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 ?

A colleague I used to with with was doing sorting out the food delivery at work, her job was to inform the manager/owner if we needed any more food/products if they hadn't been delivered ready for the next week. So she text the owner asking for 'shit rolls' when she meant to ask for white rolls! The owner replied "don't worry we can order toilet rolls with our bla bla company"
Needless to say this went down a right treat with the whole company!

Dropped a whole bowl of hot spag bol on a customers lap when I was waitressing. There was a lot of water in the bowl from the pasta and it literally flew out of the bowl 😂 then got her a free lemonade to compensate and as I put it on the table the straw lifted out and flicked lemonade in her eye. She was absolutely livid with me 😂😂😂

My first full time job- refunding a customer €5,200, instead of €1,200. Luckily he was very sound about it and returned it, or I'd have had to come up with €4K

Not my fck up but when I was doing my post-grad the senior lab tech asked me to show the new tech how to use the instrument I was doing my thesis on. Warned him at least 3 times to close the lid very carefully, as it had delicate and very expensive internal parts. First time I turned my back on him, he slams* the lid down and you could just hear this awful crunch. Worse, he tried telling the senior guy that I never told him to he careful with the lid 🙄. Senior guy lost the plot at that point and said "Can you not read?" and pointed at the sign literally on the machine saying "Close lid VERY CAREFULLY please". Cost thousands to repair. He did not lose his job, but it was the start of his well earned reputation for being a bit of a knob.

My dh once hit the gas main and a whole towns gas had to be shut off . All the men were thrilled they had to stay till it was fixed . Past 10pm on a Friday night working with torch lights. His company even more thrilled when they got the bill for the fire service &clean up

I can tell you about the fuck up by someone at the florist/funeral home that did my Gran's funeral last year. Ordered some flowers from myself and sister, with the word 'Gran' in white with yellow roses. Between the florist and the funeral directors, our 'Gran' flowers somehow went to the wrong funeral! I should imagine that would be a fairly red faced moment to turn up to the funeral of a deceased male and start unloading 'Gran' flowers before the the mourners.

@TSBelliot that’s skin crawlingy horrific.

Dropped (deleted) a customers live database instead of the test one. It was 4:45pm so they were still working. I knew there was a backup from an hour before, but an hours transactional data was gone.

Explaining that one took some creativity, but you know, network connectivity between the application and database server was flakey for that hour I guess. Thank god they bought the excuse, god knows why as the logs had no errors and they didn't get any errors displayed.

Can't believe I got away with that.

A few years ago I was checking my online banking app as it was pay day and discovered I had an extra 14 grand in my account! I stood straight up and showed my colleague in shock!! I rang my bank and they said they couldn't send a payment back and advised me to set up another account and hold it there. I rang the bank where it came from and they weren't interested, they had fulfilled the transaction and all the names and details were correct. They obviously couldn't give me the sender's details because of confidentiality. I panicked about having all this money. All I had was a postcode as reference and when I googled it it was a random house in London. I really didn't know what to do. Then 2 weeks later I got a phone call out of the blue from a solicitor for a mortgage company. We have a commercial mortgage with this company. Someone had picked up the wrong file (our file ) and sent the monies to us instead of another recipient. This poor lady was close to tears and I could hear the panic in her voice. She was really relieved that I still had it all and couldn't stop apologising and thanking me. I felt so sorry for her.

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.

There has been a few, I once gave someone a £6k discount on something instead of £600. I was awarded an abacus at the end of year awards 😬

Then there was the time I had to drive a sick colleague home. One of the managers gave me his company car keys and I didn’t see this old rusty metal cover attached to the wall next his car. I didn’t reverse out straight and there was an almighty noise and the car was shuddering, I then started going forward again making it worse. Once I stopped I got out of the car, it was trashed so I got back in reversed again, making it worse and drove all the way to his house mumbling O fuck o fuck all the way there and back. When I had the courage to call the manager and ask him to meet me in the car park he burst out laughing and told me it wasn’t actually his company car it belonged to the CEO who was on holiday. The car was completely fucked down the passenger side of the car.

I can't even talk about it because if I do and anyone finds out I'll have to kill myself.

@Shehasadiamondinthesky

I can't even talk about it because if I do and anyone finds out I'll have to kill myself.

You're H aren't you?

@AlmostSummer21

Your client was upset, which is GOOD, the silver lining here is that if they're alive to rant/cry/whatever, they're not dead & the situation can be resolved 🤷🏻‍♀️

Exactly this!! Might feel like a monumental fuck up but no one died and the world still spins.

No point worrying about it, it's done now. Chalk it up to experience and drink more wine

I once set the toaster on fire. An ambulance and two fire engines turned up.

Unless she's a surgeon

I ran one of my students over with the school minibus... luckily there were no injuries!

@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....

OMG....this could have been so much worse!!!

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....

Surely nobody can beat this one!! Unless you are a surgeon and removed the wrong limb.

Not me but DF early in his engineering career designed a piece of machinary to fit onto another piece. It was sent out to the field but couldn't be used as he had designed it the wrong way round. £1m quid it cost to make. You know that situation when you put flatpack furniture together and its the wrong way round...like that times 50,000! Anyway he stressed about this over a week and eventually went into the head honcho's office to confess and face the sack. He just said oh about that yeah we sent it somewhere else, don't worry about it!! DF went on to a long career in design engineering. And I noticed always read the instructions when putting furniture together!

My toast got stuck in the toaster and started to burn. I was desperately flapping the smoke and shouting at colleagues to open a window, but too late! There was loads of smoke and the fire alarm went off. The entire school had to evacuate. It was lunchtime and raining, so it didn’t go down brilliantly. To avoid the fire brigade being called I had to confess to the Head in front of the school. Toaster was a write off as well.

Oh I dropped a bottle of Peroni in someones lap at Pizza Express. They were always awkward to balance on trays. Its was Valentines Day. I tell myself I boosted his credibility by the way he handled it in good humour , his gf thought it highly amusing.

@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.

Bloody hell

Not my fuckup but I used to work in the marketing department for a major university. Shit pay and I was totally shat upon & hated it.

I was very shy, only 18, very much the junior given all the shit jobs and looked down on.

The marketing dept ordered huge, incredibly expensive bespoke panels for use on a campaign to entice overseas students to the Uni. They all fucked off for a boozy lunch (didn't invite me as I was
far too unimportant).

I recall they returned from boozy lunch, to look at the newly delivered panels & all stood around congratulating one another. I took great pleasure in pointing out a glaring spelling mistake on every single one of the panels which they had to reprint later at great expense.

Spelling mistake was glorious (think University of East Angular)

I left without a backwards glance not long after...

Years ago I was volunteering for a political party during campaign time. I had access to their Twitter account to do updates and one lunchtime got confused and thought I was on mine but accidentally retweeted a post about a friends multiple bike theft on their account. The horror. It actually proved quite a popular post though!

Worked as a waitress when I was a student and there was a big party in a box, with a divider and the kitchen on the other side.

On first day I ran out of work surface so innocently placed tray with some dirty items on the top of the cupboards to deal with later. Unfortunately it sloped downwards and the whole lot crashed violently onto the table / diners on the other side.