Made an expensive mistake at work..please cheer me up with your similar stories

[PollyCazaletWannabe]

Discovered a couple of weeks ago that I had made a mistake at work. I'm a head of department in a school and I entered some candidates for the wrong A level exam paper- it should have been option B and I entered them for option A!! Discovered it in time and the students and parents will never know, but found out today that it will cost my school £1400 to rectify, as we have to pay late entry fees. (Which is probably going to need to come out of my department budget, as it was my mistake).

ARGH WHAT A TWAT I AM.

Does anyone have any similar stories to make me feel better please?

Thats small potatoes. Try working in finance.

I get that, but in a small school like mine, it very much does make a difference, as the budgets are small

I ordered some things for work from my Amazon account but using my company credit card. I forgot to change the default card back so for 4 months did all my Amazon purchases on the work card! I was horrified when I realised and had to Teams call the finance department to confess, the things I bought would never have been noticed as they were the kind of things I might buy for my job but it totalled up to a few hundred pounds. Finance boss just laughed and sent me a bill for it, which I immediately paid!

Oh dear @alloutofcareunits , that sounds embarrassing!

I lost one workplace a £10,000,000 contract by simply forgetting a tender deadline. I had it all ready to go but 12pm came and went and I completely forgot to submit. It was public sector so no wiggle room on the deadline.

I've learned all you can do is own up right away, work out what went wrong and make changes so it can't happen that way again.

I work in training.
At a previous company I booked the trainer and the room and catering etc.

Forgot to advertise the course and invite the delegates.

£5k down the drain.

I was so upset to have wasted all that money. I even cried (much younger. My manager was so kind about it and even laughed when I offered to pay back the money in installments). I had to fess up to various teams who thought they were getting this training about what I'd done as we then couldn't afford to run it "again"

Feel crap for 5 minutes then remind yourself we are only human. Have a big glass of wine and count your blessings - you noticed before the kids sat down to the wrong paper in the exam hall!!!

Crikey @LordSnot , that is a bit more than £1400!

You're right @WingingIt101 . Them sitting down to the wrong paper REALLY wouldn't have been a good thing!!

(Although I did once work with someone who taught the students the wrong Shakespeare text for their English A level. THAT was bad!)

Yep, yours pales in comparison!

@PollyCazaletWannabe it was very embarrassing 😂 I'm usually known for being very laid back but I almost had a meltdown, started telling the finance guy he could look at my current account to show I'm not in debt and could easily pay the bill, and that my colleagues and head of service would vouch for my honesty! The items were very ordinary including an iron for my mother, kindle books, craft materials, a foldable picnic table, all things I could have got away with putting through work which made it look even worse as I most likely would never have been found out!

You might not have won the contract though? I thought a tender just the first stage?

It's not relevant to the OP's thread to go into it all but we would've got the contract if we'd submitted a compliant bid.

Oh I wasn't in anyway trying to belittle you I'm sorry I was trying to make you feel better

Ugh @LordSnot one of my line managees did that once (although for a lot less- about £0.5m). That cold dread when they realised. Small voluntary sector org, we would have won it as well.

I had to take it on the chin as well- I should have made sure she'd done it. She was so gutted it was a week before she could come back to work.

I accidentally made a very large retailer pay over £1m in tax they shouldn't have because I used the wrong code…..
They took it rather well…

All our late entry fees, there are some every year, come out of the Exams budget.

You've made a mistake, it happens, a bit harsh to take it from your department budget? We would expect most of this year's department budgets to be mainly used by now anyway. Exam budgets have more flex due to the nature of what you are paying for.

In an admin role I got in a big firm when I was at uni I accidentally faxed a tender the wrong way up so blank pages were sent not the v detailed proposal all the senior managers had worked on.

They weren’t allowed to resubmit it as the deadline had long passed once it was discovered.

The good news is that I haven’t thought about it in the intervening years until I read this thread so hopefully you’ll be the same too, OP.

And at least you discovered it before exam day!

Hundreds of £1000's OP on sending documents to print with a typo in them. It wasn't just the monetry cost it was the environmental one - just imagine tonnes of colour brochures heading from the print machine straight to the skip.

I never witnessed this atrocity as the printers was external and the bill was just processed via finance. My manager just shrugged and said it is what it is. Nobody cared! I still feel bad for the environment. I also still think of it as torching the cost of a decent four bed house.

I worked in a shop on the till which were right by the door. It was January and the automatic doors opening were making me freezing so I plugged in a fan heater to keep me warm. I melted the till and it wouldn't open, and they had to shut the shop until another could be sourced.

I was working on a bank trading floor, one of my clients wanted to sell us some EUR and buy GBP. I got it the wrong way round and sold him EUR and bought GBP. To get the trade the right way round for the client, I had to reverse the original trade and then do the correct one. It cost about £30k. I did gain a husband out of of it though as I ended up marrying the currency trader who sorted out my almighty mess for me!

Of course it is, but to put it in context my entire primary school's budget for a year for all resources (all stationery, exercise books, art and craft materials, new resources for subjects like science etc, reading books) is £2000. It's about the percentage of the budget surely.

Thanks everyone - these are making me feel much better!
@edwinbear what a great story! I can't think who I might marry as a result of my ineptitude, but I'll keep an eye out 😂

My husband sent the wrong company a payment of £38 million as a trainee finance analyst (oil and gas). The company were able to get the money back. Husband ended up staying at the company for over 8 years.

@WestAtlantic exactly - the £1400 is almost 3/4 of my department's yearly budget (although I think we might be able to use some of this year's and some of next year's to spread the cost a bit, thank goodness)