What's the worst mistake you've made at work?

[Againstthegrainn]

Mine isn't the worst mistake but enough for an email to be sent to my manager along the lines of "please speak to againsthegrain and sort it out! This is getting very annoying now".

I kept sending forms out with wrong dates/details. How this happened was I was editing a word document and when i'd go to attach it, it would send an old version rather than the one I edited. My fault for not opening and checking once attached.

Only happened ocassionally before but I kept doing it this morning. So embarrassed now. Make me feel better? Share your stories 🤣

This happened a lifetime ago and it still makes my blood run cold.
Post was sent out using a franking machine [these probably went out with the ark, but it 'stamped' post and you paid for it all in total on one regular bill]
I weighed and priced a parcel and then sent out a heap of ordinary letters without resetting the postage price on the machine, so every letter was £££ to send.
Woops. And still cringing.

Just started a new job in the computer room for a large supermarket in the 1980's.
Had a small amount of training but not the full monty.
I was asked to enter some numbers as a practice but told do NOT press
Control D. Yes I don't know what came over me but I did press it.
It seems those buttons wiped clean the salary of all managers and above for the month.
It took 5 days to get the information back up. They were paid 2 weeks late.

3 months later another new colleague did the same thing. After that another safe guard was put in place and only available on one computer. To this day don't understand why control D was the management key.
All other staff were under control x.

I worked there for 15 years so I was forgiven.

I sent £25,000 to an incorrect bank account. It happened on Christmas Eve and absolutely spoilt my Christmas as I felt so guilty. We eventually got the money back, but it was still a bloody awful time. I now triple check bank account details when sending money.

Shagging my boss at the Christmas party.

Back in the 80s when the only computers were stand alone, I had heard that if you press control alt and delete at the same time it would delete every document or program on your PC. So I tried it thinking that it would say "are you sure" or similar but it didn't so I lost everything and I mean everything that I had ever produced along with wordperfect programme, excel and other databases that had been set up.

I had a friend in IT who I rang that evening - it was about 5pm on a Friday so the worst time possible. All she did was laugh but she came over on the Monday morning and re-installed everything. Amazingly it was never discovered by management.

I was once testing a function on the system - user name change explaining to some grad trainees how it was done.. I changed it back (it was my own)..! Later that same day I sent out a global comms from the head of technology 🙈 under the user name 'the most super dooper girl in the world' on behalf of the global head of technology ffs. I woke up to some interesting emails the next day!! Fortunately everyone found it amusing. We later discovered the change took 24 hrs to reset back.

Left a highly highly confidential document in my car. Car got broken into. File stolen (it was in my bag with my laptop). Had to report ourselves to the ICC. Two weeks later, an old man found the laptop bag with file AND LAPTOP in his front garden. But awful for all involved.

Nothing I’ve done is very interesting but a colleague once accidentally charged an elderly lady £2,500 instead of £25.00 and didn’t realise until a week later.

Ah yes - and in the good old days of DOS, you could input 'del .' with the same effect.

As a med student I;

Told a man who had jaundice he had a nice tan

Pulled the emergency buzzer because my patients eye wasn't responding to light (it was a glass eye)

Asked a baby where she was hiding her leg whilst picking her up to do an examination as I thought she'd scrunched her legs into one leg hole. Nope, she only had one leg.

I am a great surgeon but my god I made some clangers as a student !!

Farted in front of the CEO. 40 years ago, I can laugh about it now!

I accidentally processed a £10 cheque someone was paying in for £1000. I was very new to the job and, no, they didn't sack me.

WordPerfect- That's uncovered some memories!!

Working as a beauty therapist, used blue/purple tint on eyebrows ! Wiped
it off and thought Fck 🤣 Put dark brown over the top and styled it out! She came back saying can you make them as dark
as you did last time!!

This properly made me laugh.

When my friend was a medical student in A&E she said to a guy who'd got a bruised and bloodied face from a Saturday night punch-up "Oh, you've been in the wars haven't you?"
He was a squaddie who'd been on a bender on his first week back in the UK after six months in Iraq 😬
Fortunately, he found it funny.
Unfortunately, so did the thousand other squaddies that were with him so there was no chance of her keeping her faux pas quiet.

sent out the wrong year-end fx rates to the entire finance department of a massive listed company and all its subsidiaries.

left audit files in a black cab on the way back to the office- this was when audits were still done in hard copy so there was no back up of 2 weeks audit work. The taxi driver took them to a police station and by some massive fluke the desk sergeant’s wife worked at my audit firm, recognised them from the cover format and called her to send someone to collect them.

As a relatively new and inexperienced bank clerk over 40 years ago, I somehow left one of the two front entrances to a city centre bank unlocked on a Friday night. By the Saturday, the police discovered it was ajar, and traced the bank manager, who had to drive 30 miles from his house to lock it up!

Thinking that HR cared when you called out bullying!

I ordered the wrong car when I worked for a garage. Realised what I'd done when I checked the confirmation. Fessed up to the boss but they let me go. Fucking hated the job anyway

FX trading error with a $350k loss. :(

Working at a summer camp in the US (kitchen assistant). The most scenic part of the camp was sometimes hired out for weddings at the weekend. One Friday there was a music and games event for the campers. We did a bbq, that went well. The main chef had done iced cakes for after. We (the assistants) were told to go and get "the cakes" out of the walk in fridge and set them out for the campers and staff. We located three large iced cakes in boxes and duly set them out with plates, and cutlery.

Chef came running over, furious. Apparently the cupcakes we should have put out were in a different part of the fridge and the cakes that were by now half eaten were the tiers of the cake for the wedding the next day. We were in a lot of trouble. I don't actually know what happened with the wedding but I assume a replacement cake was sourced at great expense.

In the days of faxing, where a fax machine doubled as a photocopier, I went to send a fax to a local supplier. There was about 20 pages of non-confidential stuff to send so I popped it in the machine and left the fax room to make a cup of tea. I then got chatting to people and didn’t return to collect the paper for about 20 minutes. Turns out I’d used the photocopy function, putting an 11 digit number in, rather than the fax number there was copied paper EVERYWHERE as the huge machine stored hundreds of pieces of paper. I ran down the ink cartridges and cost the organisation a fortune in paper costs. My boss was not happy

Hahaha! I did this too when working at local Council. Councillors were v cross.

In my role I was allowed to give customers a certain amount of free product if we cocked up. Dispatch sent something late that was a bit of an inconvenience so I emailed the customer offering 50 Meters of free product - only I didn't I offered 500!!! We would have had to honour it but I phoned him (knew him well) and begged and he agreed we didn't have to.
I told my boss later and we laughed about it

We had a work night out not far from our office one Friday. Myself and my friend decided after we had had a few too many drinks to go back to the office to pick up our bags / coats. We had keys to the office but when we got in we had forgotten / were too drunk to remember the alarm code and set off the alarm. We ran out and didn't double lock the door to the way it had been locked. We then hid nearby and watched as one of our bosses had to come in and fix it up.

The next day everyone was asked and of course everyone denied. I am getting embarrassed even thinking about this now - this was about 30 years ago.