Share with me your big f%#ck ups at work to make me feel better!

[Hotankles]

Absolutely ballsed up at work today. It was a big one. Totally my fault and had an upset client. I was mortified and apologied profusely. I can’t say what it is as it’s really outing.

It’s really knocked my confidence and can’t stop obsessing about it

What dingers have you done ?

@Doublechins

Walking out of theatre to grab something and accidentally knocked the light switch plunging the whole theatre into darkness while a doctor was midway through a Caesarean section 🙈🙈

Oh god!

@PrincessBuggerPants

I once nearly sent a centre page spread to print with Middle East spelled with 3 Ds in it.

But honestly OP, when this shit happens I just think about the time David Cameron accidentally led the UK out of the EU and I realise how trivial anything I can do is.

Ah yes. There indeed is the mother of all.

This isn't really that bad, but it was to me at the time. I was young and paralysingly shy and had moved to big, scary London to work in a job that involved doing recordings of talks and lectures in various venues (actually it was a great job but I was mostly too terrified to enjoy it).

My very first time going solo in a quite prestigious arts venue was looming and a colleague had taken me there, showed me how to set up for the recording and assured me that it ALWAYS happened exactly the same way, in the same room etc.

You can probably guess the rest: I arrived in loads of time, set everything up, went off to grab something to eat, came back for the talk only to find it was a completely different one; a whole different panel including the lovely Joan Bakewell was up on stage and a huge audience there expectantly awaiting the start of the event. I had to interrupt and explain that I was really sorry but I was in the wrong place and needed to hold things up while I took my yards of cable and microphones away. Literally EVERYONE turned to stare at me as one and I could have melted into a puddle with shame as the person chairing the event cracked jokes about my ineptitude (Joan however was charming and sympathetic).

The talk I was supposed to be recording was in a completely different room and turned out to have a tiny audience and I had to set up in a panicked rush as I was late and flustered by then. It was an utter nightmare.

Next day the colleague who'd supposedly briefed me just roared with heartless laughter and said the Joan Bakewell talk sounded far more interesting and I should have stayed put and done that one instead

@Cantbebothered2

Years ago, I was working on a huge event. We had loads of speakers and I wasn't massively familiar with them to be honest. The day before the event, I was setting up our little office for the organisers in a hotel in Park Lane. This guy walked in and said something about the event and I didn't quite catch what he said but he asked if he could help and for some reason I thought he worked at the hotel or was there to help us set up computer equipment. I asked if he would help me shift some tables about which he gladly did. We chatted a as we did it and I thought he was super helpful. He then randomly mentioned something about his speech and asked when he would be speaking. It transpired he was a keynote speaker and was the Canadian Prime Minister. I was utterly mortified. I then told him he obviously had come to the wrong room and should be in the green room and not helping me but he was lovely! It still makes me cringe!

A friend of mine working for a large professional practice firm - finished off an email to clients saying she would get the Partner to "look at it" but some fast typing and incorrect spacing turned it into - getting the Partner to "look a tit" - surprising the number of clients who responded saying - "well he usually does" (or similar!)!!!

@TheCrowening

I think plenty of people have done similar to this, but I once sent out a mail merged letter to over 300 people making reference to the Cunty Council. Freudian slip, I think.

😂😂

@PennineWayinSlingbacks that makes me feel ill, thinking of that poor lady left to die slowly alone, presumably starving and dehydrating to death, suffering horribly.

It's absolutely horrific and I can't understand why there wasn't a double or triple check to make sure everyone was safe. I sincerely hope someone lost their job and was never allowed near the care sector ever again for that. They killed someone by neglect.

As a waitress I dropped a fork of gravy on the bride’s dress. Another day, 1 hr into my 6hr shift I walked into a wall with a tray of red wine glasses so had red wine down my sleeve for the next 5 hrs. As a teacher I accidentally hit an already crying child in the face when I flourished my arm too vigorously in an attempt to cheer her up. She forgave me though.

I dropped a three tier wedding cake I was delivering to a very posh wedding. Tripped over my own feet and face planted the top tier of the cake. It was almost slow motion when it happened and witnessed by the bride's father and the best man. I was actually physically hurt as i'd gone down on my knees trying to save the fucking cake like a precious baby. I had to patch it up best I could and luckily I could hide most of the damage but it was truly horrifying. It was my first big cake commission too. ...I nearly gave up after that !

We were moving offices & the removal people had come to start taking desks etc, I put the switchboard that had only been in use a year costing over £20k for the unit on a windowsill, it fell off & smashed, it meant we hadn't got the budget for a fax machine for a year ( this was in the 80's when fax machines cost the earth)

@bakingbernie

I once muddled up my noughts and ordered 24000 waitress order pads instead of 2400. Oh dear. It did not help that I left the organisation before the order arrived.

Sorry this made me laugh

@Cocopogo

Mines really awful and not very funny but I’ll share. I’m a nurse in old persons home. As a student nurse I was (wrongly) told if a patient dies, don’t touch them until the doctors been and certified them dead incase there’s are suspicious circumstance or anything. So first time patient died I was lone charge nurse. I left them until doctor came (hours later), sat up in bed. Undertaker came and he was horrified. He could not get the poor patient into a body bag, stiff, in a 90 degree angle. My manager, on call, came in from home and I was taken in the office and asked why I hadn’t read and followed protocol which was in the filing cabinet somewhere, which of course was to lay them out. That was over 15 years ago and I still get that awful feeling when I remember.

Gosh, as an old timer ( did my nurse training in the 1960s) I would say this mistake wasn't yours but the crazy training system in place which gave you so little guidance and experience.

