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?

I had to arrange a meeting between all the members of the company board and a Very Important Client. It took me weeks to sort out everyone's schedules and find a day and location that worked for everyone. Imagine my horror when on the day of the meeting I got a call from my boss that all the extremely busy board members were sitting in the room and waiting for the VIClient... who had failed to show because I had completely omitted to confirm the meeting with her. Nearly got fired over that!

I once got a job at a hotel and the woman I was replacing had just bought a new car but as she hadn't driven in a while asked if I would go with her to show her how to put petrol in it. It started to rain and she panicked and said would I drive back which I did.
She wanted me to park were it would be easy for her to drive out without reversing etc which I duly did.
We then ran from the car park back into the hotel to avoid getting too wet.
All was great until we heard an almighty bang followed by the receptionist screaming. We shot out of the office to discover that in my haste I had forgotten to put the handbrake on and the car had rolled down the hill, smashed into the double doors and ended up in the hotel reception area!
Amazingly I kept my job

loo rolls x 100 bread rolls

My dad works on a building site and each Friday they all take turns or buy cakes so 1 of the new starts offered to go to the shop my dad k my bad his bank so sent him for a cake & said get yourself something too, he came back half an hour later with a cake, a 'now' cd and a new pair of trainers.

My Mum who was a nurse once tried to take an elderly lady to the toilet to toilet her as she was on a ward where people needed help. The lady resisted and started shouting which was not unusual on this ward as lots had mental Health issues and dementia.

The shouting woman attracted the attention of another nurse who came over to help only to inform my Mum that the lady she was trying to toilet was a volunteer not a patient.

I worked for a medical charity as the office supervisor and dealt mainly with volunteers or work placement students as we didn't have the budget for any other admin staff.

1. a work placement student who was asked to move a set of resource books from one shelf to another, filed them all with the spines inwards so you could only see the edges of the pages!
2. a man who had a very patchy work history applied for a volunteer vacancy for someone to do filing. The test involved putting names like: Smith, Smythe, Smyth and Smithson into alphabetic order. He got very mixed up and finally said, 'I'm okay on the alphabet but I get a bit muddled after the letter P!' I wanted to help him and it was just before Xmas so I said we could do with some help doing other things like sticking stamps on letters. And would he like to help put up the Xmas decorations as he was about a foot taller than me? He did this and the office looked lovely and all the stamps went on right. He didn't turn up after Xmas and when I got in touch with him he said the work was much more stressful than he'd expected so he wouldn't be coming back! I'm so glad he didn't ask me for a reference as I wouldn't have known what to write!
3. we had thousands of people on our mailing list. Subscribers/patients received the details about medical trials, medication, etc. Donors received glossy mags about our wonderful work and please give us £20 letters. Obviously but sadly patients died and were immediately taken off the mailing list so their families weren't more distressed, but rather than the database entry being deleted, for some reason their status was changed to deceased. Donors who asked to be taken off the mailing list were changed to lapsed. The idiotic IT manager when asked to prepare the mailing list to lapsed donors asking if they wouldn't reconsider and make us a donation, instead used the deceased list and wrote to a huge number of dead people asking if they were sorry they'd lost touch with us and please would they consider resubscribing. He prepared the list and the various volunteers stuffed the envelopes but it was me who got the furious calls from mourning relatives saying of course Mrs C isn't going to resubscribe, she died 6 months ago. It was absolutely horrendous for everyone involved. I am so glad I don't work there any more!

A colleague was buying a house and was having a really hard time with the estate agent, she was complaining bitterly to me about all that was going wrong 'Emma Johnson said this, Emma Johnson did that, Emma Johnson didn't do that etc'.

In the middle of her rant her phone rang and she answered it very brusquely, 'hello, Emma Johnson speaking', silence on the other end of the phone ..... She quickly said ' oh sorry, it's, 'herownname' !! It turned out to be Emma Johnson on the line, clearly totally confused. Colleague cheerily said 'Oh Hi Emma, was just talking about you'! She was puce red with embarrassment.

We laughed hysterically for the rest of the day.

First job, company making several hundred redundancies. I sent a draft of the at risk people to the first person on the list instead of the senior manager in charge of the dept. Same first name, similar surname. Horrendous. Thankfully the recipient's line manager was a mate of my boss so she phoned him and got him to go over and delete it all from his email. They worked in IT. I chose to assume they did not have ways of digging it out of permanently deleted storage.

More entertainingly, I ordered 20kg of carrots instead of 20 carrots. DH was there to unload the delivery, I was out. I returned to bags of carrots all over the floor and when I asked why DH hadn't given them back to the delivery man, he just said he thought I was making something special. carrot soup served with carrot puree, carrot toast and carrot smoothie?! I handed out carrots to everyone I met the next day!

