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.

Sent a years supply of incontinence products to an elderly ladies house all in one go. They were BIG boxes.

Accidentally trapped a bird inside my bosses house when I was working from there when she was on holiday. It pooed all over the hardwood floors and leather sofas.

I’ve signed off way too many emails with Manky thans instead of Many thanks.

I once got asked to cover the reception desk with zero training. The desk and phone were placed just far enough away from the security door opener button that I couldn’t let someone in while on the phone. However, if unanswered after 6 rings, the phone would automatically put an out of hours message on. Which only a senior manager could override.

Queue me frantically trying to acknowledge the fuming visitor through the glass, answer each call quickly and figure out how to transfer them.

By time the visitor came in she was in a rage and I had to keep answering the phone cutting her off mid rant. I did explain and apologise but she was not happy!

Received a phone call from reception telling me that the interview candidate had arrived.
Forgot to inform the panel.
Got another call, so zoomed off to tell them, met someone who was heading there anyway so they would tell them. They forgot.

Candidate stomped off in a huff. The panel were in there for ages waiting. We never said anything and they assumed a no show.

Many years ago I worked on the personnel help desk of a big company. In quiet spells we also helped to prepare training materials. One day I took a call about a situation with the juiciest details imaginable, I mean I thought I was broad minded but I was really shocked. I took loads of notes to refer to my senior manager. A few days later I found my handwritten notes were photocopied on the back page of 1000 training handouts.

Just to give you an idea it included these words: masturbate, broom cupboard, threesome, boss's wife, cucumber, handcuffs.

I’m a teacher and was talking to my class (6/7 yr olds) while flourishing my arms. I accidentally whacked a child in the face. She was ok if shocked, it was an awkward phone call! Parents were thankfully fine about it

@Rachellow 🤣 hilarious.

I once took my passport to a corner shop to photocopy it, forgot it in the copier and when I went back, it had been taken.

Left work very early once when my boss was out, first time ever leaving early as paid by the hour, bumped into my boss as she'd arrived back early. Just waved at her and never spoke about it.

Blocked and flooded the guest loo as I was lazy to go downstairs to the staff loos. Joined in with everyone blaming an imaginary guest.

Invited friends round to boss's house whilst she was away, great time etc. After we'd left and boss due back, one friend mentions they left a thank you card for my boss to find at the house, for allowing us to use her house whilst she was away (which she hadn't) I was sweating! Neither of us ever spoke about it.

Name changed for this...
I got sacked for being caught in flagrante delicto with a male colleague of mine. I'd been seeing him for months, but then our department had been closed because of Covid, so we'd meet up in there. But then a manager walked in on us and caught us in the act. And although I lost my job it was worth it, because it got me out of an awful relationship, and he got into even more trouble than I did.

In the very early days of the internet transfers of domain names had to be done by fax.

Enter the unique code and fax it off to the other party to enter so you could collect.

Poor fax output made one i look like a 1.

So a very innocent shipping website went to "the worlds premier porn website for all things transsexual... "

Took three months to sort.

I managed to refund some bloke three times, so my manager made him pay back the other two refunds which I didn't get, as it was our fault (the card machine was playing up) and not his. (although NYX did that to me a couple of years ago, refunded on online order, that had gone out of my bank account, then the money was refunded, then they took it back out again!)

Doing 2 week's work experience at age 16 in the local library. This would have been around 1989. Massively overcharged a customer a fine for late return of his book on a busy Saturday. He came back later to query it with me, realised what I'd done and had to get help to refund him. Didn't get in trouble but the staff were quite patronising and felt very stupid. In my defense I was given practically no training.
Other one is I was waitressing and not trained on the till. Was asked to take a card payment for friends of the owners and to ring up for an authorisation code for the credit card. This was early 1990's! Code was rattled off once then line went dead before I had the chance to write it down. I just wrote what I thought it had said and didn't say anything.

Working for a very small company, there was couple of blokes and me.
Manager called over to me that he and colleague were nipping out and would be back in about an hour. "OK, love you" was my distracted response 😐 I never did find out if he heard me.

Working for a husband and wife team, one afternoon the wife had gone out so it was just me and husband. As I leant over to pick a box up, a button popped off my skirt. The husband picked it up and handing it back to me said how lucky it was that it hadn't been a crucial button and my skirt hadn't fallen down. Flustered, I got all mixed up and replied "yeah that's a shame isn't it". We both looked awkwardly at each other as he mumbled "erm, my wife would kill me" while I wanted the earth to swallow me 😖

I spent an entire day tidying a client's garden, including lopping several branches and taking out two large shrubs by the back fence that were listed specifically for removal.

It came to light the next morning when I turned up for work that I'd been in the wrong garden.

Working in a hospital, I once sent a surgical admission letter, along with a bowel prep sachet, to the wrong patient. I only realised when the ward sister asked me why Mrs 'nice old lady', had been made to take picolax for no reason at all.
The sister was kind to me, especially as she could see my horror, and told me that the patient was none the wiser, but that I should really double check which codes I entered on the letter generating database next time.

Not as bad as some of these but still stands out over 15 years later, I just posted this on the unusual names thread...

