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.

@ZimZamZoom

I have a few!

One I still feel bad about was in my first job on leaving school - dental nurse. A lady was in agony with toothache and the dentist asked me to take a small x-ray of the offending tooth. It took a lot of cajoling into position and I managed to do this as gently as possible but it still caused the patient much pain.
Afterwards, I took the film packet out of the holder and.... just opened it in the daylight-filled room instead of putting it into the darkbox first, meaning the image would have been totally ruined.
I didn't have the heart to ask her to repeat it, so I sent her back through to the dentist and just told him that it didn't develop properly.

Another is more embarrassing than anything else. A consultant I worked for was going on a year long sabbatical. He emailed me his home address so that I could forward any non-clinical post to him. Nosey old me decides to put his home address into Google Maps and have a look at his house on Street View. I was full zoomed into the front of his house, when he appeared at my shoulder!! I tried to x the window off quickly but, as I had several tabs open, it did the whole "do you want to close all tabs?" message, leaving his house on screen for even longer. He said something along the lines of, "um, that's my house", to which I replied "lovely and close to the M1, aren't you?". Finally closed the damn screen and pretended none of it had happened.

I also came a cropper with a typo. Titled an email to a doctor with "telephone massage", he arrived in the office soon after pretending to have arrived for the massage he was promised. He kept that joke up for a long time too. Embarrassing and gross.

I often type God Morning or God afternoon on emails too 😂

That's the best laugh I've had in ages - thank you

[quote EggSheeran]@NothingIsWrong Were you the architect then? So many of my drawings have been status A'ed and they were completely wrong. No one person is ever held accountable though - too many parties involved in the drawing approval process. I just get left with the shit to sort out! [/quote]
Structural engineer. It was mortifying as I slowly realised what had happened... Luckily it didn't affect any of the major moment connections, as that would have been significantly more costly!

Deleted a very old and important spreadsheet used by the entire department. Luckily someone had a fairly recent copy saved to their desktop so I was able to piece together most of the information before management realised.

A completely non-serious but nonetheless ridiculous one. When I was a student working in a coffee/ sandwich shop I made a tray of brie and basil baguettes and somehow managed to forget to put the brie in every one! I still have no idea how I managed that. Unfortunately nobody realised what I’d done until a customer bought one and started eating

Attended a teleconference meeting with a department at another base. This was way before the likes of zoom and so involved plugging screens and audio etc.
The screen wasn't on but the audio was while a colleague detailed his gameplay for the meeting, broadcasting it to the other department...

So one of my new team members accidentally revealed the board of directors salaries to someone who really shouldn't have seen them. Not my mistake but also I have to swallow responsibility for it as it's my department.

This one was my fault but I forgot that a colleague was a relative of another very difficult colleague and told first colleague that her cousin was a fucking nightmare. I don't know if that has got back to her yet. (She really is a difficult fucking nightmare though)

I tried to forward an email from an irate parents to my line manager asking them to deal with her this time and instead replied to the parent

@NothingIsWrong Ah yes, most definitely can't get out of that one then 😂

Worked in a newsagents as as student, a regular came in a bought a lottery ticket for Saturday and I got it wrong and sold him a Wednesday one, neither of us noticed. All of his numbers came up on Saturday!
He came in and complained and was given a free ticket for the next Saturday

In the first week of my waitressing job I managed to drop a brussels sprout down the neck of the manageress. I was also my last week. I was (politely) asked if I'd prefer to work in the kitchens!

I was collecting for a colleagues birthday, I gathered a load of papers up and the cash and accidently put it in the confidential waste box. We didn't have the key as it's collected by a company every month, they wouldn't let me look for it, so I had to put the extra in myself when I was actually skint! 😳

I once worked as a silver service waitress, it was my first night. First mistake when clearing leftover off a plate a chicken bone flew down the collar of a gentleman...he did not notice so I scooted away. Then during dessert I was pouring cream on the cake, I got distracted and after 20 times of ' say when 'was not looking...as I poured it into the ladies lap ( think blue silk dress!). As I went to get my manager to calm this woman down I ran behind her still cutching the custard and cream...tripped and covered the managers skirt with it all...i never went back .

