To think I'm fucked

[mysonphillip]

I've made a huge fuck up at work. Big, likely to cost the company around £60k.
Not to mention a load of work.

A genuine mistake made with the best of intentions and while trying to do a good job. I'm generally very good at my job and highly valued I think, so hopefully not a sackable offence, but still shitting myself. I do have treated anxiety too, which isn't helping as you can imagine.

I just work so, so hard and try my best, and this project has been really stressful - perhaps part of the reason the mistake happened. Also married, kids, mortgage etc, and all the day to day stress that goes with that.

AIBU to ask for stories where you made similarly big cock ups and what happened, and how you dealt with it? Just looking for a bit of support and a handhold before I go to my boss on Monday.

Look at Boris and Rishi and all the money they waste. They still have jobs. Take inspiration from that.

You're fired!
Own it and get on.
We all*uck up,not as bad as you though.

Similar to a pp, as I trainee solicitor I transferred the proceeds of sale from a clients house to the wrong bank account, near as dammit £500k that went missing. We got it back after a week but my supervising partner was ok about it (‘we carry insurance for this sort of thing’). Needless to say I didn’t go into conveyancing after that though!

i was told at the time it’s not that mistakes happen - because we are all human - but how you handle it. As soon as I realised my mistake (well minus a five minute cry in the toilet!) I told the partner and got to work trying to fix it. Had I tried to hide my mistake or not own up to it and wait for it to be caught by someone else, things may have been different.

Most people are not giving identifying detaills of time or even country. If you dont want to share you dont have to.

I messed up big time, I worked for printing company that gave out instant prizes. I messed the whole procedure up and way too many cash prizes were given and my company had to pay out. The MD’s of the Company were fine, after I apologised, but another employee really had a go at me, so much so that I walked out. The MD managed to persuade me to stay, but I hardly ever spoke to the employee who shouted at me after that and that person left soon after anyway.

Can I make a plea, please, about the 'just a lazy journalist sniffing for stories' accusation?
I get that. It's horrible to feel we might be bearing our souls in good faith for someone to rattle off their 1000 words from their bedroom.
However, I've been at the other end of this accusation myself. I came online seeking support and validation for something that was causing me great distress. I got the 'lazy journalist' line and then felt ashamed for telling my story, on top of the distress I felt. It was like a side order of shit on top of the old shit.
I work (broadly speaking) in mental health and wellbeing - there's great power in hearing that you're not the only one to experience something difficult, and in hearing how other people have approached it.

...of course, this is probably just a double bluff. Look out for my 1000 word column in the broadsheets tomorrow.

The problem is that these 'tell us about a time when...' threads so often end up in the Mail. Which is not to say the OP is a journo, of course, but you can understand people's reluctance.

OP, if it makes you feel better, I know a number of people who have made six and seven figure fuck-ups in work and are still in their jobs. Good staff are very difficult to find, and only idiots sack them for isolated mistakes.

It happens, I lost our company £35k because I didn’t make a contract change.

I worked my arse off to minimise the loss and negotiated with the other company to share the loss (we could have lost more then double).

I was honest and emailed the bosses the situation and my efforts to minimise loss.

They were fine with it.

Out of interest those saying “we all make mistakes”…. What do you think about medical mistakes made by Drs? Not those made by negligence or poor care, but a genuine mistake made by someone trying their best to cope and firefight with an impossible workload, and go then drops the ball?

just seems like everyone always thinks medical mistakes are ‘negligence or poor care’ but in other industries it’s ok to be human 🤷‍♀️

Oh my God OP no decent employer will sack a good employee for making an honest mistake.

I've made more mistakes than I can count. But the most recent example I can think of is someone I supervise. He made a doooozy of a mistake and it blew up with the client complaining. He stayed calm, brought it to my attention ASAP and we fixed it. If anything the whole incident increased my respect for him. No panic, no blame or excuses.

When there is human life at stake, that's the difference. Loss of £xM is ultimately retrievable. If someone is dead or maimed for life, that's not something you can shrug and say Never mind we all make mistakes.

