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 ?

@Hypie OMG! Please tell me the shit hit the fan big time, and he got his comeuppance?

I love that hypie

Hypie it disgusts me that he involved you in his personal business at all.

@OurSurveySaid I imagine it was something like the person phoning in would let the phone ring twice before hanging up and then immediately ringing again.

@BlowDryRat

As an office junior, I once ordered 20 reams of A4 paper instead of 20 packs. They were delivered to the small office on a lorry. I was horrified as they just keep unloading and unloading. Luckily my boss thought it was hilarious. I found a new job before we ran out of paper.

Ha! Did very similar, I was given the task of ordering the consumables for our print room a very long time ago,got the quantities mixed up, instead of ten bottles of tippex we had ten boxes of 20 bottles etc. Think they were still finding boxes of pens when they demolished the college five years later.

@Howtomakeevery1 that’s a horrible one. Did you put the milk in the meat kitchen? So easy to do

Quite a few actually. Can’t really reveal
ANY of them as they are so outing. Some
Deeply embarrassing mortifying and please swallow me now inducing. Some because of bloody awful processes and lack of procedure where I ended up looking like I had done something REALLY REALLY REALLY dodgy, got suspended and they found out it was THEIR FAULT. Seriously. I imagine everyone has their moment. You only live once. It’s just another experience to be had. Apologise, fix it if you did it, learn, move on.

Yes milk in the meat kitchen. It was an office not a restaurant so really not very obvious at all

I worked as a waitress at a wedding venue when I was 16.

I recognised a guest who was at one of the tables I was looking after. She was known for her fashion segments on breakfast tv.

The tables were round with 12 people on them and were quite crowded. When offering tea/coffee, the cups and saucers were already on the table so we had to lean in and pour from coffee pots.

When pouring coffee, I accidentally spilled coffee down this lady from the tv's white fur coat which was on the back of her chair. I pretended I didnt notice and carried on. She noticed but didn't say anything - I'm guessing she didnt want to cause a scene on someone elses wedding day. I can only imagine how much the coat must have cost and cant believe she didnt at least try to have cleaning costs reimbursed. Although I dont know if coffee would even come out of a white fur coat

Work for a bank. A few yrs ago I took 100k from my client, followed it up with an email and asked him to call me the next morning. Well he did. And turned the air blue.....I had accidently keyed in 1 mil. I took his business into the red overnight. I fixed it immediately. Luckily he is still with me now and likes to remind me in a funny way 'Of That one time......' now and again.

@Wowzel

I vaccinated someone with the wrong vaccine... I then had to call her back and ask her to come back for the right one. On the upside, it meant her tetanus was up to date....

A child I vaccinated was thrashing about so violently that I missed their thigh and gave my finger an MMR jab. It was swollen for months!

I had a part time job in a restaurant during my uni years. On one particularly horrendous shift I managed to spill a tray of drinks all over a customer's coat and drop spaghetti in the same customer's lap. He was fine about it but his wife was livid. On the same shift I had a missing payment for a table of 12. I don't know if they left it on the table and it was stolen or they did a runner but I was made to cover it. It was a rubbish job.

Not me but a friend who is a prison officer lost a master set of keys for the whole prison!

Final written warning and new locks in the prison (at vast expense) and all was sorted.

Whilst working for a large investment platform many moons ago, there were two different types of product and in order to place deals a manual code had to be input, one for the first product and one for the second.

I was being supervised as I had just started training in this process yet still managed to input the same code twice, resulting in around 200 deal placements being doubled. Our minimum deal size was £5m per deal at the time. You don't need to know maths realise this was a big amount! I swear all the blood left my body when I realised that millions and millions of pounds worth of deals had been placed incorrectly and the same amount hadn't been placed at all!

Luckily the market movement meant that the deals we placed the following day to rectify the mistake meant the company actually profited. But it highlighted a HUGE risk and appropriate procedures were implemented shortly after. So I like to think I did them a favour 😂. Also, I'm still working there 17 years later!

Just remembered another (how many of us on this thread are in finance) -

A (relatively low rank) employee shared the same first name as the CEO - and requested a copy of his P60..

You can imagine what went wrong here...

In the 90s when paper was god, I doodled on the back of an official one off certificate. I was young and stupid (and bored) in an early admin role. I was horrified when I realised and had to 'lose' it which got me into probably more trouble as it was needed for manager to gain a travel visa but the doodle was included a self penned poem and omg I couldn't have taken the additional shame.

I also lost a roll of money from the petty cash tin and tbh they'd have been within their rights to fire or shop me. It turned up a year later when we were decorating and moving furniture but there was a year of feeling under suspicion.

I'm not a good administrator and I work in a completely different field now, no surprise.

Working in finance sounds terrifying. I have been a waitress, worst mistake was throwing away stock thinking it was something else and chef going mad. Think a really angry Gordon Ramsey type.

Not me but one of our customers, who were in financial trouble, had 1.5mil paid into their account mistakenly by a large government organisation.

Cue their bank closing their account because it cleared the overdraft, the company going into administration and us loosing a lot of money.

Oh, another vaccine one.
First day at the Covid vaccine clinic, Pfizer vaccine. We'd had loads of training on how fragile it is, can't knock it, can't drop it, can't make it bubbly, vials have to be mixed by carefully turning them over and back at snail speed without sloshing (very OTT stuff).
I go to get a vial out of the fridge, they are all in this pizza box type thing, of over 100 tiny little vials. Loads of people watching and as I pick one up super gently I knock another one over. Sharp intakes of breath all around me...
The vial had to be binned and it had 10 doses worth in, at the height of the January covid surge so I felt like I had literally murdered people with my vaccine wastage. It was mortifying

I did work experience at a fashion designer’s head office (quite well known) and managed to delete an ORIGINAL print design. They only had apple macs so I didn’t really know what I was doing as I only used windows (this was circa 2008) to this day I don’t know if they had systems in place to recover the original file...I like to think they did but by the way they were reacting to not being able to find the file on the system whilst I was sat there slowly sinking into my chair and wishing the ground would swallow me up made me think it probably really was gone forever.

I’ll never forget that.

worked in store office and was in charge of ordering, some companies I only had to tick boxes (pre computer days) they kept complaining that the cake was coming in pre packed when they wanted large ones to cut to customers size. It was weeks before they realised it was me ticking wrong box!

Probably the worst and biggest fuck up i made was shagging the chef while on duty! Learned my lesson on that one!

Published an obituary on someone who wasn't dead.

Not me, but years ago I worked for a bank in a small town. The staff members assigned to filling the ATM made a mistake when putting the notes in which meant the machine was dispensing £20 notes instead of £10. Obviously lots of people cottoned on to this and kept going back for 'free' money. The bank was able to sort it for our own customers and debit them accordingly but there was a competitor bank in the town which didn't have an ATM (so their customers used ours free of charge), we had an agreement that we could not charge for any errors. Cost the bank thousands.
I accidentally sent an inappropriate photo to a parent (I work in a school) instead of a colleague. I apologised profusely, but thankfully she found it hilarious. I still remember that feeling of utter dread when I realised what I'd done 🙈