Tell me your hideous workplace errors

[BordelDeMerde]

Today I was bitching about a colleague and accidentally sent him the messages I meant to send to the colleague I was bitching with. I referred to him as a 'mofo' in the messages.
Yes, it was incredibly childish and unprofessional and I'm mortified. I know, there's no need to tell me. I'm also very worried about the consequences.

I can't sleep because of it, so please cheer me up with your embarrassing work stories.
I promise I'm not the daily fail in poor disguise.

I also pulled a ridiculous gurning face at a colleagues back when she was being difficult for the sake of it. Just as she remembered something else and turned back around.

I love this. I can imagine you having to turn this into a fake 'hurt my foot' face. Total sitcom farce material.

@WhatWouldKalindaDo

I'm a veterinary nurse and a very long time ago (during my training), I left a thermometer up a dog's bum. The owner was not impressed when she discovered it at home later that day. It was in the days of the glass mercury thermometers too so I got in a lot of trouble for that!

reminds me of a plotline in House where he left a thermometer up a policeman's bottom for 2 hours. The policeman got his revenge, though.

NC for this. Many years ago I worked in admin/marketing for company that although small, had sites across the UK. In those days we used to take images off the internet for use on posters etc (naughty I know).

Anyway, rushing to finish a flyer I was working on, I took an image I quickly found to use as a background and printed thousands of copies without proofing properly.

Only when they had been distributed did someone notice that there was offensive racist language on the image I'd used. Small and feint, but readable.
Our sites managed to stop displaying and get all the leaflets back in before anyone else noticed (or at least said anything).

This is the only time I've ever cried at work. My boss was not horrible to me about it, I mean it could have been a PR disaster but he could see how distraught I was.

I am now so thorough in proofing and getting work reviewed!!

I was working the late shift in my old hospital and was told the lists were done for the day, no more surgical patients. I went to the loo and found a very sad boy wandering around lost. I popped him in a wheelchair and wheeled him to the children's department making race car noises, we may have even popped the odd wheelie and done a few donuts to cheer him up.
Of course when I got back another patient had been added to the list and everyone sat on their arse watching time tick down wondering where I'd gone instead of doing anything about it themselves so I got into trouble.

Broke some equipment that was worth tens of thousands of pounds. Because the equipment was then unavailable the company then lost millions of pounds worth of contact work it had scheduled. Kept my job. Don't know how.

@Iamblossom

There will be a billion of these post Covid WFH with the reliance on Teams

I've just been spotted on camera massacring a moth (with a fly swatter) during a training session

colleague was kind enough to remind me camera was on...

@nonsensenow

I always think of the person at the nhs who managed to email 840,000 people in one go. Server was struggling, but then compounded by 'reply all' idiots.

I don't work for the NHS!

Ha!! They work in my trust. Still working away and known as a legend for some; majority say the twat who wrecked nhs mail 🤣 sat in a meeting with them once - bloody scarily full of knowledge too......ironic

Not me but when we were buying our house the estate agent had attached her boarding pass to Tenerife under the epc info, so if you kept swiping on the epc it was just there, passport numbers, dob etc for both her and her husband.

I did call and let them know but it must have up on Rightmove for months before anyone noticed. That was a very odd phone call as the manager answered and I explained and he went 'that's not possible, let me look........ oh... my... god!!!'

I often write to customers and am always very careful to spell check any letters. Unfortunately didn't check the word had been corrected to the right word..."I apologise for any incontinence this has caused you" yep - I meant inconvenience. Have to be careful typing discount card - easily becomes disco cunt card!

@Sparklebrandy

I often write to customers and am always very careful to spell check any letters. Unfortunately didn't check the word had been corrected to the right word..."I apologise for any incontinence this has caused you" yep - I meant inconvenience. Have to be careful typing discount card - easily becomes disco cunt card!

I hate those words that spellcheck doesn't pick up because they are, erm, words.

kind retards is one of them

At a bank many eons ago I coded overdraft charges onto accounts.

The code was 3300 unfortunately I entered it in the multiplier field and added £99k of bank charges to someone’s account.

I found out a week later (PT while studying), and was mortified. The customer had been understandably irate.

How I didn’t get sacked I don’t know.

I once accidentally copied and pasted a recipe for Jool’s Oliver’s beef stew into an NHS database instead of into an email to my friend. I did try to delete it, but it was still sat there in the very visible audit trail for everyone to see 😳 no one ever mentioned it but i’m sure they must all have known it was me!

