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?

I quoted several people the incorrect housing allowance, those people then committed to leases based on the figures that I had quoted. By the time I realised, the leases we're signed and the company had to honour it, it cost about £30k 😫

Not an expensive mistake but a funny one. I used to do motors ads in the local paper and advertised a Nissan micra with forklift drive. Apparently the guy said "faultless drive". I looked like a right nob 😂.

My DM did the same in the mid 70s @bleughgreen - Jewish brothers owned a small local chain of jewellers in NW. She went with prawn cocktail and ham salad because, y'know, sophisticated 70s choices for these important men.

Perhaps they didn't always keep totally kosher as they just told her not to tell their wives 🤣

@PollyCazaletWannabe that's a hard one on a personal level surely?

Like I understand you say parents and children don't know. But 3/4 if the budget gone, and a head mistake. Are there conservative of that?

I ask as I many years ago made a similar mistake value wise on a legal aid application, as a trainee. The firm made me pay it back at a monthly amount so the staff did not suffer. Which was ironic given I was earning legal aid rates and them private.

*consequences. Not conservative

My phone today. I message a friend asking if she liked her new orange for walking her baby. How is that pram autocorrect?

@alloutofcareunits I've done that twice! First time was my prime renewal which went out on my work card as I'd accidently made it the default card for Amazon. The second was just last month when I booked my airport lounge and parking on my corporate card 🤣 In my defence I travel for work frequently and hadn't realised I was logged into my work account to book the airport stuff!

When I worked in corporate finance at an investment bank, we used to conduct highly confidential disposal processes, with project code names so it didn't leak out etc. It was imperative that no bidder knew the identity or the number of other bidders in the process as it could compromise the price we'd achieve for our selling client.

We had one process with only two buyers and I merrily emailed buyer no 1 the questions marked with private equity buyer no 2's name (in fairness I was very sleep deprived). The disposal was worth hundreds of millions to the client and our fee was a million plus. It could have resulted in losing one or both buyers and considerably lower offers.

I honestly thought I'd be sacked and confessed all to the managing director who laughed and was extremely forgiving. We're all human and mistakes happen. Better to be honest than try to cover it up (although I'd possibly have got away with mine in retrospect).

I used to work at a school, arrived at work one day to see all of the children being sent home as the school was closed..
one of the cleaners had gone home the night before having left the hot tap in her cleaning cupboard running.. plug still in the sink. Flooded the school kitchen and the condensation caused the sprinkler system to set off throughout the entire ground floor, fucked the electric and sacks upon sacks of work. I felt so sorry for her!

I agree with this. I work in finance across several secondary schools. This happens every year to a greater or lesser extent and we'd never make a dept pay out of their budget. Exam fees are huge but late entries are inevitable.

A teacher at my DC's school taught her 6th form the entire wrong A level syllabus. I am now wondering if she just entered them for the wrong exam. I think that is more likely. It was disastrous for the kids.

Many years ago I was an office junior in the personnel (HR) department in
an investment bank. I did the overtime sheets and my work wasn’t checked by my supervisor, 400 employees ended up getting the wrong pay as I’d messed something up. One woman had no money to take on her honeymoon, it was such a mess, I was only just 17 years old.

We got entered for the wrong computer science o level. It was the first time it was running and I assume now there were two boards running different syllabi and the teacher taught us the other one.
No one got higher than a C.

@EnglishGirlApproximately it's so easily done, but I should have paid more attention, it went on for months and I didn't even notice things weren't on my bill because I don't take much notice 🙄

A long time ago I did an A-level in English language and literature at night class. We were studying five books. My friend and I worked really hard at it. On the day of the exam we found we had to answer six literature questions, not five. I never knew whether our tutor knew or not. One of the other questions was about an Iris Murdoch book that I had read and had told her about in great detail just a couple of weeks before. Needless to say there was no sign of our teacher in that exam. My friend and I did well though!

In an admin role for a remortgaging company. I inputted the final redemption fee incorrectly and cost them a few hundred thousand 😫 I was on such a tiny wage working 5 days away with a 2 hour commute each way, I soon left and got over it

As a partner in a law firm my husband tells juniors who make mistakes and then worry about it that their error can at least be fixed with money whereas if they were doctors they couldn't be.

(Yes he may secretly be a bit pee'd off it costs money but at the end of the day shit happens and no one died!)

I used to work in the training department of a large, internationally known multimedia company. We had 30-odd courses coming up and I decided to get ahead and prepare all the supplies boxes for the course tutors in advance. I bought 30 sets of everything - packs of flipchart pens and paper, pens, highlighters, paper, post-its etc. It was only when the pallet of stationery arrived that I realised that I could have reused most of it as the boxes used to come back with supplies only lightly used.
I left 5 years later and they were still working through the stuff I bought in 1996. They probably still are.

And I once mis-measured and ordered myself a monstrous office desk. Mistake only realised when it arrived.

That's bloody outrageous as you should have adequate supervision so it was actually their error not yours.

Yeah my manager is always "nobody died, it's fine"
Even if he is eye rolling at me

At least you realised in enough time to order the correct exam papers.

Imagine only realising its the wrong exam paper on the day of the exam. I bet you would willingly pay more than £1400 to fix that on the actual day of the exam, if it would work.

(I do realise it is a big chunk of your budget... sorry. Poor schools, its rubbish being so strapped.)

Op- I was a pupil whose teacher entered us for the wrong GCSE history paper. Discovered in the exam hall, all of us flicking through the booklet trying to work out where the Irish history questions were. Then the teacher rushed in and said she was really sorry but they’d entered us for wrong exam (wrong century/country). She just said, remember it’s an evidence paper, read it carefully and make the most of it and then left! It was 1992 and transparency/apology wasn’t such a thing. School said they’d let exam board know and that was it. I’d imagine they’d be far more parental drama about that today..

A million years ago in a country far away I used to work in a bank, in the business accounts. It used to be common practice to pay for things in instalments by cheque, so you’d pay, say, £1000 in 4 instalments, I’d date a £250 cheque for today and the other 3 for the 03 of July, August and September. Businesses could, then, get a bank loan and the cheques were passed on to the bank and the bank would cash them when the date came. Sometimes cheques would bounce, and every so often the businesses would send someone in to collect the bounced cheques so they could be chased up. We were not supposed to give back the cheques that had loans on them, as they were collateral for the loan, but I did it once, and it was a massive amount, like £200K luckily the company noticed and were honest about it and just brought the cheque back. I was fairly new on the job and because the bank didn’t lose any money I only got a metaphorical slap on the wrist 😅at the time it would’ve taken me like 200 months to pay it back.

Not me but a colleague. She was scammed by someone who sent an invoice, pretending to be a senior manager of our company She paid it without questioning it - around £40k.

Your bosses are all more forgiving than my old boss. I put a couple of hundred Christmas cards through the franking machine 1st class instead of 2nd. You'd have thought I'd cost him a few million the fuss he made.