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??

Work in a secondary school as a technician. Got the water still down to clean it. Spent 4 hours on and off cleaning limescale out with a teacher

Only to drop it

Yeah slightly expensive mistake

I know someone who broke a Tornado quite badly. He got a telling off but kept his job.

Authorised an insurance claim payment of £250k to a building society account without using the roll number. The 00000000 account number should have been a giveaway.

I had a terrible week waiting for our finance team to claw it back from the slush account it sat in

Ellebelly the image and sound of those chickens hitting the floor has made my day

We were moving to a new office block, the removal team came to move desks, I put the switchboard on a window sill, it fell off & smashed, it cost about £5k.

Two ends of the scale..a bf who crashed his red arrow plane ....and me, on student placement writing in the classroom whiteboard with a permanent marker. ( though given the state of school funding both as catastrophic!)

First proper job when I was 16. Was asked to defrost the fridge where all the vaccines were kept. Think thousands of pounds worth. I put a knife through the back of the fridge but panicked and didn't tell anyone. All the vaccines had to be destroyed plus new fridge freezer.

More recently my colleague has just realised she's fucked up massively but is trying to brazen it out. She's cost the company £40k and we know exactly what she has done yet she doesn't seem to be facing any consequences for it!!

Hell, yeah.

I sent a company cheque to an old address, buggered a machine that took photos of documents (am v. old) by trying to clear a clog with a biro whose innards got eaten and ordered fucktons of forms that were specific to the branch I worked in but only needed very intermittently. Had to be v. creative to hide that one

I expect they were glad to get rid of me...

lonelycrab it was quite funny looking back
On a slightly different note I worked in an off-licence for a bit, one evening two youngish scruffyish lads came in, one of them wanted some quite detailed advice on which wine to buy. We'd not long had some training on different wines and I was keen to use my new knowledge, so spent ages with him discussing what meal it was going to accompany etc. He left without buying anything in the end which vexed me, but not as much as when I realised the next day at stock count that while I'd been pretending to be a wine buff his mate had been filling his coat and bag with bottles of Moët. Looked back at the security cam I felt such a prat. That was about £400

Thankyou tea that helps. and a non sarcastic for you with thanks for what you do. X

Worked in a bank as a cashier at 18. Had a wages order for something like 2.8k, 1k in £20 notes, 1.6k in 10's, rest in £5s and coins.

Counted out 50 x £20 notes. Then 160 x£10's. But actually used £20s. So £3200 instead of £1600. Cashed up and panicked, burst into tears and ran off.

Assistant manager who was a bit of a dragon realised what I had done, phoned customer and explained and she brought ot straight back. Assistant manager found me sobbing in staff room, made me a brew and told me she had done similar and not to worry about it as customer was on way back. Covered for me with branch manager and was generally really fucking lovely.

Have made a few fuck ups in my life. I work for myself now. Fuck ups are even worse when you fuck yourself up.

Lols Cricketmum. I learnt that lesson about the same age in my first shared flat. Don’t defrost the freezer with a big sharp knife

An intern in my DH's department put an extra zero on the end of the order of paper. He finished his placement a month or so later, but DH reckons they will still be working their way through the paper in another year's time. There is paper stashed everywhere, they've even built an extra table in the break room.

You're all making me feel so much better.

Thank you

Smallish mistake but it was in my first week of a new job as a teen, printing logos etc. Never noticed the spelling mistake (not made by me) when printing t shirts for "spots day 2013" (sports) all 150 of them

My first job was a payroll assistant and managed to put a whole site's timesheets on twice.

The men were made up that week, less so when they had to pay it back.

Have worked in investment banking operations for quite a long time now. Things are automated so much now that errors don't really happen but back in the day when everything was done manually errors were cost of doing business. As the numbers being dealt with are huge even the smallest error costs a lot. Teams I've been in have cost tens of thousands over the years.

Biggest single one i can remember was almost 20 years ago and was about 30k from memory

A relative works for a company that was told they would get the contract, they just had to pitch for it as a formality. Pitch had to be in for 5pm on the 10th, a month away. The day came and went, someone didn’t bother to press ‘send’ on the pitch, thus losing their employer £10million.

Not on the same scale as some of these but I once was trying to administer a very unusual drug that had been especially ordered by pharmacy at a cost of around £1500 to a patient, and trying to remove the cap of the needle my hand slipped and I bent the needle against the sharps box.
Also I drew up a very expensive drug to administer to an outpatient who had gone for a coffee as I was busy at the time, only to find when she returned that she was unable to receive it (was an immunosuppressant) at that time due to a potential viral infection. Had to chuck it

I recently lost about £2,000 by raising the wrong invoice. There were two different versions of the invoice and I just uploaded the old version.
Fixing it at the moment. Should be fine.

A friend of mine got fired a few years ago. She left a cash back offer on the website we worked on for two days longer than she was meant to. Our company had to honour the payment to customers without any payback from the supplier.
This was in the dawn of cashback websites and people were going mad for them.
So many people took up the offer that it was estimated she would need to work for free for 3.5 years to pay back the amount paid out.

We (a group of us) sold a contract at a loss (hard to explain why without outing myself) . To date its cost the company nearly $300m. We cannot pull out of this contract either. It would mean the loss of thousands of jobs.

Not me, but remember the Tianjin chemical explosion in China? Well Jaguar Land Rover lost about 6000 vehicles in the explosion. No problem, surely they were insured? Nope... It's reported that they lost about £250million.

Apparently, they were insured on the boat over to China and in the Chinese dealerships, but not in between. I imagine someone would have been in hot water over that cock up!

Think of the challenger disaster in 1986. Seven people (I think?) including a teacher lost their lives due to an error allegedy brought on by sleep deprivation.
Thats a pretty big mistake!

I know someone who, as a joke, drew a huge, spurting cartoon penis on his family’s new fridge freezer in dry wipe pen...except he used a permanent marker. 😁

I used to work in production planning for a pharmaceutical company.

Made £30000 of finished product that was too old for the country it was intended.

Not my fault. All to do with a mismatch of product shelf lives, and at the time, could easily have happened again.