DH has form for ordering the wrong quantities on our online food shop, but he goes the other way...
We had a whole shop full of tiny things once. He wanted orange juice, so ordered the cheapest - we got one individual serving of juice. We needed milk, so again he chose the cheapest bottle of milk - one individual drink sized bottle of milk arrived. Olive oil - tiny little almost trial-sized bottle of oil.
He has now realised that you have to look at the amount of stuff you're getting, not just the price!
But every now and then one sneaks past him, and his super bargain purchase becomes just another reason for me to laugh at him

Not me, but on a train back from London found lots of students in and around my pre booked seats. Teachers were extremely rude to us and the conductor until he pointed out they were on the wrong train as they hadn't worked out the 24 he clock correctly . They didn't apologise to us but sidled off the train with their charges , telling them it was all our fault.

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 once opened a set that had someones melted biro in it. They didn't own up to that one either

We asked a young girl who was working for us if she could please ring the supplier and ask about an order. She tried ringing literally all day, so thinking there was a problem with the phone line or something I said don't worry and I rang it myself, it rang and was answered instantly, because she was quite new I just asked her to show me the number she was ringing, I think she was a bit put out and her face saying I'm not stupid. Anyhoo in she trots with the headed notepaper with the list of numbers we had given her, only for her to point to the number she was ringing which actually wasn't the supplier but was the same number she was ringing from in reception. Poor girl nearly cried bless her

I once had to input a new starter onto our payroll system. Accidentally gave them an annual salary of 2 million - whoops! Luckily the payroll manager picked up on it doing the first run so he didn't actually get paid that much!!

a relative told me of her first job as a Saturday girl in a corner shop in the 60s - she was 13, religious and rather naive
a lady came in and whispered to her she wanted 10 'S Ts' in a paper bag (eg sanitary towels. which were kept under the counter sold by number and wrapped discretely )
my relative, not having reached that stage in life and knowing nothing of menstrual products, looked about for what could be meant
and served the poor lady with 10 iced tea buns in a paper bag
the customer stormed out leaving her wondering what the matter was

Luckily she confided in an older female colleague who had to fill in quite a bit of worldly knowledge

When I was in the Brownies my friend and I used to go to an old people's home on Saturdays. We used to make a list of what bits they wanted, they'd give us the money and then we would walk to the shops for them.

One lady asked my friend for some Obas Oil and we came back with Anusol.

I accidentally logged an assault on myself into the new work system. Concerned line manager comes running, asking if I am ok and is very confused when I smile and say "fine, thanks".

Couple of days later I accidentally logged another major incident. New system and I had a bumpy start...

Not long after I started working in the office for my father I wrote an email intended for my husband an 'I ❤️ You" in the largest font I could fit on the screen, to my horror it got sent to one of our customers a older male builder! I had to phone him to explain what I had just done to which he said it was a good job I told him so his wife didn't see it! Then a few days later came to the office and jokingly told dad he wanted to make an complain as a member of staff had sexually harassed him! I was mortified, I not sure to this day if he truly believed it was a mistake as he never seemed comfortable around me when visiting our office and if dad wasn't there wouldn't even come through the door! Months after my embaresment as time move on I realised the funniest thing about the whole email was if any one had read it it was signed off at the end automatically with my fathers signature 😂😂

i went out of the house one day to the shops with my 2children and child's friend. When we tried to get in the key wouldn't turn in the lock. It seemed to be broken. I phoned my husband to come home to change the locks as he is a joiner but he was working far away and took a few hours to get to us. When he got back he pushed the handle down on the door and it opened. I hadn't locked it in the first place which is why thy key wouldn't work he had to travel back to work and was home much later that night. Oops luckily he saw the funny side of it

I left a shopping list for my ex to do once whilst i was at work. He called me to say he couldn't get something on the list. He had been to 4 shops and asked everyone and no one knew what man get out was. first i was then the penny dropped and i think i actually fell off my chair laughing.

I work in a kitchen and when we order mixed leaf it comes in 4 bags per box, head chef was off last week so told colleague to order 20 bags i.e. 5 boxes.
He obviously didn't pay enough attention to the order form that asked how many boxes and ordered 20, so we've now got 80 bags of salad leaf that are dated 7th June, so most of it will be binned tomorrow

Manager saw the funny side tbf so not the end of the world, but I doubt colleague will be placing anymore orders in the near future

Cuppa my car is starting to get old and falling to pieces a bit and I'm not the most patient of people.
I was in a hurry to get somewhere and could not start it. I came in on a strop and said to dh "my sodding car will not start"
"in what way? "
Conversation ensued about how the key just wouldn't turn, had I checked the steering lock etc, I had. I stomped off to Google new cars and he went out to try to fix it. Which he did, very quickly. The trick was to use my car key rather than his.

Lol at man get out, brilliant. If you just had peas he'd have been fine

I worked in a petshop aged 15 as Saturday job. I was a bit hopeless and naive.
The boss took me aside at the end of the day and said " im sorry I'm going to have to let you go"
Oh says me, go where??

Oh I just remembered another, this one is not work related but still makes me laugh.

When my sister (who I'd never considered to be stupid) first went of to uni last year her housemates had made pasta one evening, when offered some she asked what was in it and was horrified when they told her it had basil in it; she thought basil was the term used for fox meat like beef is used for cow meat.

I've no idea why she thought this as DM nearly always had basil in the house growing up, we figured she must have got mixed up because basil brush was a fox

Paul at basil brush meat. Wonder who got the brush - they'd have been picking it out of their teeth for weeks