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.

@Shehasadiamondinthesky I’ve done the same, but given an eye exam to someone who was having foot issues.
They were not impressed. The podiatrist wasn’t in that day.

@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!

I worked there during this happening. Not just the reply all idiots but the reply all idiots telling the other reply all idiots to stop replying all! It literally went on for hours

@LindaLooky

First job in a shop as a teenager. Someone paid by card and the machine told me to call the bank line. I called it and the person on the other end said a code eg "4352". I had no idea wtf they meant. I must have sound panicked cos they told me to calm down.

Rather than asking someone, to avoid a scene I just gave the person their card back and said it was fine. To this day I have no idea what it was all about.

I also gave used towels to visitors at a spa during some work experience.

And accidentally wrote a rude word on a presentation slide being displayed as the backdrop at a huge conference.

I can be such a moron.

How can you accidentally write a rude word?

I have dyspraxia....I work for a supermarket chain.
I picked up a box of boxes of eggs one evening. No one told me that the outer box had a hinge up the middle. I scooped up the box and the sides folded out! Five boxes of a dozen eggs hit the floor. Sixty eggs everywhere! I called my colleague on the headset. I just said I'd had an accident. I was so upset. Thankfully she cleaned it all up for me. We kept spotting eggs all evening under nearby shelving units!! It's now an unwritten shop rule that I don't touch the boxes of eggs!! 🤣

@LastToBePicked

Sorted a single column in excel rather than the entire worksheet. The worksheet listed sites where my company was due to do work, and about 2 weeks worth of work was done by dozens of people in the wrong places as a result. Fortunately I noticed the mistake in time for it to be corrected (at a cost of about £50k) otherwise we would have probably lost £millions worth of future contracts.

Oh I made that mistake too - sorted the postcode column for a 50,000 mass mailing list.

Luckily I did spot check the "test" name in the list before I pressed print. Still brings me out in a cold sweat 20 years later.

So I was thinking I hadn’t done anything too awful and then I remembered one awful incident…..

I was a fairly newly qualified RMN in the days when mental health wards weren't routinely locked and on my first night after returning from maternity leave with my eldest. My brain was mush and I was not used to the routine or the very specific challenges of nights.

The ward was really busy, very noisy and chaotic and I barely knew any of the patients. Bad combination. It turned out a patient who had answered to Bob when I asked if they were Bob, turned out not to be Bob or indeed a current patient, but an errant ex patient who didn’t want to leave and we basically had to physically eject them from the building. They had been for a shower on the ward and everything😱

I felt very stupid! Especially when the senior nurse didn’t want to come and help remove the patient as it was my ‘cock up’.

I did get better at nights and worked nights for years until my dses were old enough to leave at home. Never, ever had an extra patient again. Lots of other awful and traumatic incidents but not that…..

@BlackCountryWench2

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.

I've not had a good day.. This has made me ☺. Thankyou. 💕 💕 💕

You’re very welcome I still laugh about it to this day and I left the paper in 2005! I then went into my first Comms job and once sent round the all-staff brief with an article by “The Director of Pubic Health”. That gave everyone a good laugh

I was fairly junior working in treasury management when I sent a £10million investment to the wrong local authority. All the blood drained from my face and I had to phone them and beg them to send it back as soon as possible. It shouldn’t have been able to happen so the authorisers got a bollocking for not checking what they were signing off and I could no longer put “good attention to detail” on any internal application forms.

Calling a patient, they didn’t answer, at the exact moment the voicemail recording kicked in I had a massive spontaneous burp that I had no control over, and accidentally recorded it on their voicemail, in my panic I hung up and completely missed the option to delete and re-record the message

Sent a competitor a detailed quote from a supplier.
I tagged him in the company email, there was no fixing it, tbf his name was the same as the MD.

When I was studying for my English degree, I had a temporary summer job working in a warehouse alongside numerous other university students and permanent staff. The supervisor was a letch, making inappropriate comments, scratching his bollocks in front of the young women, and leaving porn mags lying around. Once he grabbed me from behind, hoisted me into a lorry, and bound me in clingfilm so tightly I couldn't move. Apparently, this was him having a 'laugh' - it was the 90s and somehow acceptable among the managers.

The canteen was at least a 10-minute walk away, making it a very tight squeeze to get back from lunch on time. One day a snotty letter from the supervisor appeared on the notice board. It warned about timekeeping, threatening to dock our wages by every minute we were late back from lunch. Our pay was £3ph. The letter was so poorly written it was barely comprehensible. I'd had enough by this point and when no one was looking I took a red pen and did a stylistic analysis of his writing, word by word, tearing it to shreds.

When he found it he went ballistic, demanding that everyone took a handwriting test until the culprit was identified. This backfired, with refusals all round and permanent staff threatening to get the union involved. No one suspected me and I certainly wasn't owning up to it - I only had a week to go until I left for university.

I kept my head down during that week, listening as everyone gossiped about the incident - the general consensus was: good for whoever was bold enough to do it, wiping the leering grin off his face.