Re the above with medical mistakes. As in any field, there are three categories of situation.

1. Doing everything right and still getting a bad outcome.

1. Honest misjudgement made by a competent person.

1. Foreseeable harm (incompetence, refusing to listen to the patient, refusing to follow procedure). That's where it becomes negligence.

This! If you think it’s a journalist, just don’t reply 🤷🏽‍♀️ Report if you must.

I hope the situation is resolved quickly and easily, op.

Well no..

1. They don't have to share the exact story, just say it's happened to them too. Details arent required

1. People could say it's happened to their colleagues before

1. Not everyone likes reddit.

As a lowly account clerks a colleague and I found a mistake that cost the company £4million ( back in the 90s ). But if it hadn't been found by us ( an underpayment of a particular tax ) could have cost a lot more with a fine - which was avoided because the company came forward with an 'oops'. I don't think they fired anyone in the accountants department for this and it was a huge mistake that lowered their share price for a bit.

As a reward they threatened me with training as an accountant. My colleague accepted this, but I handed in my notice a week later. It crystallised in my head that I hated office work and I moved back to a more person-centric career.

What about:

1. Lack of experience and unavailability of more experienced support (so lack of competence through no particular fault of your own - patient would have died if you did nothing, patient died when you did the wrong thing, because nobody else was there to help).

1. Mistake made due to fatigue due to unreasonable expectations of employer (mistake due to employment conditions)?

Sometimes, after all, mistakes happen due to understaffing, exhaustion, poor employment practices, underfunding, lack of resources, not due to the fault of one individual, or group of individuals. A blame culture is the best way to ensure attempted cover ups are more likely than attempts to learn from mistakes and thus improve for the future.

Yeah good point, so then the legal question is causation. Who was being negligent.

Honored and Hart wrote a really good analysis of the question of causation, and where is the line between "creating conditions " and "causing"?

In the legal field, a lot of juniors get in trouble not necessarily making mistakes but for trying to hide them out of sheer panic. Which, okay, we can't accept dishonesty, but we should look more at their working conditions. In any decent job situation, a person should be able to approach their boss and say, "I messed up and here's how I propose to fix it" without a whole psychodrama.

And similarly, to your point, a person should be able to approach their employer and say, "I'm too overwhelmed to do my job properly ". But we all know that most workplaces don't reward the person who does that.

I accidentally ordered the wrong PPE and cost the country several hundreds of millions during a pandemic.

Well no I didn't but there are bigger mistakes than yours.

$60k is nothing in IT.
You could've blamed your boss to his boss and slide into his job after he gets fired.

I did a terrible one when I was 16 and fecked up loads of peoples’s wages when I work in HR (then called Personel). One woman came crying saying I’d ruined her honeymoon as she hadn’t received all her pay. I phoned the Samaritans that evening, it was only after some time it came to me that as a 16 year old office junior somebody should have been checking my work.

Hopefully it won't be as bad as you think OP. My sister made a very major mistake in her job. It could potentially have led to her company being sued and also losing a FTSE 100 customer. She realised her error within seconds of making it and she was horrified.

She instantly notified everyone who could be affected (clients, project managers, senior partner, director) telling them what she had done and what steps she had taken to ameliorate the impact of her error. When the director had a meeting with the clients to apologise she asked if she could be present to explain and extend a personal apology.

in the end, thanks to the professionalism and integrity of everyone involved the mistake was reversed without any great harm done, financially or reputationally. The director (who probably didn't even know her name before) took her out to lunch and congratulated her on being so open about her mistake and for taking the responsibility for correcting it rather than trying to conceal it or pass the blame, a system was introduced to reduce the risk of similar errors in the future and she was promoted!

Please try not to worry, I've seen many posts like this over 15 years of MN, so you're definitely not the first.

Hello everyone, we've had a few reports about this thread so we just wanted to let you know that the OP has been with us for many years now and to remind you that if you have any concerns about a post or a thread to please report them to us. We are always happy to check things out behind the scenes.
Best wishes,
MNHQ

Sadly it won't make any difference, Pip - once again an OP's already been chased off her thread