@annie335

Work once gave me a brand new laptop and DH accidentally ran over it with his car on the same day.

Two of our directors did that in the same week. The IT guy in charge of hardware famously bawled the whole board out to the effect that if it happened again, the person responsible would be paying for a new laptop out of his salary (v expensive as this was the early days of portable IT). The IT guy was several rungs below the board on the corporate ladder but just didn't care.

I once worked for an insurance company which administered company pension schemes. We had to make a multi-million pound transfer from one scheme to another. My boss, who had to make the (paper) authorisation entered the wrong account number on the slip. Instead of being paid from the multi-multi-million pound pension account he paid it from what was, in effect, a petty cash account. The shit really hit the fan when the bank rang up our Finance Director and asked was he aware that the company was now overdrawn? That was not a happy afternoon for anyone.

I started a new job in a Domino’s type place, I was employed to take phone call orders and maintain the internet orders. When I arrived the back of the shop was empty and a customer asked for a pepperoni pizza so I took what I thought was a plain cheese base off the counter and put pepperoni on when the 3 other cooks came back and asked why I was putting pepperoni on a tuna pizza and please get on with my actual job 🙈

Wow there was no grammar there at all, dreadful! 🙈

Used to work in a nursing home.

Junior nurse, first time on nightshift, thought it would be a good idea to collect all the false teeth from the resident's rooms and give them a good clean - collected them all together, did a wonderful job cleaning them - and then they had to try to work out which teeth belonged to who??

Manual Handling training - the instructor was explaining that if there was a fire, don't try to carry residents, however wrap them in their bedding and drag them off the bed and then drag them to safety - staff members had to practice on each other and the first attempt ended in the "resident" breaking her arm when she was dragged to the floor..

Administrator speaking with me and was putting on a cardigan. As she went to pull her shirt sleeve down out the bottom of her cardigan sleeve, she accidently pulled her elbow back, right into the emergency break-glass panel - 3 fire engines rolled up (thankfully she was the boss!)

@GarlicThread

I once made a fairly small error which meant two people couldn't be convicted of their crimes (a fraud type thing) so they were freed from prison They were due to be sentenced to about 5 years each.

What did you do?

I was a pay clerk in my first full-time job; I had circa 800 people to pay weekly (huge organisation, the more experienced clerks had over 1k). This was in the days before computers on every desk. We had to fill out forms to be sent for data input into a single big computer to command changes, so if someone was off sick, that went on a form to go on their record & adjust pay if necessary. All O/T calculations were manual etc. If anyone died, we stopped their pay immediately, until we had legal instructions about their estate. I happened to pay a father & son who worked together. They went on holiday with their whole family together abroad. The father died on the holiday... I stopped the son’s pay (same surname obviously) while he was trying to sort out repatriation of his father’s body and in shock of the sudden and unexpected death of his beloved dad. He phoned and was lovely about it, but I then had to organise an emergency payment and it messed up his pay for weeks. Meanwhile, his mum was spending the money I’d not stopped going out for her husband, and that had to be recovered before the probate report confirmed she was his beneficiary. Weeks of extra work, profuse apologies and tears.

Junior nurse, first time on nightshift, thought it would be a good idea to collect all the false teeth from the resident's rooms and give them a good clean - collected them all together, did a wonderful job cleaning them - and then they had to try to work out which teeth belonged to who??

hilarious!!!

Spelling Middle East with 3 ddds reminds me of the time years ago when the company I worked for got a load of pamphlets with Ottawa spelt wrong. I thing they had Ottowa! A lot of people were falling on their swords but the boss was actually the one who said 'stop! we made a mistake! we're going to live with that. We made a mistake! so be it! If anybody notices we will confirm that NOW we know how to spell Ottawa''.

Went to work feeling unwell (seasonal head cold)

Awarded a multimillion project to the wrong Contractor (more expensive, inexperienced, poor quality control)

Didn't realise until it was too late (wrong Contractor mobilised, correct Contractor took other work and filled their order book)

Sweated it out and just hoped that it was never discovered

When my old work first started using SharePoint, I accidentally sent a file to an external person in such a way that meant that she could see the whole site. Luckily she alerted me within about an hour so it could be sorted.

I once worked with a patient and I’d gone to see her on the ward and she showed me that she’d recently changed from an Android phone to an iPhone. Without thinking I blurted out ‘so you’ve gone over to the dark side then’ (the reason for this comment was because the last time we met she told me how much she loathed iPhones) Anyhow, the reason she got the iPhone was because she had been in a horrific accident involving acid being thrown in her face and the surgeon had told her that there was no chance of getting her sight back. iPhones have better talking features so she’d gone for that. I seriously wanted the ground to swallow me up.

Okay, not me but the Director of the teeny charity I worked for forgot to put an application for a grant (we were entitled to) in time and lost us over £30k. We were a tiny charity - that's big money for us.

The Director of the council I worked for said in his first management job his boss wrote him a letter when he left saying he was so rubbish he couldn't manage his way out of a paper bag.

@OurSurveySaid

I once accidentally turned off the incoming electrical distribution to a site of national quasi-strategic significance. In my defence, we were testing new electrical infrastructure and monitoring and this is why we do the tests. Backup supply kicked in and nobody outside the facility would have noticed anything, but it wasn't an expected outage and it caused several weeks of delay in commissioning the system because the public sector likes paperwork...

@memberofthewedding I am curious to know how you implemented this friends calling code with 70s phone technology?

I am not that poster but my parents used to have a 'code' on their landline when screening calls from work; they only answered if it rang twice then stopped then immediately rang again as their friends knew to do this I assumed that's what the code was haha!