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 ?

This week I ordered 10 of an item instead of 1. Each one cost £346 and the company I ordered them from are refusing to take them back!

I forwarded an email, which contained all of the employee annual bonuses, to the regional directors.

What I didn’t realise, because I hadn’t read all the way to the bottom of the spreadsheet, was that the email also contained all of the regional director’s bonuses.

The regional director’s bonuses were very different, but were a set percentage of their pay. Which was HUGELY different between the four of them....

I think I probably cost the company quite a lot, as obviously three regional directors were very unhappy....

I was mortified at the time but, actually, it wasn’t my fault as a) the spreadsheet was sent from the UK hq and I was simply asked to forward and b) there shouldn’t really have been such a pay discrepancy in the first place...

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.

In a previous role I was given the task of tour guide in a European city I had never been to before.

I was tasked with leading a large group from the coach stop to a museum and instead of admitting I had no idea where I was going (this was pre-smart phone age) I just decided to blag it and hope for the best.

I ended up like the Pied Piper of tired and angry Brits, traipsing all over the city for a very long time. It was so long ago but I still make an audible cringing sound anytime I remember it.

I worked for an oil company and every week I had to prepare the oil stock figures for one of the UK refineries. I got them wrong every week. It was quite serious but thankfully my boss and the others on the committee found it funny. Maybe my mini skirts helped.

Years ago, when I was at uni I worked in a bar.
I was carrying a tray of drinks, tripped and poured it over a group of customers.
TBF, they were quite nice about it, I was mortified.

I once slipped and grabbed onto some racking. Unfortunately it came down with me, along with £18,000 worth of specialised glass lab equipment it housed. Not only did it all have to be replaced but we lost a multimillion pound contract as we had to delay some impending work whilst the equipment was re-blown.

Still feel a bit queasy when I think about mine. I was a lawyer working for a large City firm. Was doing very well and was put on a massive matter advising a global investment bank on a restructure. The board had flown in from around the world for a meeting which I was asked to chair. One of my firm’s senior partners was also attending, but I was leading the meeting as it was looking at an issue within my specialism.

I was terrified! My taxi got stuck in traffic so I arrived 5 mins late. Was shown into the board room where they were sitting around a huge polished table- about 20 of them, all alpha men aged 50+. I was 27, and about to talk them through a very complex, technical issue which was stalling the whole process.

I took a deep breath, walked to the head of the table and pulled the pack of meeting papers out of my bag. Unfortunately, a rogue tampax from the bottom of my bag got snagged in the papers, so when I pulled them out, it came flying out and bounced down the length of the table like a stone skimmed across the ocean.

All the men sat in silence, horror on their faces, as it came to a stop at the far end of the table. I walked down the room, picked it up and said, with all the dignity I could muster “I think this must be mine”.

I had to carry on, and got through the meeting somehow, then got into a taxi back to the office and burst into a combination of sobbing and hysterical laughter. The taxi driver must have thought I was a total lunatic.

Artesia I'm really sorry but that made me laugh out loud!

I worked for a bank, and we had to mail out inter bank rates, and I got them the wrong way round.

Our whole department, had to input lines and lines of manual interest recalculations.

There was no hiding from it - everyone knew!

Long long time ago, when I worked in a shop as a Saturday job. It was just after the halfpenny piece had been taken out of circulation but we still had '1/2 p' as an option on the till. The customer wanted one of something that was in a pack of two, costing 21p (or some such amount). So I split the pack and charged her 10 1/2 p, of course, pressing the '1/2 p' option on the till. Apparently I crashed the whole accounting system for the business (this was pre computerisation) and the shop manager was aghast.

It was actually quite amusing...

I shredded the minutes of a meeting between a branch manager and a member of staff that were key to an unfair dismissal case. I nearly had the shortest career in HR ever!

It wasn't me who did it (before my time, but still a legend/ tale of Awful Warning), but this is the worst I ever heard of:

In the Seventies, i.e before stuff was backed up on computers, a graduate student had finally completed his Ph.D thesis. He sent the necessary two copies to his supervisor. The supervisor was on holiday. Between the IRA and some animal rights extremists, who had targeted the university, everyone was very jittery about letter bombs. The supervisor's college rang him on holiday to ask him if he was expecting a parcel. He said no. So the college called in people from security to do a controlled explosion. So, oooooops, lots of bits of paper flew out, and they realized they'd blown up the only two existing copies of the student's thesis! Under the circumstances, he was awarded the Ph.D. anyway, but he'd have been in trouble if he'd wanted to publish material from the thesis.

Working as a PA I once set up some offsite meetings for my Director manager with his senior management team- and didn't invite his senior management team- he was sat alone in the hotel! I felt awful.

One of my colleagues had booked a Director a flight to the Glasgow office - he turned up at the airport to find she'd booked him a ticket to Edinburgh.

My boss when discussing a large insurance payment being offered with a difficult claimant accidently put the amount as £ rather than Euros, and we had to honour the higher amount.

It feels awful now OP but will soon be forgotten I'm sure x

I used to work on bbc news and I walked in front of the newsreader in a live tv bulletin.

I used to work for a Rugby club and dealt with all the tickets for the opposition clubs. We would send the allocated number of tickets to the club we were playing for them to sell, cancel any returned then invoice for the number sold. The ticketing system was crap so it was easy to make a mistake especially with the standing tickets, however I wasn’t as diligent as I should be and instead of cancelling the unsold tickets, I cancelled all the tickets so we had about 150 fans who’s tickets didn’t work, it caused fucking chaos for the grounds staff and I had only been working there a short while. It was fairly easy to rectify in terms on finance but it made us look bad to the away fans and caused massive queues at the turnstiles. Luckily rugby fans don’t kick off the way other sports fans do and a bit of sweet talking and a free pint placated them. I was a sweaty stressed wreck by the time kick off came.

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.

[quote Youdontknowwhatyoureonabout]When I messed up at work I used to think to myself “could be worse, at least the whole country doesn’t know”

David Cameron has been caught on camera talking about how the Queen “purred down the line” after he phoned her to say Scotland had voted no to independence
www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/sep/23/david-cameron-queen-purred-down-line-scotland-no-vote[/quote]
Deary me! 😂😂

@BonnyandPoppy

This week I ordered 10 of an item instead of 1. Each one cost £346 and the company I ordered them from are refusing to take them back!

How can they refuse!!

These are making me feel a little bit better about my ‘fuck up’ this week at work.

I put it like that, because it’s not really my fuck up, but the business owner wants me to take responsibility because I put the process in place. It was a mistake made, human error can happen, and that’s what has happened here. It has nothing to do with me, months after my involvement.

It may cause a loss of £1500, but I work for a massive high street bank that has reported profits this year so it’s basically peanuts.

@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.

Fuck!

Oh and when I worked in a school office a colleague and I were gossiping about a parent who was thought to be an alcoholic and we completely forgot about the child in the medical room who could hear every word we said....

Distracted while giving the first day “this is where the toilets are, this is where we go if the fire alarm goes off” talk to forty playscheme attendees, I have brain fart and instead of telling them that the first person to that door pushes the bar and opens it I push it... setting off the alarm through the whole building and making the poor caretaker sprint down thinking there’s an emergency and all the other users of other areas evacuate out.

It took several years before there were no returning children to say “don’t actually do it!” every time I did the talk and went near the door.

Best bit was I worked part time in the school building we hired at the time so I knew it was alarmed and I knew the alarm was a pain to turn off.

@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.

Holy shot! How did you get over that!

** shit