Years ago I worked in a call centre and spelled back surnames to bring up customers records.

I don't know what I was thinking when I naively "confirmed" "so that's cocks...?"
And Mr Cox angrily shouted out "NO. THATS C. O. X"

I was mortified

Worked at Waitrose from age 16, never got properly till trained but often had to jump on. Plus I’m a bit daft

Once accidentally clicked a £149 transaction down as cash not card, till opened immediately and could not easily be rectified without rescanning whole shop to refund, scan again and pay again. Thankfully there was an in shop cash point and the lovely lady got out £150 and paid cash, my till beeping wildly the whole time she was getting it.

I also once accidentally charged a woman £10 cash back she didn’t ask for, and didn’t notice until she was half out the door. I panicked and said nothing, she had done an expensive luxury shop so I don’t feel too guilty. It was also on an arsehole coworkers log in…

On my first day to be allowed out on a ward as a very new student nurse a staff nurse asked me to fetch a sheet from the linen room. I thought that the linen room was the place at the back of this very large hospital where we'd gone to be issued with our uniforms. 20 mins later I returned to the ward! Needless to say the sewing room staff had put me right and the ward thought that I'd taken fright and decided nursing wasn't for me. Three years later I qualified, and even got a hospital medal. Now retired after many great years in nursing with no serious mistakes- at least not that I'm aware of!

@WishingYouAMerryChristmasToo

Volunteering on a ward during my university holidays I was asked to move a patient to the other side of the ward. I spoke to a lovely lady aged 85 and told her I had come to take her to the ‘other side’ will it be quick she asked? Will it hurt? No no no I said and answered her other questions then it dawned on me she had thought I was dr death come to get her - she was quite pleased with my mistaken use of English at that point and not cross at all - I however could of died

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

I set up a whole department to collect the Poll Tax.

@Starstar7

I managed to install a software update to the wrong system and bring down one of the major UK banks CHAPS payment systems for a day.

I do hope no one was moving house but I expect they were...

That's a pretty impressive cock-up!

This wasn't a mistake but fits with the kind of story we are sharing

Background 1

I was what was then called a 'Cardiac Technician' part of my job was fitting and analysing 24 hour tapes.

These look like the old Walkman tape players but are connected to electrodes on your chest but do include a cassette tape - they are probably all digital now. Patients come to a clinic, we fit the tape, they go home or to work and have a normal day, the following day they come back, the tech puts the tape in a machine and we analyse the ECG at high speed and produce a report.

The cassette is then wiped using a magnet and is reused.

Background 2

We had a particular group of junior Drs who were a lot of fun and had acquired nicknames, one was nicknamed 'Biggles' because of how he spoke and started signing requests as Biggles. Biggles sent a request for a test on a patient who was 100+ and had a suspected assegai imbedded from the Zulu war.

Obviously fake so my manager sent a fake report back

So one day a couple of weeks later I removed a tape from a patient and start to analyse it. But I can't because it hadn't been wiped properly so I had 2 ECGs on it.

It happens, I had to phone the patient, make a new appointment, appologise etc. But when you superimpose 2 ECGs looks similar to a 'piggy back transplant' which is a heart transplant that leaves the original heart in situ.

Then (in my own time) wrote a report as though the patient had had a piggy back transplant, the patient's name I put Avril Fool, 1 Fool's Lane date of birth 1/4/50.

Because one of the recordings had a lot of abnormal rhythms it looked at first glance like something was seriously wrong.

Biggles completely bought it, was asking the medical secretaries to get the notes, the secretaries had twigged so were saying the notes were missing, was he sure she was a patient etc.

Fun times.

And no one was damaged, disadvantaged, had medical needs neglected.

Also when the patient came back I used a brand new tape.

My first job working in the restaurant of a very posh hotel in my hometown. Family come in for a meal and I’ve opened a bottle of red wine for the Dad to try. I lose my grip on the bottle and it falls to the table and he ends up covered in red wine (white shirt too!) Fortunately he was very nice about it and was staying in the hotel so was able to go to his room and change. I was absolutely mortified and was relegated to pot washer!

Many years ago, had a boss who could by turns be lovely or a bit of a moo and she was an incorrigible flirt. She also didn’t have a phone system installed so we each had an individual line to our desk and if a call came through on someone else’s line you had to run to their desk. (I spent much time fending off calls from her fiancé.)

A call made from my line to a chap we worked with, as my boss wanted to say hello & congratulations. He had taken a promotion so was now a Director at his company. It was his first day so his boss, his wife and his boss’s wife were all with him, they were off to have a celebration lunch. My boss is relaying all these comments to say to him about how she had a dream about him and so forth, sexual innuendo, the lot all passed along by teenage me. Turns out the chap had inadvertently put the call on speakerphone & couldn’t turn it off so his boss, wife, boss’s wife could hear EVERYTHING. I picked up on the frostiness but my boss didn’t stop.

A good while later they told me but it still embarrasses me to my core.

TBH I make mistakes all the time. I'm honestly shocked I haven't been sacked yet.

[quote underneaththeash]@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.[/quote]
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