My stomach still churns when I think how hideous that job was but I don't regret my actions for a minute.

About 30 years ago I worked for then then DHSS processing Income Support claims. I had a new claim for a chap, his wife and about five kids. His employer had gone bust so he had found himself out of a job and with no money. I duly processed the claim and issued the first payment by giro in the post, as per policy. But I then forgot to deduct the first payment from the automated payment schedule. For anyone reading this who worked there back then, I sent a wrongly dated B2 to DoE UBO. As a result he received 4 weeks of initial benefit payments when he should only have received 2. I only realised my mistake when he rang me to thank me for the payment and to say that it had really helped them. Those were in the days when customers had a dedicated DHSS contact and we sent out letters to our customers with our actual phone numbers on. I never told anyone and the overpayment was never discovered. No regrets. I hope it really helped that family.

@thistimelastweek

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.

I have done this too! I then pretended the catering company must have missed our booking - "how disappointing, can't believe they haven't delivered our order". Luckily my boss was very relaxed about stuff like that.

I also also once organised a meeting and invited about 150 people, and booked the room... for the wrong date.

Worked for a big company doing server side IT.

Once yanked down the main unix server at night. I was at home, had done a small edit to a cronjob by connecting to the server from my home linux box, and I was preparing to go to sleep. Those days my home computer was noisy and I usually shut it down every night. I typed init 0 and instead of seeing my computer shut down I saw

    connection to server.something.uk closed

I needed to take the taxi to our data service center to bring the server back up.

Another one. The company had thousands of people, including two with the same rare surname. Only I didn't know there were two and I didn't check. I was asked to create a new email alias which I did, without checking properly. So I ended up routing Mrs. Raresurname's emails to Mr. Raresurname's inbox. They were going through a bad divorce at the time and him getting her lawyer's emails did not help things.

I work in IT for a massive company. We have offices worldwide. We all use "smartcards" to access the system. For those that don't know a smartcard is basically a card you insert into your keyboard/a usb card reader which lets you log into the company's systems. Without your smartcard you can't get past the welcome screen on your computer.

A colleague who was training on the smartcard portal where we reset passwords and cancel old cards clicked "terminate all" when cancelling a leavers smartcard. She cancelled everyone's smartcard, company wide, including IT's.

We had to call Symantec to get an override code so we could get back into the system to set up new smartcards for ourselves so we could all get back into the smartcard portal and start remotely re-issuing smartcards for 525,000 staff. There are 12 of us in IT. It took weeks to get everyone back online.

We all forgave her when it prompted management to train "smartcard admins" in each office who can issue and cancel smartcards

My funny one, which didn't really matter.

Sending an invite out to 100 or so people. Caretaker comes in talking about paint. Asks how to spell "Emulsion".
I can't spell out loud, so I typed it into the email and told him.

Didn't think much about it until one of the invitees asked me why the word "emulsion" was on the bottom of the email and was it a secret password.

Worked in marketing and was the client on an international TV advert in a 3 day mountain location shoot involving two expensive actors and helicopters. The weather was atrocious and thick fog for all three days so we couldn't shoot anything. I called my boss and he said 'at least insurance will cover it.'
Except there WAS no insurance!
To be fair, the ad agency should apparently have handled that, but it was something I should have checked off (although I was fairly junior and hadn't done anything similar before).
There ended up being a lawsuit with the ad agency!

I was doing some meet and greets for an interview panel in my current job and had to photocopy candidates identification documents and return the originals to them. Upon returning the passport etc to a particular candidate, I asked him to sign the form to clarify he'd received the originals back by saying "Could you sign here for mummy please?"

He looked at me like I was deranged while I laughed my head off, apologising. Luckily, he didn't get the job offer!

One of my many workplace embarrassments!

I know someone who sold an interest in a central London property for £200k less than it was worth. She probably still doesn't know about her mistake, I discovered it after she moved department and I don't think anyone particularly wanted senior management to know about it!

I send £56.000.00 to a HK bank account instead of 5.600 HKD. My checker was fired. God i felt terrible

Forgot to order a roll of fabric for an order so air freighted instead of slow sea freight from the Far East - it costs more than a business class ticket to go and get the thing.
When it arrived it was cream - I should have ordered green.
Boyfriend worked in the finance dept so he processed the invoices without telling, and I ordered the cream with a first class ticket.
I’m useless.

I did payroll and they had a basket on top of a filing cabinet for paperwork of changes, additions, etc. One week I just completely forgot to check the basket and we had two new employees that pay period who didn’t get a paycheque. That was a bad day.

@Wrenna

I did payroll and they had a basket on top of a filing cabinet for paperwork of changes, additions, etc. One week I just completely forgot to check the basket and we had two new employees that pay period who didn’t get a paycheque. That was a bad day.

I can beat that. Once missed an ROI bank holiday and 1500 people didn't get paid 😳

Laughing at some of these 🤣