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 ?

I was writing up all invoices to send out to customers, costs, details, etc and allocating invoice numbers as I wrote them.
Unfortunately, without realising, I sent invoice number 666 to the local church!

Following

My first ever job I was 17 and a receptionist for 4 companies sharing offices and clients and I had to put all the Christmas cards in the envelopes and frank them. They gave me boxes of over 2000 cards and then other boxes full of printed envelopes. I just stuffed the cards out of the boxes straight into the envelopes. After doing them all and them just about to go in the post (on the last post day before Christmas) a manager came past and randomly picked one up saw the address on the front and opened it ‘wondering what x manager had said’. My blood ran cold as she said the persons name inside the card and message didn’t match the envelope.

I’d assumed it was a generic ‘happy Christmas from all at x company’ type message. But no, every fucking card was personalised. The whole company had to stay till 1 in the morning matching the right cards with envelopes. Everyone totally hated me.

As a teenager I worked at the local newsagent on Saturdays, and Sunday mornings. At the end of the day I had to polish the floor so I temporarily unplugged the socket for the ice cream freezer while I did it. You know where this is going...

I went home and came back the next day to find the freezer swimming in ice cream wrappers and lolly sticks! Hundreds of pounds of stock ruined and environmental health inspectors had to be called.

I was not popular for a while!

I used to work in ground investigation - we dig/drill holes in the ground to characterise it to design foundations, identify contaminated land etc. It is always very nerve wracking working in an very urban setting, where there are a lot of buried services in the ground. The utility companies do provide drawings of where their stuff is, but they are a bit hit n miss. In my time I have damaged unrecorded/poorly drawn buried services more than once, and put out the power to an office building; shot high pressure water 10m into the air and broken the fibre optic cable to an office. My colleague damaged a gas main that shut down a pharmaceuticals factory for 48 hours.

I forgot I was on call. I'm a hospital health care professional.

It was the 90s, so I had a bleep. I had it in my pocket at home when I had my tea when my friend rang to ask if I fancied a spare ticket to a concert. So, I went and had 3 pints and was having a good bop about in the mosh pit. And then felt the bloody bleep buzz in my pocket.

Shit.

I should have been struck off.

@Hotankles They are refusing to take back the items as they say they can’t be sure that the items have been stored correctly (at room temperature!) and therefore they can’t resell them

As a newly qualified archaeologist, I went out to a site to do test holes prior to building work commencing. Quickly found bones in a fairly modern context and they looked like a child's. Called the police who didn't really know what to do and suggested I keep digging to see what happened. There was quite a group of police and site workers all looking to see the body, as I trowelled round the tail. Of a dog. I was a bit of a laughing stock for sometime.

@WestendVBroadway

Years ago I was a section manager in the produce department of a well known supermarket. I had meant to order 4 crates of apples but due to fat fingers I accidentally ordered 44 crates. The thing is the system had a fail safe in the case of unexpected large orders, but I was obviously away with the fairies and manually overrode it. Fortunately it was a long life item, would have been sh*t if it had been lettuces or spinach.

I did this in a supermarket bakery but I ordered a ridiculous amount of pints of fresh cream 😬😬 it had to be shared out amongst loads of other stores

I used to own a care agency and remember with horror, a terrible event that happened to my local authority at that time.

The Border Agency had raided a care agency and found staff were there illegally so it was closed immediately.

The list of clients was given to the local authority to be reallocated to other agencies. Unfortunately, one of the names was missed and the poor lady went unvisited for 9 days and died soon after.

The stress of care management put years on me and whilst i had my moments I still think of that really sad event.

This one still makes me want to vomit when I think about it, 20 years on.

I’m a journalist and I was working on the news desk. We’d been to court to cover a rape sentencing. The defendant had a fairly common name and was sent to jail for 14 years. The reporter wrote it up, sent it to me on the news desk, I read it, told the sub to give it the once over and stick it on page one, told him the picture of the defendant was in the system. The night editor, the one with overall responsibility for sending the page, was new in post and wasn’t really clued up on who was who in the town I was working in.

I walked into work at 7am with the phone ringing off the hook. The leader of the borough council was fairly furious to see his picture on page one next to the story about a man of the same name convicted of rape.

A grovelling apology in the evening edition, the poor distribution vans driving round all the newsagents to recover the papers they’d dropped off earlier in the morning, 20,000 papers recalled and pulped. Thank God he didn’t sue us.

Not so much a screw up but deliberate revenge for poor industrial practices.

