed and this pushed back the whole construction project.

During my first six months as a legal editor working for the premier publishing house for legal texts (fresh off my LLM and a bit over confident at that young stage), I was in sole charge of editing a manuscript, basically all the steps to turn it into a book. I misspelt one of the main words in the TITLE. It was published and the mistake was only noticed after 1000s of copies had been printed ... OOPS doesn't cover it ...

A mistake was made (not by me) when I was working for a law firm but one which benefitted my client. A solicitor had failed to remove a second charge from a property when it was sold which was in favour of my client. It meant that the new owner was subject to the charge too. However the seller was a Trustee in Bankruptcy and there would not have been enough to discharge the second charge and it would have been written off by my client. However due to the solicitor's error to ensure the charge was removed prior to sale the buyer's solicitor had to claim the amount due to my client on his insurance and my client was paid in full. (PS> I was not the solicitor on either the sale nor purchase but acted for the client in a different capacity).

A colleague forget to unhide a column on a budget spreadsheet and omitted to include £50K for travel and expenses. Budget was approved at board level. She had that kind of spinning head out of body experience when she realised. We spent a looooooong time shaving the said £50K off other things like stationery, marketing, promotions etc to make things balance. We did have a crap Christmas party that year though!

i may or may not have sent a ship off on a round-the-world cruise short of 10 restaurant waiters.

it was a nightmare, and i still remember the hideous, dawning horror when i realised what had happened. i owned up to my Big Boss and we fixed it, but it cost a fortune.

the horror.

Perhaps a bit off-topic, but a certain Mayor spent an AWFUL lot of money on crowd-control equipment that was never used for its intended purpose and was ultimately sold on at a knock-down price.

As a trainee lawyer I issued court proceedings for £10,000 in the high court of Delhi instead of Mumbai. Client (an enormous Indian bank) was fuming - not least because my cockup was only discovered by a judge (in Delhi). Not my finest hour.

Take heart, OP. Chris Grayling has chucked away £2.7 billion of taxpayers’ money, and he’s still in his job!

A friend of mine put the entire Christmas post through the franking machine at $7 each. The franking machine had been set up for a parcel and she didn't realise so didn't change it.

Signed some drawings as correct when they weren't. Discovered when the steel frame for the two storey building wouldn't fit together on site. That cost a fair bit to fix.

Different job, someone (not me this time) switched a 7 and a 2 in a handwritten dimension and we built a whole building 0.5m too tall. Extra cladding required and we had to resubmit for planning permission in retrospect. Luckily it was granted or we could have had to demolish and start again... think 4.72m tall instead of 4.27...

Booked a venue for an event, paid the deposit of £16k on my boss's say-so. Boss then got sacked, new boss decided not to run the event after all. £16k down the drain! Not technically my fault but I did have to go in and explain it to the FD.

I used to work in a soft play area. We would host birthday parties and supply a buffet but wouldn't take a deposit, so there was no formal confirmation, just penciled in dates in a diary. A party had been provisionally book, then cancelled, but not properly erased from the book. On the day I made all the party food, set up the party room.... And no one arrived. My manager went apeshit at the waste then made a point of eating a load of it for her dinner whilst glaring at me.

In my defence I blame their shitty booking system and whoever did a bad job cancelling the date in the book.

I read the wrong number on a report and ordered a server that was 20 times big as we needed. In my defence, the order had to go through 2 lots of management approval and neither of them picked it up either. One manager did say afterwards that he thought it sounded a bit big ...

I accidentally refunded someone £7000 who I was supposed to take £60 from, and took £60 from the person I was supposed to refund too.

I was mortified but we were so overworked we were told to write down requests and do them later to get through the call queues and I mixed the two up.

I dropped a wad of £150 on the way to the post office to buy stamps. It got taken out of my apprenticeship wages :(

Also almost cost someone their £2500 dental implant one by not putting the right setting on the drill. I had a hell of a telling off from the dentist 😳

Mistakes happen, we learn from them.

I lent USD200millon to Lehman Bros. Do I win?

Here’s one OP:

mobile.twitter.com/hawksmoormcr/status/1128937017587453952?lang=en

How much were you supposed to lend DropOff?