To ask about your worst mistakes at work to make me feel better about my own?

[WhereverElse2019]

Hi all. Messed up royally at work yesterday, found out today. Can't say too much as it's quite a niche role so potentially outing, but needless to say it can be fixed but will likely cost the company money, and also impacts another company who apparently are not happy.

I am relatively new to this job (been here since June) and it's a very complicated job with a high level of responsibility. I am just so annoyed and upset with myself. I'd convinced myself I was going to be sacked. I broke down and cried in front of my manager (so embarrassing and not professional I know!) and he was great about it, reassured me it's absolutely fine and not to worry. But I cannot stop ruminating about it.

What're the biggest mistakes you've made at work? Please say I'm not the only one who's messed up royally 😅

Cost my company over £10,000 because I made an error (can't say what as too niche a job) but I kept my job!

This wasn’t me but a colleague, working in a bank when we had to key in all the paid cheques every day so they were applied to an account. If you made a mistake you had to reverse it out using the exact figures in the original mistake. If you did this wrong the original mistake went through and the reversal landed on a suspense account. We left customer’s account over £1million overdrawn overnight. The credit controllers n the bank were having kittens.

happily it was pre internet banking so it was all rectified before the customer found out. We did tell them as we typed out their statement so it never happened in their eyes but it would have showed if they ever ordered duplicates. They found it hysterical and asked that they could have the erroneous one too.

I put the wrong signage (as in +/-) against something that was £955,845 (I will never forget that number) in a calculation, confidently presented my findings to the exec board and got the sign off. Luckily we found it right before things started as there was no way to recover that value.

So you don't want to give any details about your mistake, fair enough, but you're asking people to post about their biggest work mistake. Just to make you feel better ...

a bit double-standards. And it's pretty dumb capturing company specific information that really ought to stay within the four walls of the company not posted out on the internet.

I haven't asked for any company specific information? People are free to give as much or as little detail as they please.

Sent out a mailshot to many, many schools in Hampshire but mistyped as Hampshite

Sent out a mass email to well over 100 customers but CC'd them all instead of BC'd. This was years ago before GDPR regs but I got quite a few angry replies.

I worked in customer service for online retail. After a particularly tricky phone call from a disgruntled customer a new colleague of mine issued a refund. When prompted by the computer system to enter a reason he ticked 'other' and wrote 'entitled bitch'. Little did he know the refund and the reason were automatically emailed out to each customer! She rang back in an even more disgruntled mood (understandably) but actually managed to see the funny side after a mortified personal apology from my new colleague and our boss.

I once accidentally sent a complaint about a colleague to a team inbox (of which the person concerned was a member) rather than their team leader. It was years ago but the thought of it still makes me cringe!

@daisychain01 I bet you're fun at parties 😅 this is a light hearted, anonymous thread, nobody is giving ant confidential info away

I was one half of a joint misinterpretion that cost about $500K+ to fix, it would have cost $Millions to not fix.

The guy who was the other half of the misinterpretion (for unrelated reasons 🤣) resigned soon after. He was gracious enough to offer to take the blame for all of it. I did not take him up on that offer and we both stuck to our shared misinterpretation story. It really was nobody’s fault, he asked a question that could legitimately be read 2 ways. Then he took my answer and read that in a different way than was intended.

Still employed and no lasting repercussions that I’m aware of.

If your manager said not to worry I'm sure it's fine, these things happen and it's possible there's something that can be improved in the processes to stop it happening again. Being open and honest so mistakes can be resolved is the best thing you can do although it's scary and sounds like you did that.

Once had a spreadsheet with everyone’s address on it for a mailmerge, so each line of the address in a different column, but didn’t highlight the postcodes when I sorted it by name so every singles address had the wrong postcode. They’d all been sent by the time I realised. Thank god the post office used the address and not postcode to deliver them. I’d been in the job six weeks.

Many years ago I used my work email to send a politically opinionated letter to the Guardian, which published it (yay) but under my name they also put the name of my organisation as if the organisation endorsed my view (ohhhhh noooo)!

I confessed and was forgiven, got the paper to print a clarification (but oh my goodness, the heat of that mortified realisation could have melted plastic).

Aren’t inset days for staff training though?

I think I know which company you’re referring too haha! I worked there at the time!!

lots always have that horrendous sinking feeling. Also ruminate for weeks afterwards. Be kind to yourself, everyone makes mistakes. I’ve not been fired yet

Not the costliest mistake, but the messiest. Worked at Maccies when I was young. The bags of milk for the milk shake machine were very large & very heavy. I dropped one as I neared the counter & it split. Milk everywhere, in front of all the customers!
Tipped a few bags of frozen fries straight into the oil, like a chip shop, instead of the baskets, again the place was packed with customers.
Needless to say, I left after a few months without any stars 🤣

Went to the wrong court recently. I wondered where the other advocates were before realising and making a mad dash for the correct court 40 mins away. I was aggrieved I'd paid for a whole day of parking too.

https://theconversation.com/the-reinhart-rogoff-error-or-how-not-to-excel-at-economics-13646

Not my own but these guys are worth reading about... Top economists, info relied upon to usher in austerity by governments, fucked up the excel in the most basic of ways which meant outcomes of research were reported as completely opposite to what they were

I threw out a box of computer chips worth thousands of💲when I was 19 cleaning offices. In fairness the box was placed on top of the bin and I presumed it was to go out (should have checked but it was light as a feather) Luckily they searched through the bins and found it 😳

I got a massive promotion. Accidentally wrote 'senior managagagager' in my email signature. Didn't notice for 6 months.
Fuck it, it was incredibly funny.

I locked a customer in a station by accident. I did get them out after it was discovered what I'd done. And that's all I'm willing to say about that.

I misgendered a teenage boy once. I honestly thought he was a girl. His mum saw reason to complain about me. It was an honest mistake!

Haha my manager at my old job did similar, but it was 'senior manger' 🤣🤣

Buggered up parking a work pool car and bashed two of the doors in the process. It cost £4k for them to be fixed. My secret Santa gift that year included ‘L’ plates and a copy of the Highway Code 🤣

Oh and one of my favorites. I was updating a database table and forgot to add my ‘where’ clause. So after executing it I realized what happened, I inadvertently tried to update all of the millions of records in the table.

Normally not the worst thing as the database will store all the changes in memory until it runs out of space then will rollback.

In my case I was in a dodgy warehouse where my cords were snaked down a rickety staircase and it was not uncommon to lose my connection if someone went up or down the stairs. If this happens the system would commit my changes automatically.

I then forced everyone to remain where they were until I could contact an admin to kill the update. Took about an hour. That was embarrassing.