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 😅

I was the manager and the one to notice the mistake.
A client database system , all new starts had to have any updates authorised by IT, and were told this.
Fortunately for this colleague there was a major incident going on and as I had clearance and access IT had asked me to be the authoriser for a couple of hours.
A client record arrived and had been altered - the word cunt had been incorporated frequently but in a very funny way.
I called the colleague responsible and asked him to come through to my office ( he was a bit confused, as I was a manager but not HIS manager - she was in a meeting)
What the colleague didnt know that was the system had been set to autosave - he had put it in to make his team laugh / show off then as far as he was concerned deleted the lot.
He was MORTIFIED.
I was very gentle with him , just explained that anything he out in would be seen and to use this as a learning experience. All while trying not to laugh myself.

And I rejected the changes.

I got that email lol followed a short while later by another one saying they had made a mistake and I wouldn’t be getting a refund 🤣

I'm a legal secretary and I sent an email, intended for our client, to the other side's solicitors 😱 it contained privileged advice including our valuation of her claim and our proposed next steps. Putting us in a terrible position. I immediately sent another email when I realised what I'd done, and asked them to delete it - but we'll probably never win that case now as they know our hand. 😞
I told my manager straight away and he reassured me he'd done ten times worse, but it didn't make me feel better. I have to admit, I went and had a cry in the toilets!

I got the same email & I thought "great, a company actually admitting I'd overpaid" & was eagerly awaiting some extra cash! Gutted!

Extended the hand of welcome before their arrival to a colleague who has turned out to be the most incompetent, vainglorious, lazy, spoilt, plagiarising and piss-taking, arse-licking-to-superiors, entitled, petty, spiteful individual I have ever met. They have literally destroyed the morale in the entire team and I wish I'd left well alone. Pretty much the entire team is now looking for other jobs and/or on the verge of going on long term sick. They've been away since the 6th of December but are due back on the 20th of this month and the mood in the entire department is already at rock bottom. It has been absolutely lovely while they've been away and as we've all been happier and not frightened of her nastiness and eavesdropping and spying we've also been more productive.

Having made such a massive error of judgement about this person I will never be so welcoming again. And no, I wasn't the recruiting officer, they're almost as bad and couldn't even be bothered to be there on this - person's - first day. This person then showed exactly the same behaviour when they recruited someone and couldn't be arsed to even be at work, shoving their workload onto the rest of the team. The organisational culture - or certainly the department culture - needs a bloody good boot up the backside. And yes, this incompetence is all on public money which is why the piss taking riles me so much as my own team ALWAYS play by the rules.

It often bewilders me how some people in the wider organisation (biggest employer in Britain) get hired in the first place, let alone retained while the good staff get ignored or sideswiped when they try to raise issues. That whistleblower protection legislation can't come soon enough.

First time as a bank branch manager, I had to set the code for the safe. I forgot it within the next 5 minutes and had to bring in specialists to break it open. It cost us quite a bit of money.
I moved to the UK (English is not my first language) and started working as a receptionist. One client called to ask if, since we are on the first floor and she is in a wheelchair, we accommodate in any way. I professionally told her that we have "an electric chair" to take her up the stairs.

I once (very very hungover) interviewed someone for the wrong role; I don't mean slightly different, I mean entirely different, paying about 50k less and based in another part of the country - think call centre operative V technical architect.

The boss had asked me as a favour to come down and meet them as she was keen on this candidate and wanted another opinion. I remember thinking I was going to throw up I was so hungover from the night before.

Afterwards the boss asked me what I thought and I read out all my notes and feedback against very detailed criteria. I wouldn't have said the job title, just the competencies.

I have a very clear memory of her brow furrowing and looking at me for a long time probably noticing the film of sweat on my forehead and slightly green tinge. Then she snatched the form out of my hand and said "please tell me she's still here" and practically ran to the interview room.

Not exactly me, but I'm the end of the line person submitting something before a deadline. Despite me saying for fucking years that I need more time to assemble the documents, check for errors, and allow for any IT issues, one day I got a series of emails containing the documents randomly titled, in no order whatsoever with 19 minutes to go. I did my best and got them assembled but then there was an IT glitch and they failed to send in time. That error lost the company a good few million quid.

I accidentally hired two extra people for a role once, instead of sending them rejection letters as a temp employee. Got a telling off but thar was all.

I used to work in a Travel Money Bureau and I bought back $1800. Except I typed it in wrong. Should have been $1080. Really got told off for that loss and investigated to make sure I hadn’t stolen the money myself 😕

Up late writing a report for work that wasn't even urgent but I wanted to hand it in early and do a really good job to impress my manager.
Realised I'd left crucial notes locked in my desk drawer at work.
Then started to doubt myself and wonder whether they were in the drawer at all. My workplace was a hospital for long-term-stay people with mental health needs and I started to wonder if I'd somehow left my notes on the ward. Realistically there was no chance of my having done this as I was always very careful about my notes but once the splinter of paranoia had entered my brain, it wouldn't go away. By 3am I still couldn't sleep and was convinced my notes must have been left somewhere unintended.
Drove 45 minutes back to work. Time now 3.45am.
Disabled alarm system in the offices to access my desk. Found my notes locked safely away just as I'd first thought.
Accidentally sent alarm off on my way out.
All patients on the ward woken by loud alarm at 4am.

Remarkably, I lived it down and some time after moving on from the team, ended up marrying the manager who I'd been trying to impress in the first place.

Early autocorrect changed my innocuous email addressed to five male directors from the innocuous ‘ we need to get all of our ducks in a row’..,,,to something else - not ducks.

I was mentoring a junior in the marketing dept and we were working on a mailer which would have gone to every one of our global customers, so quite tight branding. My colleague dared me to write and hide a rude word anywhere in the document, somewhere only we would know where it was and like the dick I am, I did it, cos I was showing off.

So there is a v big brand with a very big logo and in the background on a particular mailer it says TITS. I had intended to delete it but helpful junior sent it out. My life and career flashed before me but seeing as only 3 of us knew, I thought I’d sweat it out. I got away with it for years until the v big boss said “is that true about the tits?” And we both knew it was.