[quote honeyytoast]@Anordinarymum I don’t understand what you did wrong? Why did it make you cringe? Were you supposed to have just let her have it for almost free?

Only thing I can think of is when I worked at primark, I accidentally gave someone a tube of wrapping paper for free because I forgot to scan it. I actually realised before she began to leave, but for some reason I smiled and said bye and watched her walk away with it. Not a big deal at all really but I remember shitting myself for the rest of that shift[/quote]
I should have known the amount was not totting up. I was not on the ball that day.
I felt like I was back at school and the supervisor was my teacher.

Wrong, but not incorrect words have tripped me up. I put impersonation of dogs rather than importation into a letter once. It was copied to a colleague who immediately called me, impersonating a dog....

If you made this mistake today, how do you know you can't sleep ?

Actually OP I was on the receiving end of an email, slagging me off and sent to me in error. The look on his face when he realised! Asked me to step into a meeting room and apologised profusely before being really nice and asking if I was OK. I burst into tears as I was going through a rough time, with a baby that wouldn't sleep and trying to juggle work. Mortifying but I was being a bit of a bitch, hence his email.

I once punched my boss.
He had crept up behind me and pinched my bum as a joke. It frightened the life out of me. I thought he was a particularly pervy old man who had been bothering me. Before I even thought about it, I had swung round and punched him, square in the face.
I fully expected to be immediately sacked, but he just said "Sorry, I shouldn't have done that, should I?" and walked away.

@TheChild

I worked in a florist as a teen every Saturday.

We got phone orders for flowers that we wrote the cards out for. So the message would read "Happy Birthday, lots of love Paul x" but the person who took the order wrote it as "H B, LOL Paul x" to save time. They obviously knew what the abbreviations stood for.

One day they asked me to write some cards out for the orders, and I didn't know about the abbreviations. I did question it in my head, but instead of just asking someone, I literally wrote the card as "H B, LOL Paul x" thinking it was some secret language the flower receiver would understand.

The florist got a very angry call from the flower receiver, and the flower gifter 😳

I love this one

@LowlandLucky the ops first post is at 22.30 last night ...

An ex line manager of mine made a big fuck up I just remembered.

I was owed 10% commission of a big account I landed for the business - a client from a previous agency who I had a great relationship with.

A meeting to confirm logistics including my commission had been put off a few times by my line manager so I emailed the MD and cc'd in my line manager to request it was rescheduled ASAP as per the terms of my contract regarding commission.

MD replied all by accident (meant to just reply to my line manager) and said 'shit, didn't you update the contracts? I thought we amended to 5% commission?' or similar and my line manager replied all again (so I was in the chain still) saying 'Don't worry I'll persuade her to take 5% and tell her she must have signed the wrong contract.' As if that's a thing!

God remembering the look on her face when I turned around and smiled at her just as I received that email is still absolutely joyous.

She bullied every single member of my team, sometimes outright lying, and as I was the only person between me and the MD hierarchy wiser, she hated that she couldn't push me around as easily as the juniors who were bloody brilliant grafters. So the day she got at least a bit of a comeuppance was a treat.

The MD's office was glass and not as soundproof as he thought so I think everyone in the office rather enjoyed the office bully getting a bollocking.

Anyone else I would have felt sorry for but she really was the worst adult bully I've met. Just needlessly cruel to people for no reason other than to make herself feel important.

I got my 10% commission and then 6 months after I left the company to become self employed, the client contacted me and asked if I would take their account. Happily, the contract clause for 'poaching' clients was a six month term so it was a big fat yes from me

At the end of a very successful first year in a brand new boutique hotel, had the bright idea to send Christmas cards to all the guests who had stayed with us.
This prompted several calls in the New Year from confused sounding women who were quite certain they had never stayed there with their husbands/partners and where had we got their addresses from . . .

@rslsys

At the end of a very successful first year in a brand new boutique hotel, had the bright idea to send Christmas cards to all the guests who had stayed with us. This prompted several calls in the New Year from confused sounding women who were quite certain they had never stayed there with their husbands/partners and where had we got their addresses from . . .

Oh nooooo 😳

@QueeniesCroft he deserved that punch!

@rslsys 😂😂😂

We've had those Christmas cards. Never occurred to me what it would look like if one partner had been playing away!

Put a load of paperwork on the windowsill and it flew out into the sodding high street 🤦🏻‍♀️