Tell me your work mistakes that you can laugh about now!

[Drearycommuter]

Hi all,

I work in a relatively high profile role and had a complete brain melt in a meeting today and actually spoke gobbledegook.

I got completely confused and was talking about one person when I meant someone else AT LENGTH, everyone was looking at me like I was mad. It was my only contribution to the meeting.

It doesn't sound that bad on paper but honestly it was mortifying as they were all internal very important stakeholders who were completely competent. I was also the only one on screen so imagine I was MASSIVE too.

A few weeks ago I was on a virtual call and saw a cat killing a bird in my garden and started screaming on camera like a lunatic. This was worse than that!

Please make me feel better with your stories of work mistakes that felt awful but are now funny!

I had a new boss, and she gave me her number. Later that day I was texting my friend about cooking and somehow ending up sending a first text to my new boss that just said "I have excellent knife skills, haha!" with some devil faces. The poor woman looked terrified.

Ha ha ha ha! Strong start

Many years ago I clean up a crime scene, accidentally.

It was incredibly painful having to explain my stupidity to my manager and the police.

How?!

Yes @Meecrowahvey - we definitely need more details on this one....

I had to write a guidance document for a new computer system which went out to about 200 people. Was mortified to have it pointed out that I'd written 'porthole' instead of 'portal' all the way through it, and when they told me I still didn't understand the mistake (I was pronouncing them the same) until they told me that ships windows are portholes and computer systems use portals! I still cringe a decade later 😆

Many (many many) years ago I was a trainee solicitor and a client about my age asked me in reception- in hearing range of the receptionist - if I would like to meet him for a drink after work...

I stammered "Err, no sorry, I can't mix business with pleasure" and beat a hasty retreat.

Of course the receptionist told everyone in the office about this, and how "sweet" I was - including my boss, one of the senior partners.

I was working in a pub when I was a student, doing the morning clean while the owners went out for breakfast and when I finished I went upstairs to shower (live in position). The owners got back and were so mad at me because they had left the front door unlocked so anyone could have walked in with no staff around. They fired me and I lost my job and my home in one moment.
Ridiculous now I look back, because they never told me they were leaving the door unlocked and didn't say I needed to remain downstairs until they got back.

More recently I made a non-awful but pretty funny mistake in my current job. Spent all morning installing cable pulleys in a really difficult to reach place, then at the end of the day I was about to go home and someone looked in the plane and pointed out I forgot to install the actual cables in the pulleys. Had to uninstall the bastard things and do it all again. Almost cried

When I was much younger and had just started working in the building trade, a customer wasn't sure what diameter pipe he had so I grabbed a builders tape measure and wrapped it around the pipe, I quickly realised my mistake and was mortified! He was just staring at me!

I accidentally told my boss I loved her. Don't know why I did it, I was hanging up the phone and thinking about someone else at the time and it was just force of habit somehow.

Not me but when I worked for a big organisation, someone in one of our satellite offices had devised a handy guide to a new process and it was sent company wide for us all to read. Bold as anything on page 15 was an empty table with "write more inane shite here" 🙊 I felt so bad for the person who had obviously forgotten to take that bit out and replace it with the real text

I was organising a residential weekend in a rural location for a youth group. I somehow got the food shop delivered to our offices 300 miles away rather than the residential location.

We didn't have a car with us as we arrived by coach so had to take a very expensive taxi to the nearest supermarket, nobody went hungry but we did end up paying twice for food and the food we did have wasn't what was planned.

Oh god, that's epic 🤣

I worked in HR many years ago. We worked in a group HR team supporting all the companies in the group. I was sending out salary increase letters to the CEOs and somehow managed to put the letter for the highest performing CEO getting the highest increase and bonus in the envelope for the lowest performing CEO who wasn't getting a pay increase or bonus. Caused a few issues to resolve.

On my way to a company wide conference that i had organised years ago, driving with my boss in the passenger seat. Had about 2 hours to go of thr journey, would arrive and get set up and then approx 930am about 200 people would turn up ready for a day of mingling and schmoozing

Turned to talk to my boss and something on the back seat caught my eye and the realisation hit me, it was a box of invitations. Invitations that I should have handed out and posted out inviting everyone to the conference.

Me and my boss were on our way to a conference and no one else in the company had been invited.

Many years ago I did some contract work for a bank. Back office processing stuff.