Used to work for an organization where I was one of the keyholders. After a break in I nearly always got called out. It was part of the job but my boss somehow always seemed to be “unobtainable” and he was paid a lot more than me. One horrendous sunday I was sitting in an empty building from 3pm til 10pm with nothing to eat until the emergency services arrived to secure the building. I decided to make him do his turn by being uncontactable. There were no mobile phones back then (1970s) so the police used to ring one at home then send a car round. I gave all my friends a little code to use when they rang me and told them that uncoded calls would not be answered. Uncoded call came at 10 pm on a Saturday night in November. Warned my opposite neighbour, turned out all the lights and watched TV in the dark. Police banged at the door but I did not answer. Neighbour told police he had not seen me all weekend and assumed I was away, so they went away. I assumed they would route out my boss and he would have to get off his ass for a change.

On the Monday when I went into work there were eruptions because neither of the keyholders (my boss and myself) were available. So they had to send out security staff from the main building. It always ticked me off that security had access to keys to every building and were paid money to sit on their backsides over night watching tv. In the meantime a woman had to sit alone for 7 hours in an empty and insecure building which was obviously unsafe.

There was a big fuss about it and in the meantime I launched a formal grievance via the union about my 7 hour stint. Eventually the rules were changed to that we could only be called out upto 9 pm and after that one of the security was dispatched.

Several times after that I used my "phone code" trick to make sure my boss did a 50% share of call outs.

Years ago I attended a film festival and had to interview various actors. Before one interview, I joked with the PR that I always got Clive Owen - who was that morning's interviewee - mixed up with Greg Wise.

Ha ha ha - you can guess what happened... god I was mortified.

A relative of mine is an electronics expert who covers a number of high-security research sites. He's a bit of a perfectionist and had been working together with an new colleague whose work he found untidy. The colleague then failed to turn up on the last day of the project so my relative decided to take the opportunity to quickly tidy up some of the colleagues' cabling work, including a cable routed via a ceiling. Cue: total collapse of the ceiling and three years' research ruined.

I was working as second secretary to the Head of Light Entertainment at the BBC when I was 17, and had to compile the audience research figures for every LE show. The list went to every producer and I had to hand deliver it first thing every morning. I made a typing mistake and put 25% instead of 2.5% for the 10cc 'In Concert' show and was seriously reprimanded. I'm 64 now and still remember the producer's face when I had to apologise to him. RIP Johnnie Stewart.

Whatever your mistake was - was it as bad as David Cameron calling the Brexit referendum?

If he can hold his head high, so can you, sister.

Former NHS administrator. I once sent out meeting papers to 40 committee members, 4 of whom were laypeople. One paper contained names, addresses and dates of people who'd had certain serious medical incidences in the past year. To be fair I hadn't looked at the spreadsheet, just forwarded it on when a senior colleague said we needed to discuss the issue. I didn't realise she meant discuss the ISSUE and not the PAPER. One of the lay members opened it on their Yahoo mail on an airport internet kiosk!
I immediately recalled the email once my boss told me what I'd done and had to call data security and tell them what I'd done. They investigated for 6 months but I kept my job because i reported it right away.

I once worked as PA to MD of building firm and it was among my tasks to insure all the cars and vans. I tried many times to get the details needed to insure the van of 'Irish Olly' and he was always to busy to give them to me. I have to say in the end I forgot as it took so long and it wasn't until he crashed his van we discovered he had no insurance. I got fired for that!

I’ll never forget the look on a previous boss’ face when we unpacked the catering for an evening event. She had ordered a platter of sandwiches, cakes, wine, still/sparkling water and three cartons of orange juice. Except she’s ordered three of the little lunchbox sized cartons with a drinking straw attached

Thankfully the guests were wine drinkers!

I once credited £15000 to the account of the Iraqi ambassador instead of taking payment. I left that job very soon after. I wish I was making this up.

He was really nice about it and transferred the money back straight away BTW

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?

@BetterKateThanNever

I had been designing my friend's hen do invites on my work laptop during my lunch break and downloaded a penis border to put on the invite. Then got back to work and sent 3 emails to the CEO, an important client and my manager, all with a penis border. Thankfully they all saw the funny side and the CEO sent back a reply with the same border.

This is brilliant!

I work in a hotel and we have to do water flushing in all unused rooms for h&s. Over lockdown we had the whole hotel to flush. I accidentally left all taps in one bathroom for 3 days until that floor was flushed again. Flooded the place. This was a brand new room as well that had only just been refurbished and hadn't even been used. Everything was ruined because of the steam. My managers took it really well.

19 years old. Senior director was having an affair with senior PA (my manager). They’d had a row about him going on holiday with his wife who he was supposed to be leaving

He asked me to send her flowers and a note he dictated.

Sent to the wife instead. By accident of course