Very heavy period. Leaked 😭. When I got home my husband asked what was on my dress... I have no idea how long I was walking around an office full of hundreds with a massive patch of blood on my dress. Then went to nursery to pick my son up.

Fairly boring really. I was temping for the Inland Rsvenue many years ago. One of my jobs was filing which was done every afternoon and I was being shown the ropes. Picked up a pile of the files and promptly dropped them all. The contents were just pushed in behind flaps so loads fell out and got mixed up. The member of staff showing me the ropes just pushed them all back into any random folder - I found out later she was an alcoholic and by mid afternoon was drunk!! Oops

Retail job, decade or or ago when amounts were manually typed into the PDQs. Colleague typed in £9999 instead of £99.99 and the payment went through! Called a manager over to rectify and refund the customer and the manager actually pressed charge instead of refund so charged the customer £9999 and it went through again! And the final correct amount refund would take 3-5 days to go back, customer was ok actually - guessing he wasn't on the breadline!

"I'm sorry you found out that I think you're a cunt." would probably not smooth things over much really. grin

I think I love

I know someone who sent out the payroll spreadsheet to every employee. That caused some bad feeling when everyone saw what everyone else was earning.

Dropped some paper off in the secure OT room. Stood up an banged my head on a genuine red button. Everything went deathly quiet. I had hit the emergency off for all computers. Whole company lost half a day's work and it was 2 days before it was all sorted.

IT

Me and my bestie are lucky enough to work together and we are the only females who work there. The ladies loo is upstairs in an unused part of the building. We have an unwritten rule that if we need to have a number 2, we will use the other loo (male) so we don’t have to smell each other’s poo! My friend used said male loo on one occasion snd didn’t lock the door. The financial director popped into the office and proceeded upstairs and walked in on her! Still cracks me up to this day 😂😂😂

Working in HR 1-2 days a week while I was a student accidentally invited the ‘no’ pile to the recruitment day rather than the ‘yes’ pile, they got told they didn’t get through. Didn’t find out until the day, I wasn’t there thankfully, the rest of HR went ahead and did recruit all the positions, they said the candidates were actually really good so it turned out ok in the end!!!

Back in the days when you could smoke in the office post-6pm, I was temping at a travel company and sparked up - but my lighter was set at maximum flame and I was wearing so much hairspray that my hair caught alight, which set the office sprinklers off.

I was not offered permanent employment.

Not me, thankfully, but a sub-editor on a sister title in our newspaper group. The paper had had a 15 year old work experience chap in and had been out with a reporter, the photographer, even written a couple of court reports which were published. On this particular day, he was in with the sub-editor, who was showing him the basics of the job - correcting errors, writing headlines, checking the same article didn’t appear twice etc. The sub-editor impresses upon this lad how important it is not to rely on spellcheck and then unbelievably, let’s him proofread the paper! In this particular edition, a local gastropub had taken out a half page ad, half page editorial to mark their reopening after an extensive refurb, complete with a photograph of the new chef. The photograph caption was supposed to say something along the lines of, “Tom King, new chef at the Royal Oak, guaranteed to tickle your tastebuds.” This work experience lad sits there, attempting to proof, and obviously thinks sod it and just uses the Mac spellcheck. The paper went to print and the next day the gastropub owner called, absolutely livid. The caption actually read: “Tom King, new chef at the Royal Oak, guaranteed to tickle your testicles.”

The newspaper group put a blanket ban on work experience after that.

Crashed my car into a very expensive BMW on my first day in the HQ car park at my new job. Kept a tight lid on the whole thing and offered paying etc to my very senior colleague but luckily no serious damage done.

My first job in HR, sent an email out to the whole company with the title 'Cock Clerk'... nobody said anything, it was only a week later when we had lots of jokey internal applications that I realised. My manager never twigged and just kept going on about how weird all these joke applications were

However same manager later sent out a report to all managers and directors across the 5 sister companies, all good except she'd just hidden the tabs on Excel with all the background pay grade info for everyone in the businesses, thinking it meant nobody would find them.... Lots of family members being hired for way more than actual qualified employees,and all seeing it in black and white led to lots of drama, but nobody trusted her enough to raise a proper grievance

I had to organise a meeting for really important people. Like government people.

I had two things to do. Book the room and organise the teas and biscuits.

Well, I booked the room...

...turns out people really care about tea and biscuits.