Mistake at work- please make me feel better

[wheo]

Made a big mistake at work which resulted in a significant delay for a client who is furious. Waiting to speak to my boss about it now.

Please share some stories of work fuck ups to make me feel better!!

Hope all went well.

In my first week of one job I accidentally reprogrammed the telephone system so every time someone's desk phone rang, everyone's desk phone rang. Every desk in the entire place.

Own your mistake, human error, we can all identify with that. Look for ways to address the fallout and prevent it happening again and you'll be fine. Good luck for your meeting.

Bad luck. Everyone makes mistakes, it's how you acknowledge, apologise for and learn from it that counts.

In a previous job, my boss once shipped £80k-worth of groundskeeping machinery to a customer in Spain, rather than the customer in Switzerland who had ordered it. That was fun.

Plenty more work nightmare stories (as well as excellent advice) to be found here: wait, what?! — Ask a Manager

Best wishes to you. x

Working as a private carer and visiting an apartment in a kind of assisted living building. First day of work. Making the lady dinner not knowing there was a bloody heat detector alarm placed above her cooker. Set the fire alarms off to every one of the 120 apartments and common areas, made an ungodly racket for around 40 mins until the fire brigade turned up with 3 firemen who switched it off 🤦🏼‍♀️

How about being responsible for booking 70+ seats in a hotel eventroom, and catering, and AV equipment, the whole conference. Then, finding out TWO days before that you booked the 31st instead of the 13th!

And that's why I don't work there anymore.

Age 16 I once booked someone a holiday in the wrong month - did March instead of February, both were Wednesday 10th

Luckily the couple were retired and thought it was hilarious and just went on the later date, but I was bloody lucky - got a reminder to be more careful but nothing else

My boss forgot to check passport & visa requirements for a couple's honeymoon and they were turned away at the airport. We sorted them a different one but it cost a fortune and he wanted one of the other staff to take the flak! We said no and he was shitty to us all as he got a bollocking

Worst was when my admin sent the wrong pricing to our 2 top clients. They both had the same first name and got each other's costs
Unfortunately she was fired - they both demanded the best costs of both price lists and it cost us hundreds of thousands

I used to run the social media channels for a certain digital television provider. During the Leveson inquiry, I posted to my personal Facebook page, "Mr Burns and Smithers and Rupert and James Murdoch. Never seen together in the same room."

Not my personal Facebook.

You'll be fine, OP

Spilled a very small but very expensive volume of medicine all over my workstation. £18k gone in less than two seconds. The manager was surprisingly calm about it.

First job, back in the 80s. Was asked to organise a cocktail party to celebrate someone's retirement. I ordered canapés and nibbles for 50 people.

Nobody had told me it was a small, intimate gathering of about a dozen people. Oops.

A party with 4x the amount of food sounds like my idea of a decent party, tbh!

There was a great thread on this a while back. One of my favourites (for want of a better word) was the poster who, when working as a community carer for a new client, went to wrong address and put the wrong elderly lady to bed. A completely baffled elderly lady who didn’t receive care visits and just meekly let herself be helped into her nightie and tucked into bed by a total stranger at 7pm.

🤣🤣**🤣🤣🤣

I once arrived at a work event in a taxi. Lots of people waiting outside chatting. Was a bit nervous because I was new. Opened the taxi door into the path of an oncoming bus, which took the entire door off. Taxi driver tore me a new one, understandably. More than 20 years have passed, but I still die inside when I think about it!

Really!? 😂😂

As a lawyer I always tell juniors a mistake is time or money. Be thankful you aren't a doctor. Time or money mistakes can be fixed.

I forgot to cancel an arrest warrant for someone whose solicitor had arranged a new date for them to attend court. They got arrested and held over the weekend as the police didn’t believe them 😬

I always tell my staff I don’t mind sorting out genuine errors, but I do mind sorting out when someone has tried to cover it up!

1. Sent $ 50 million to the wrong customer over a bank holiday. Eye watering overdraft charges and a vvv unhappy manager.
2. Didn't pay the IT bill for a large events co. Result, no phone and no internet for anyone until panic phone call and a faster payment to get it back up and running.

I once covered for the big boss's PA for several months. Think global CEO with complex travel arrangements, lots of meetings, etc. All went well until my very last day covering the role. He rang from Heathrow after a transatlantic flight asking where his car was. I'd forgotten to book it. Cue me frantically ringing his regular driver. I had to fess up. He ended up in a black cab off the rank. He and I survived, but I was mortified at the time.

@Sammysquiz exactly what I say too!

Priceless!😂😂😂

Years and years ago on here there was a post by a new detective who went authoritatively into a crime scene and tripped over the body 😬

These threads always make me glad to be an engineer, where my calculations go through line by line check, methodology review, and approval, before ever getting near the client. 😅

Plenty more work nightmare stories (as well as excellent advice) to be found here: wait, what?! — Ask a Manager

Some absolute doozies on that site. They make every place I've worked look like beacons of sanity.

Especially if there was 4 x the amount of cocktails to go with it!