One day I was on overdraft renewals for corporate customers. All admin really. Review the write up from the (onsite) business manager, check it was all crossed and ticked in the right places, reinput the overdraft limit, input the renewal fee (1%), press submit. I did loads, they only took 5 minutes, my eyes were going square by the end of the day.

The next morning a client was on the phone to one of the business managers screeching about fraud on a huge scale. He'd had £300k taken out of his account 😲 which had taken him £250k overdrawn. All of his payments, including all his staff salaries had bounced. Everyone was whispering, all the managers were dragged into a meeting, trying to work out how a fraudster had managed to take such a large payment and how, no one recognised the type of transaction.

Then I got called in. It was me 🤢 The day before, I'd processed the overdraft renewal. The overdraft limit was £300k, the renewal fee was £3k. I'd typed the figures in the wrong boxes - so I'd reduced the clients £300k overdraft limit to £3k and I'd charged them a £300k renewal fee 😂

The worst thing was, no one could fix it. Whilst the stupid system had allowed stupid me to charge a customer £300k, no one had the required level of authority to apply a credit of £300k...computer said no 😂😂 Not my manager, or their manager OR their manager. It took until lunchtime the next day to get hold of one of the execs in the USA, get him updated and get them to do it.

It cost them a fortune in compensation (think it was about £10k) and they had to launch a whole big risk/IT project to lock some systems down and stop it from happening again 🙈

Surprisingly they still renewed my contract for a further 3 months when it was up 😂

@ShiningforLeeBertie
Didn’t you wonder why you’d had no RSVPs?!!

Love it! Sums it all up really 😂

When I was a newly qualified accountant and moved to a new job in a countryside accountancy practice, one of my first client meetings was to do a livestock analysis/reconciliation for a farm, where you have to balance out the opening numbers of each kind of animal, the numbers sold/died, the numbers born, to balance with the end stock numbers. I thought I'd cracked it with the different descriptors of different ages of sheep/cows, etc as I'd tried to do some basic research as I didn't want to appear a complete prat in front of a client in my new job (never done farming clients before). The meeting went well, and I was thinking I was doing OK. Asked a few pertinent questions, but at one stage the husband/wife farmers looked at me funny and I saw them give a sideways glance to each other, but they just answered the question and remained pleasant and polite to me. It stayed on my mind, so I asked one of the other accountants afterwards why I'd had a strange reaction to what I thought was a simple question. The whole office burst out laughing. The question was "how many of your tups were female?" All credit to the clients for not either laughing in my face or storming out claiming I was incompetent! They just quietly answered "none" and left it at that.

Another time, same firm, again, right at the start of working there, I crafted a brilliant tax planning report to a very wealthy client, lots of detail, in fact I thought it was a work of art. I read and re-read the report several times to check it was right, but unfortunately concentrated too much on the numbers and not enough on the wording. The report was typed up, signed by the partner, and posted out. Then a very irritated, valued client phoned to give me a right ear bashing. He hadn't got past the first paragraph! The reason was my introductory sentence saying the purpose of the report was to "maximise" his tax liability (should have said minimise), but I'd not noticed it, the typist hadn't noticed it, the partner hadn't noticed it. Lots of grovelling apologies and going through in great detail with the client to persuade him I knew what I was doing and the rest of the report was right.

It wasn't an invite as such, more information about the event and no response needed as it was in work time and all were expected to attend. Staff knew an event was happening at some point, but didn't know the date, I had booked it all and neglected to tell everyone.

I once texted DP while he was at work to tell him all about the naughty things I was going to do to him when he got home. My sister replied and said well thanks all the same, but I think this message was for someone else 😳

That reminds me of sending a birthday present to a friend via Amazon - and then also sending her my next order of Fungal Nail Treatment....

She sent me a somewhat baffled text as it arrived with her first in time, so looked like her bday present 💝

Wow @BlumminFreezin - that's amazing, it made me feel sick reading it!

A minor one that I’ve posted this before but it still makes me cringe.

I temporarily worked for a company called Harry Fairbairn, only I kept getting tongue tied when people called and saying "Hello. Hairy Farnbarn. How may I help you? I just couldn't say it right. Who knows what sort of establishment they thought they'd called instead of a car dealership?

My first museum job was in a huge military museum. One day I was doing some exhibit maintenance in the military vehical display - mainly light cleaning (in another zone I'd treated a polaris missile with a giant feather duster) . The dust was pretty thick as it was set up on packed soil and I managed to get halfway round a tank with a damp cloth before I twigged that the mud splashes were supposed to be there as part of the scene. It looked a bit odd half clean, half splattered!