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!!

I also fell for a scam email asking me to change a company's bank details and £ 60k went to the scammer. Luckily the scammer's bank was on the ball and blocked all but £ 1,500 of it. We had the finance manager and accounts person in to discuss the issue of their security (things like leaving new passwords on postit notes on PCs, that sort of thing), and how we were tightening procedures on our side to prevent something like that happening again - and I'm still convinced they knew all about it from the body language and total lack of outrage.

And they were a security company, just as icing on the cake.

When I worked in banking, I once got a call from customer's finance manager.

The previous day, he had transferred €2,000 to the company's solicitor and €1.5 million to a staff member they had fired the week before after he was arrested at work.

The amounts were the wrong way around.
The €1.5m was to purchase a new premise.

The €2k was final wage payment.

Obviously, the property purchase fell through as they didn't have another €1.5m available.

The arrested guy had skipped the country after being realised on bail.

It took several months as the man on the runs bank account ended up forming part of a large criminal investigation internationally so all funds were frozen.

We managed to get €1.2million back nearly a year afterwards.

Yes, he got fired.

That made me laugh (although obv a very sad situation)!

You ok op? Hope you’ve your feet up and are having an ok evening

I once had to call someone 2 days before their holiday and tell them they couldn't go as I'd not checked the dimensions of the lady's wheelchair properly with the airline and they couldn't carry it. It was a specialist chair so couldn't be replaced and she couldn't travel without it.

I spoke to them, refunded them, arranged an enormous bunch of flowers to be sent to them, and then went and sat in the car park and sobbed.

I will never, ever make that mistake again. Thankfully the clients did not go as apoplectic as they had every right to do, I think they could tell how distraught I was on the phone.

I've got two that I still cry inside about almost 30 years later. It really brings me down when I'm reminded (like now!) so I just remind myself that it made me doubly conscientious and a better worker afterwards.

Just admit what's happened, apologise sincerely, learn from it and resolve to be better in future.

A colleague of mine at a previous company. We looked after housing for international employees who were posted to the UK for a set period of time. A lot of them were extremely senior and very busy people. Colleague failed to inform two of them that their US driving licences could only be used for 12 months here, and they'd have to pass a UK test to continue driving.

One exec - fortunately it was her husband who did the driving and he had to do an intensive one week driving course and luckily passed first time. The other person it was a nightmare as she travelled extensively and we needed to send off her passport to apply for something. The company ended up shelling out for months for taxis for her and her husband to take taxis everywhere.

I signed off on a rush order of £50k worth of packaging for Banoffee Pie. When it arrived, to go into production the next day, I realised I'd misread the sample and that there were actually 3 'F's.

I hate banofffee pie.

I was one of the copy editors responsible for proof reading for the printers and 10,000 cards were printed that said Happy Eater instead of Happy Easter. The boss dug the proofs out and there were my initials (and my colleague's who was the second checker) at the bottom, signing it off as approved. The cards were pulped.

At the same place we designed a card that said happy birthday aunt with the word aunt in a handwriting style cursive font. There was a gap in the letter a and it looked exactly like it said happy birthday cunt. Those were also pulped.

Not a dramatic story but last week I misread a rota and turned up half an hour late. I was due to open the building and some clients were waiting outside, one who had booked and paid extra for the early time slot. My colleague and manager had apologised but I went out of my way to corner all the waiting clients over the next few days and apologise personally, I think it helped. Everyone told me it was ok, forget about it but I took it really badly, I ended up in tears. I absolutely hate letting people down or being thought of as unreliable. I will forever be obsessively double checking the rota.

@Schoolrunmumbun love these stories!!

I forgot to tell a large group of touring customers that they were moving hotels the next night. They came back from their day out to find all their stuff in bin bags in the hotel reception. I also hadn’t booked a coach for the transfer so also needed to find another hotel for that night. Not easy for a large group. I still cringe now.

