To ask for positive stories after a massive cock up at work?

[PoppinsMoppins]

Just that.

I've really fucked up. Sitting here stressing and can't think of anything else.

Have you got any experience of cocking up and it all being ok?

I couldn't sleep last night, so got up and put together a plan/brief on how to avoid similar things happening again.

I have had a lovely meeting with my manager this morning. I just said everything I needed to and shared my idea about some training for the team. I told me not to worry about it and then told me some other things people had done ( much worse than mine) that have all been forgotten.

Chose an amazing seafood buffet for a major client event. Sadly most of attendees were Jewish and quite rightly so made a huge fuss that they couldn't eat anything. The name of the client was a huge pointer of their religious beliefs and I should have been more on the ball.

Lots of minions made a huge huge deal of it but big boss thought it a hilarious mistake to make thankfully.

Your approach to this mistake sounds very professional. If you had been in my team, I would have been impressed.

Sounds like a good result from the event - and a helpful understanding boss as well.

I manage a team of 5. Not a week goes by without a mistake of various catastrophic proportions happening. I don't get annoyed - these things happen and they aren't don't intentionally. And that's why I'm there, to help sort it out. So don't think any of your managers will be annoyed or judging you. It won't be the first time this has happened and it certainly won't be the last.

Good outcome Poppins. Well done

Oh Poppins big hugs and I am so glad your manager was sympathetic and nice and I think your response was very professional, as other posters have said.

We've all been there. On my first day in my first ever job many moons ago I broke the photocopier. Doesn't sound much but it was a huge printing firm and a the copier was state of the art machine costing about 20 grand. It had a pivoting arm which enlarged things. I swung the arm across and it shattered the photocopy glass which then fell down into the body of the machine. It had to be replaced. EEEK

I used to support witnessses of crime giving evidence in court. Was supporting a young girl in a particularly gruesome case via a video link -so we were in a different room to the court.
The video link broke half way through her evidence - screen went black. You are never allowed to talk to witnesses who are giving evidence if they are part way through.
I tried calling the court, security, my boss - the phone wasn't working.
The witness turned to me and asked if she could stretch her legs - we chatted briefly about what was happening - I was explaining to her what I was doing. It was a brief exchange - nothing about her evidence.
What I didn't know was that we were still visible on the video in court. The judge didn't know there was a problem our end - he thought i was chatting to the witness and ignoring him and the court!
The link got fixed and then the judge told me off in front of the entire court, I was so humiliated. He'd had to get the jury to leave the court - I had to swear I hadn't discussed details of the case with the witness (I hadn't).
The whole thing was awful.
I never ever spoke to a witness again while doing video link and always warned them that if it broke down we would not be speaking.

I accidentally set a fire alarm off airside at an airport once, causing a terminal to be evacuated and flights delayed.

Glad you have such a fabulous boss!

I have made some major cock ups as a lawyer; sent several million client money to the wrong account, forgotten to file a tax return, emailed some negative comments about the other side, to the other side...

Luckily my boss has patience and a sense of humour!

I worked really hard on re-writing one of our department's key policies. I produced brand new accompanying forms and guidance notes. I did it pretty much on my own.

Then I sent them out and said "Look here's the shiny new things which we start using from now". I didn't get any emails back.

A couple of months later, it transpired (well was highlighted by a very nitpicking colleague) that these documents should've gone through about five different committees of increasing importance before they could be used. This became apparent in a meeting in front of my whole department.

I said nothing. I went home that night and cried so much. I started looking for other jobs. I panicked because I was still on probation. I genuinely figured out how many more days I had to work before I retired. I had no sleep that night.

After a couple of calls and meetings over the next week or so it just all kind of went away.

Biggest cock-up of my career, injected a patient who was HIV pos, came out and plunged the same needle into my hand. Still don't know how I did it.

One month of anti-viral medicines, lots of d&v caused by the medicines, a few worrying months.

And it happened in my lunch break!!!!

Thank you so much everyone.

I bloody love mn, I started this thread last night feeling so sorry for myself, but thanks to all the encouragement on here I pulled my finger out and sorted it.

