Can you beat my colleague's mistake?

[yaela123]

I work in a school and we were doing a cake decorating activity this afternoon, so at lunchtime I sent a colleague to the local shops to but some icing, decorations, etc.

On the list was sprinkles. (aka 100s and 1000s)

He comes back with... a sprinkler!

Yes, one of those things for watering the garden.

He said he was a bit confused, but could he really be that dim?

In his defence, there is a small garden. but everything else on the list was icing, chocolate chips, etc. And we don't send out the teachers to buy gardening equipment!

What silly mistakes like this have people around you (or even better you yourself!) made?

The secretary was told to buy PG tips for the office. Boss told her to get enough so we don't run out again next week. She ordered 2 packs of 1600 teabags each. I suppose that was enough.

Reminded me of this Cake Wrecks classic OP.

Same as MummysMaison, all the mums were in charge of taking something to school for the class' xmas party. My friend (non UK born) had been given 'crackers'. She took a single packet of... dry crackers...

Our receptionist frequently tannoys 'good afternoon ...(name of company)'. She also has form for not being able to get names correct when she tannoys for people.

Oh yes. I can beat those.

Landed a fab new job and sheer fluke brought in a lucrative new client within a few weeks. Bosses thought I was just great. Client wanted to show a presentation. Handed me some CDs and asked me to get someone to burn them.

Walked into general office and asked "Where would I find an incinerator? These must be hyper confidential because client has asked me to burn them."

Meet old colleagues and they still smirk- how I crashed from that pedestal.

My husband has made silly mistakes like this twice.

First one not work related, but for our wedding I asked him to go to the post office and buy the stamps for the invitations. He bought a stamp for each guest instead! 102 stamps for 58 envelopes...

He was also asked to buy earplugs for his department at work. He thought he was buying 1000 individual ear plugs, so 500 pairs. No. He bought 1000 pairs. 2000 individual ear plugs.

Ah I have made tonnes of mistakes at work but nothing this funny sadly

However my sister once met a quite famous actor and told him how much she had loved his performance in a popular tv show. He looked at her like this . She'd confused him with another actor.

They don't even look similar

Biggest mistake was a colleague who was the purchasing manager in a factory. He bought £300k worth of an expensive steel alloy to manufacture components for a new contract/project. Unfortunately, he mis-read the contract/project documents and bought the wrong stuff. As it was specially ordered from the rolling mill, it couldn't be returned, and as it was the wrong stuff, it couldn't be used for anything else. Worse still the stuff they really needed cost £500k, and they'd used the £300k figure when they costed the contract, so not only did they lose the £300k on stuff they didn't need, they also lost money on the contract itself. Needless to say, he didn't work there for long after that!

Not me but a military colleague ordered 1000 India tags - not realising they came in bags of 1000, so we had a million India tags...

Why Stores didn't phone and query the requisition I don't know!

nosquirrels that really made me laugh.
A colleague accidentally ordered 82 cases of wine instead of 2 boxes of 8. He got so frustrated at the delivery drivers and knowing he'd get a right bollocking kicked a box, which promptly collapsed toppling two stacks of ten boxes. We watched the cctv footage on loop after every shit shift.

I sent ex DH out for shopping with list - in amongst all the fruit and veg I wrote Baking pots. It was the days before mobile phones were common place...he came back with bun cases from the baking dept... I then asked him if we were having cake for tea then...having discussed menus with him before writing said list...in one ear out t'other

I was working as an outside caterer in a particularly swanky house when I dropped a huge pot of raspberry coulis all over their pure white, thick-coated show dog. I frantically tried to clean the coulis off, only making the dog more and more sticky and a beautiful shade of pink.

Love this thread!

You guessed it........my dad proudly gave me 3 packets of Jacobs crackers, very pleased with himself that they had made it without being crumbled

I had another one of these. That was a sad Christmas, the year our American friend showed up with a packet of Carr's thinking he'd brought along exactly what we asked him to .

Oh I love the pink dog!

I sent DP out with a list and he came back with a leek (asked for spring onions), olives (asked for olive oil) and double cream (instead of blue top whole milk). He's slowly improving. When I worked in retail and popping out to get lunch, a colleague asked me to pick him up a sausage roll, I misheard and came back with a pack of 6 rolls.

I think we should have a whole board for tannoy disasters. Once, whilst temping, I may have turned to my switchboard, which was ringing on about eight lines, and said flip fuck it, which may have echoed around a whole factory employing 1000 people.

I may have had a call from HR asking "is everything ok"

My friends work organised a small lunchtime Christmas lunch, with everyone bringing something. She was asked to bring the crackers. Turned up with a tub of Jacobs crackers for cheese. It was Christmas crackers for the table that they were after!

I just this minute got an email telling me I had made an electronic payment of $229,800 and she couldn't stop it from her end! When I called the bank to stop it, they told me not to worry as there was no way they'd pay it. I'll pay more attention to decimal points in future.

PMSL at the raspberry coulis on the white dog.

At my old law firm I sent an email with an attached document to print... Only it turns out there were about 15 documents attached to the email which I'd have known if only I'd scrolled down. I was asking for quite a few copies... I wanted to die when I had to go into the partner's office and confess that I'd accidentally had £42,000 worth of photocopying done. Luckily he saw the funny side...

When dh was a student he was with a theatre group doing The Importance of being Ernest.

They sent props out at the last minutes for the muffins Ernest and Algy eat for tea.
Props was American.
Yes, she returned with chocolate muffins.

My colleague accidently printed the whole staff handbook - all 2000 pages of it - when what she wanted was a print out of a protocol which was on a single page.
It was the day after we'd all had the memo about cutting printing and photocopying costs.

I have payment disasters too! I may have made electronic payments in Swiss Francs instead of French ones (years ago, obvs) which may have been worth about three times as much!

I may also have sent money to Belgium instead of France, just by looking at the address and thinking "that sounds like being in Belgium" rather than actually checking.

I may also have got the MD's pay wrong, and deducted £1000s extra tax

not all these errors in the same job mind, and I'm better these days

These are all funny but I loved this

My first job was in a restaurant in a pub
One night we had no customers
At locking up time I found out that I didn't need to lock up as I had never unlocked the door in the first place