To ask the biggest mistake you’ve made at work

[aibutohavethisusername]

Just wondering that really.

Deleted almost all the files on the server rather than just the one I wanted to delete. fortunately the fact that the previous backup was a month old took the heat off me.

Managed to balls up a spreadsheet of customer names by sorting the first column alphabetically but not the rest of info. That took a loooong time of manual data entry to fix.

16YO me slagged my boss of for a god ten minutes whilst she was in the next room & could hear every word She started talking really loudly but never confronted me.

I also went into a stable & didn't push the lock across, I thought I had but hadn't pushed it far enough, horse bolted out & was loose on country roads for an hour causing mayhem. I was mortified!

I tagged member of the presidential family in a tweet and we got sued 😂😂

Binning a whole load of marking I couldn't be bothered with.

This was over 10 years ago and nobody ever noticed.

Saturday job as a waitress, age 15. Brought up vegetarian and thought 'rare' was the posh word for 'well done'. Cleavers may have been thrown.

Agreeing to work there......

Most embarrassing was getting a call saying PM is doing a talk in a region and he wants to speak about how good grammar schools are and can you say how many grammar schools are in that area. Said that's not one of his better ideas as there are no grammar schools there then well it maybe one of his better ideas but its still a rubbish one. Person replied I am on speaker phone and have PM with me. 😱😳

Many years ago as an administrative officer I sent the wrong letter to a patient coming in to the colorectal unit at the hospital where I worked. Her procedure did not require fasting or bowel prep. Sadly the poor woman had received the barium enema letter along with a sachet of picolax which she dutifully took the day before she came in. It was only when the ward sister took me to one side to ask me why this lady had been made to take a laxative for no reason, that I realised I'd made a mistake! I'd hit the wrong number on the keyboard. Thankfully the patient didn't know any better and nobody enlightened her, but I felt so guilty about that poor woman, especially as I knew first hand how unpleasant that whole experience would have been.

Got my first corporate job a few weeks before Christmas. At the Christmas party I got chatting in the smoking area to someone, and asked them who the “creepy shirt guy in thick glasses” was that was hanging around. Only to be told that he was the CEO and I was in fact talking to his deputy. Oops. I was young and naive.

I also once sent menus to print with a massive pricing error on. Can’t remember exact figures but it was roughly 150 menus per site, to over 200 sites. All of them with incorrect pricing on a certain wine. It cost the company around £80k to reprint. It was awful, I had panic attack’s over it and ended up leaving my job.

*creepy short guy

Love this thread

Processed a payment with the wrong account details. Thought I was going to lose my accountability level and barely slept for the whole week the money sat in a slush fund before being returned to us.

Following

Mismanaging $17,000. I made loans to people who were not vetted properly. The loans were less than $1000 but they added up quickly. My face still gets hot thinking about it.

I emailed a very senior broker about a client’s county court judgment (I worked in insurance at the time and CCJs had to be declared when we did renewals). Except I left the ‘o’ out of County....

Sparklesocks My middle name is Cynthia. Invariably, I type Cunthia. Usually catch it but did not on my graduate school application.

SecretWitch oh no!

Current job. Transposed two figures in a part number when entering an order that resulted in us making and shipping $25k worth of the wrong things. They were also made out of a special alloy that we only had enough of for that order and with a wait time of 7 weeks for more from the suppliers.

I didn’t get into too much trouble because others, who are supposed to make sure job specs match customer order specs, you know double check for errors, should have picked it up at some point in the production, quality inspection, packing and shipping process and didn’t. To be fair their receiving didn’t pick it up either on delivery. The person who discovered it was me when I came to invoice it. I guess I should be flattered that everyone involved trusted my accuracy and attention to detail so much they didn’t think they needed to check...yeah, they won’t do that again!

Fortunately the buyer for the customer (our biggest) was ‘understanding’ enough to take the wrong parts, which were something they’d bought from us before, off our hands - but at a substantial discount obvs because they ‘didn’t have much projected demand for them’. He also said they still wanted the correct parts but also at a substantial discount because of the prospective two month delay because of the wait for the alloy. They pretty much got two lots of parts at cost and we made zero profit but at least it was better than the huge loss it initially looked like.

I almost gave a patient 3 times their prescribed dose of blood pressure medication (the pills were in the wrong box). I realised it was wrong before I gave it to them, still makes me feel a bit sick thinking about it.

I used to work for a national schoolwear company and managed to get a great contract with a residential school for children with behavioural issues / learning difficulties.
They wanted to buy uniforms for all their staff, the students, all colour coded for different levels and even days of the week.
Their account would have been worth over £150K a year to the company.
Just as we’re signing off the 3 year bespoke uniform contract I sent an email to the principal and signed off the email with Kind Retards instead of kind regards.
When I saw the typo I felt physically sick I could not imagine a worse client to make that typo to.

Luckily I was able to apologise profusely and they continued to use our company for many years afterwards... but still, even now, when I think about it I cringe

Sent my ex boss to the Middle East without a visa... they wouldn't let him in to the country so he had to get back on the plane and leave. A family member died the same day so luckily my boss took pity on me but I wasted several ££££ of company money. Not my finest moment.

Worked in a company that prided itself in accuracy. As a new employee I spotted that important figures they had been giving to the industry regulator for years, were wrongly calculated. I explained this to seniors and followed it up by email. They didn't quite believe me and there were quite a few emails explaining it before they accepted it (kind of place where they insisted everything was written down).
I then contacted the regulator by email and somehow managed to forward the long discussion at the bottom of my email, about this major mistake. I phoned up the regulator, said I had forwarded an email that had some confidential info in it, and begged her to delete it without reading it. She said she had.
I got a bollocking and left soon after, as I am pretty sure I was going to be sacked.

Not me, but someone sent out HSC (a level equivalent) certificates to approx 77,000 students in NSW with 2017 on them, instead of 2018.

For an organisation that penalises you for every mistake on your exam paper it was pretty embarrassing and caused no end of problems with uni applications.

Our tiny company won a 3 year government contract, which would be great for our cashflow. However my spreadsheet had only 1 decimal place (not 2!) Which rounded down the contract totals. The sneery civil servant pointed out the error of my ways and said the cost of my mistake would teach me a lesson . That was 25 years ago and I always check now!

Kind retards

Oh that’s made my day !!! Sorry !