Don't know if I would have done the same without having the advice I had on here. You're all lovely

I work in publishing; my mistakes are permanent, irreversible and public!

I recently had someone contact me with a complaint about something we'd printed. They called multiple times a day for weeks on end, made ridiculous demands, threatened legal action, got all of my seniors involved, questioned and criticised every process we have, threw crazy conspiracy theories all over the place - total nightmare.

Finally, after more than a HUNDRED emails (I shit you not) and probably at least 6 hours of phone calls, he was placated with a resolution which involved printing something in our next publication.

Except I forgot.

Admitting that to him, and my senior managers, was a fun conversation.

Ha! Mackerel.

Who hasn't done this? I did it once when working for a major charity. To make it worse, my boss who was actually very kind and understanding about it, lightheartedly calculated how many hungry people could have been fed with the money I'd wasted. Ok, the budgets didn't work like that, but it made me feel even worse.

Someone DH used to work with accidentaly caused over a million pounds worth of damage to equipment and property. Luckily it was insured.

Someone I knew was working in horticulture and forgot to close the doors of a large greenhouse on the evening of a harsh frost. All the plants were killed.

Don't worry OP, by next week someone else will have done something and your error will have been forgotten.

Aww am so glad you sorted it out op ! Now relax

I once paid about £7k to a generic bank account because I didn't realise the cheque was a counter cheque from the bank instead of a personal cheque from the customer. Took months to get the money back and we had to make a duplicate payment to the customer in the mean time.

I once wrote to Mrs Jones about the account of her late husband... except Mrs Jones was the dead person and her husband was the one dealing with it. To make matters worse he called and asked that I send her a letter of apology but I was out of the office for a couple of weeks and nobody picked it up in my absence so before I got back he'd called to make a formal complaint.

My company made a mistake on our annual statement. We sent a letter to the 100,000 or so affected customers. Then had to send another letter to correct a different mistake on that letter! We had more calls about those letters than we did about the original error (which was irrelevant to most clients but from a legal perspective needed to be corrected).

I used to work in utilities. There were two screens one for "Customer Names" and one for "Customer Notes". Letters and bills that went out pulled directly from "Customers Names" so if you were Mrs Smith in that screen you'd be Mrs Smith on your bill. Customer Notes was for staff to write notes about customers, namely to warn other workers about how twatty some people were. We were pretty much allowed to write whatever we wanted in Customer Notes.

Now, in the heat of a busy and heavily surveilled office environment with multiple screens, it's easy to get Notes and Names mixed up.

One of my colleagues who worked in Complaints (so was on the receiving end of a lot of twattiness) spent a week putting awful things about customers in the Name rather than Notes screen. When the letters went out at the end of the week, there were lots of:

Dear This blokes a bit of a cunt, handle with care

Dear This woman sounds fucking simple but she knows the law

Dear I can't understand a word this guy is saying, I think he just got off the boat

One I heard was of an order being for items costing around 100k, for a client which was a factory having an upgrade. The items were bespoke and took around 3 months to manufacture.

To install, this 24 hour factory needed to be shut down for several nights (obviously at cost to its production schedule, and all planned way in advance.)

When the items arrived on site on the day of installation, along with all the installations team and the client having shut down their production facility in order for the installations to take place, it was found that the person placing the order had written down the item code wrongly. So something completely different (and useless, as it was bespoke) had arrived.

Items non-refundable. New items take another 3 months to make. Etc etc.

Eek. Eek eek eek.

You impress me , op and I am not easily impressed. You have handled it professionally. Well done.

In my experience owning up and being totally honest with your line manager is the best tactic.
I've fucked yo before and tried to hide it... that is much worse.

This one really is about a friend. He worked in a supermarket and was dealing with a particularly tricky customer and had gone off to check the stock room. On his return he said to a colleague - 'where has that cunt gone, I knew we didn't have any of xxx'

Customer/cunt taps him on the shoulder: 'I'm right here.'

Read Black Box thinking...sometimes mistakes are necessary to improve the process or what you do. Dyson made over 6000 prototypes of their Hoover (6000 mistakes?). So long as you learn, share the experience so others can also learn from it, mistakes are a necessary evil in developing and improving.