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?

In my first summer job, I was left in charge of answering phones for an hour while everyone else was busy. Didn't really know what I was doing and was a bit stressed.

Someone phoned up to ask when our late night openings were, as he had to travel quite a distance and wanted to make sure. I didn't know (didn't work in the evenings) and didn't know how to find out, so just said "Monday and Wednesday". Turned out it was Tuesday and Thursday.

The swimming pool thing (correct length until tiled) happened in Bangor in Northern Ireland a few years ago too!

JakeBallardswife How did you resolve the issue?

The cautionary tale I was told during my induction as a trainee solicitor was of the corporate lawyer drafting a long 100 page + syndicated loan agreement. And forgot to include the obligation to repay...

Mine is REALLY bad. I used to deal with life assurance claims for a mortgage firm. I had two death claims with the same surname and they had both used the same life assurance company. When the cheques came in I paid the wrong surplus, after repaying the mortgages, to each family. One surplus was significantly larger than the other. By the time I realised and we tried to get the money back, the family had divided up the inheritance!!! The firm had to let them keep it AND reimburse the other family. The thought make me want to throw up even now, several decades later.

Another one. PA to the CEO (not me!) booked a lavish and complex routed holiday for her CEO, booked hotels and flight and forgot to book any flights etc for his wife

On my first day as a care assistant, a resident asked me to empty her bag. I took her handbag and emptied it out on the table. Of course, she meant her urine drainage bag blush

That's great!

I ordered a new multifunction printer last year but I can't figure out how the scanner works, so I've hidden it in a cupboard!

Why don't you call NotCitrus

At school a girl brought spaghetti in as she thought it was long grain rice!

My worst was typing address labels for Virginia, and yes I did miss the second I out , but apart from the embarrassment, the laughter that came when the poor engineer had to try and tell me what I'd done. 😂

Im a TA in a school and managed to mark a very similar Y1 number sentence correct when it was actually wrong right in front of an Ofsted Inspector...not my finest moment!

I ordered what i thought was a normal ball of string out of the stationery catalogue (at work). Nearly died when it came as it was almost the size of a football! It was about 10 years ago and we still have it.

You can never have too many envelopes

Or parcel tape. I ordered 36 boxes (I think there were 36 in three boxes!).

I used to be an operating theatre nurse. One day I was working as the circulating nurse in the orthopaedic theatre, where the first case was a hip replacement. All our instruments came prepacked on trays, from the central sterile services unit (CSSU), and there were a series of trays needed for a hip replacement.

As the first phase of the operation came to a close, I removed the first tray of instruments, and put out the second one for the scrub nurse to open (I opened the outer layer, so she could get to the sterile layers).

When she unwrapped the tray, there, nestled into the corner of the tray, was a pair of glasses, in their case! Clearly whoever had been packing it had been called away, and had, in an absentminded moment, bunged their glasses into the tray - and no-one had noticed before wrapping it all up and sterilising it.

The glasses case had gone all manky, in the heat of the steriliser, and the glasses had melted somewhat - and when we told CSSU what we had found, none of their staff owned up to the mistake.

I spend an hour's criminal law tutorial talking about penile colonies

And forgot to include the obligation to repay...

A company I worked for was in serious financial straits and decided to let a load of people go. One department was shut, having opened only a few months earlier (Director's pet project). One of the newly laid off people read their contract quite closely and told their colleagues to do the same.

Three dozen people turned up at arbitration and were told yes, your contracts do say that you're to be paid X amount for 12 months. No mention made of any impediment such as not having a job. So the company had to pay 8 or 9 months of salaries times 36.

I took a whole year group of Year 6 children to the theatre on the wrong week!

Miraculously, it was nowhere near full and they found us alternative seats, still more or less altogether. The amazing steward even said, 'don't worry, it happens all the time.' I was thinking, 'thank you so much but ... yeah right; no other teacher in the history of teachers could ever be this idiotic.

Once a friend of mine who worked in a large tax department had finished a tax review and sent the email to her manager for his review- saying at the end of the email - "Can you get the partner to look at it?" - but she was typing so fast she messed up the spacing and typed - "can you get the partner to look a tit?" - mortified when she realised, until her manager responded - "I don't need to, he does it all by himself usually" 😁

I was a Saturday girl in bookshop.
The other Saturday girl never got a book on the correct shelf. The best day was when she moved the whole Judaism section to martial arts.

I used to work in a cafe with two wonderful owners who were both mad but awesome. One was very very batty. Every week she faxed off the food order to the wholesalers, one day they phoned laughing because she kept writing Arsehole rather than aerosol cream...

In a previous job, I drafted a letter to a client telling them that we'd do all we could to help them minimise their tax liability.

The typist typed it saying "maximise" your tax liability and passed it to the partner to sign, who didn't notice her typo and it was signed and posted.

Next day, a very irate client phoned up the partner, who in turn started to berate me for "my" drafting mistake. Luckily, I had a copy of my draft letter so very easy to deflect the vitriol back to him and the typist.

So so many....

First job in the 1980s - no PCs but a bank of green screen ICL word processors on one wall which people took turns to share. First time I used them, I sat down confidently, crossed my legs, caught the plug and pulled it out the wall, taking out the whole set. Cue wails from very senior staff on either side who had just lost all their work. Cue me quietly putting it back in with my feet and denying all knowledge as the screens sprang back to life ...

I always wondered why, in our local modern hospital, that there was a slope/ramp that everyone had to walk down or be wheeled down into the X-ray department. All of the other departments and offices in the area were level with the corridor except that one.

It turns out that when the hospital had been built, the Architect had forgotten to take into account the height of the imaging equipment and there had to be emergency excavations to lower the floor so that the hospital could open in time!

Not sure who was to blame, but this is true not an urban myth, a I was one of the lucky customers.

We accept any vouchers against any product...

A brand new supermarket did this, took 3 days for them to get a court order to remove the promotion , you have never seem anything like it, and some little old lady came in too buy something with £10, everyone gave her £10 of vouchers, we filled her trolly and she used the £10 to take a taxi home with her shopping.

First day temping in the tax office years ago. In the afternoon I was being shown how to do their filing and was handed a huge pile of A4 folders and promptly dropped them, scattering papers everywhere. I assumed it was also going to be my last day but the person showing me said, "don't worry" and started sticking papers back in files, any file, not checking them. I suspect that the tax officers were still sorting out the mess years later. Clearly not for some time as I not only finished the co tract but was asked to go back!!

The guy who designed the Toronto university library forgot to take the weight of the books into account. cue five floors of very expensive unusable library.

Hector That reminds me of a place I once worked, where the IT staff were scratching their heads for weeks as the server kept going down overnight and rebooting itself, and it meant that the automated backups were being aborted half-way through. Nobody could figure out why it was happening.

One evening, somebody was working very late in the office when the cleaners arrived, one of them armed with a vacuum cleaner. My colleague watched as she walked over to the corner behind the server, pulled out the plug, used the socket for her hoovering and then replaced the plug back in the socket again....