When my DH first retired, he volunteered as a patient transport driver.
He went to a sheltered housing home, to transport a chap a couple of hours drive away for eye cancer surgery.
Jack was waiting for him when he arrived, he even double checked with a staff member that this was Jack, awaiting patient transport.......
Do I need to say more?

Not me, but I was working for this organisation when this happened.

A major conference was arranged to mark the anniversary of an event that was important to an associated organisation. The programmes came back from the printer's for distribution prior to the conference - with the wrong year on the front cover.

It was evidently decided the budget wouldn't run to reprinting. A staff member whose job might have slack periods during the day had to sit there with a black biro in quiet moments, manually altering the date on the covers of all the programmes.

I have no idea who made the initial mistake and who didn't proofread properly. My job had nothing to do with any of it.

I was working as a holiday rep and had 4 three day pre-booked theme park tickets worth hundreds of euros ready to deliver to a family when they arrived.

Another family were leaving early and gave me their tickets. I'd got on really well with another family that didn't seem to have a lot, so I offered them the tickets the family had left, but stupidly gave them the brand new tickets!! I only noticed after they had headed off for the day and panicked all day. They later returned and thankfully still had the tickets that still looked new.

Next problem was that I expected them to run out when I gave them to the other family, but I got away with it. Never forgotten this and always been over-the-top careful ever since. It would have been at my own loss, so I was very lucky!

😨Correcting with a biro must have looked so rubbish, I think any other solution would have been better - do without programmes, take the cover off completely, leave the wrong date and have someone creative invent a bollocks backstory to cover it: "Now, you may be wondering why this brochure says 1906 not 1908 - that's because although we were founded in 1908, our founder actually made his first note about the future business on the back of a fag packet on 14 September 1906 ..."

Hope it went OK, there's nothing to do but be upfront and apologise and say how you're going to avoid it in future.

In my first job I corrected the foreword-writer's name on a book cover proof and then was proud of myself for catching it. Then as soon as the copies came back I realised I'd actually 'corrected' it to a wrong spelling. I fessed up, I hoped it might blow over but it was someone quite important in their field and they were furious and I heard the MD (it was a small business) apologising to him on the phone. I bought her a bottle of wine and a card to say sorry and she was really good about it, she said these things happen to everyone and so on. My manager, however, never forgave me and chased me out of the job (illegally, but it was so low-paid it wasn't worth getting into an constructive dismissal fight) - which a colleague told me was totally unfair and that everyone else thought it was unfair as well. But my career recovered and I stayed in the same field!

Sent a comms out to everyone in Tech instead of our team. About 75k people

They locked the system down after that so you couldn’t send anything anywhere lol

@Schoolrunmumbun I raise you pulping of 40,000 books due to my not catching something I was specifically asked to look out for. When the error was presented to me by my boss I actually said 'you'll just have to shoot me'. I have others - in different kinds of jobs. It's astonishing I'm still employed.

Correcting with a biro must have looked so rubbish

It did, and this was supposed to be a prestigious event, within the organisations concerned. There was no fudging the date - the event being commemorated is in the history books, though probably not well known beyond people who are specialists in the field.

Not me, but a friend that I worked with - we used to take card payments over the phone, and she took a payment on a Friday afternoon for £2k... except, she put through £22k by mistyping it, and the payment went through! The worst part was that she had to phone the client to admit the mistake, and tell him that he wouldn't get the money back until the Tuesday as the Monday was a bank holiday! The client was actually lovely about it thankfully!

Sent my boss to Saudi without a visa. He wasn't let in and had to fly back home.

😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂

Not so much a mistake, just a good example of how rubbish I was at work:

When I was a teenager, I worked in a busy restaurant and I was shockingly rubbish. I just couldn't cope with the number of tables I had, there were about 8 tables waiting to order, I couldn't cope and just went home without telling anyone.

Then I decided I still wanted to work there, so I rang the manager and made up something to explain where I disappeared off to. I still kept my job somehow!