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?

Generic email address used by many within our organisation .... "genenquiries" so I laughed my socks off when there was a phone call by someone asking to speak to Jen Enquiries

Nothing compares to the time i had cystitis and sent dh to the chemist. I said 'just tell the person i have had it a few times before and am having a flare up, could they give you something over the counter for it?'. He called me from the shop flustered and said 'they say you need to go to the gp, they can't give you anything otc'. me 'what?! did you tell them i've had it before?' him 'yes, but they say its quite serious and you need the doctor'. me 'oh what rubbish'. him 'you did say syphilis right?...

me

@MrsKoala
I think that's my favourite one

... And you've never shown your face in there again, right?

I used to be the manager of a well know homewares shop and got called down to deal with a customer complaint. Someone had come to collect their several thousand pound made to measure curtains and when they were unpacked it became clear that whoever had taken the order had confused inches with millimetres- god knows how. Tbf, they'd have made lovely dolls house curtains. The whole team were desperately trying not to laugh at the teeny tiny curtains in the cutting table.

I was working in a remote part of Indonesia for an airline. The pilots would fly the aircraft stopping off at 6 hotels along the way & it was my job to book all the hotels.
I'd send the names off the night before they left & one pilot was called Captain Stephen Hunt. Only I spelt his name wrong so at every hotel he checked into they welcomed him as Captain C**t. Because English wasn't the hotel staff's first language they didn't realize my error....

It was the bosses birthday so he was buying cakes for everyone. I gave the money to the office junior and sent them off to the cake shop to buy 20 fresh cream cakes. They came back with 20 apple turnovers. I kept opening boxes expecting something different. I asked why they didn't buy an assortment and the reply was, "But I like apple turnovers."

I sent someone out for razors and they came back with raisins...

This is awful and I feel hot and cold now just thinking about it. It wasn't even a mistake, I just panicked because I didn't know what to do. I was doing work experience for a theatre when I was 14 or 15, answering the phone in the box office. I was a bit scared of the other people working there and was basically really out of my depth but also embarrassed to ask for help when I needed it. The customers were also often quite demanding and impatient and would get cross if I was slow or said I needed to check something.

Someone rang up to buy 6 tickets for a show that was nearly sold out. There weren't 6 seats all together, but there were 3 seats together, and then 3 more scattered around the theatre. So I sold them the 6 scattered seats without saying that they were all in different parts of the theatre. I feel so appalled now, thinking about what must have happened when they turned up on the night with their party of 6 all expecting to sit together. I wonder if the theatre staff worked out it was me, and exactly how livid the ticket buyer was.

Getting the lift to a lab on the top floor with some paperwork for the test I was going to do. Somehow I managed to drop it in the gap between the lift and the door and it went into the lift shaft. Fortunately my boss knew how to reprint the paperwork.
On nights once I put made a folder on the server for some files I was using called 'DrDres Shit' (there were no big bosses around on nights). I forgot to delete it before I went home and got a telling off the following night!

Last week I turned up at Heathrow for my work trip to Bucharest to discover my assistant had booked me a flight to Budapest. Stupidly I hadn't noticed when checking in online either so we're as bad as each other!

I've told this one before: but I often end an email with

Regards!

And I once ended an email to several people that way except I hit T instead of G . . .

It won't happen again, thank you auto-correct!

Stealth polar bear hilarious. At least we aren't the only ones doing daft things

I once had a job in a magazine office and I was supposed to email a logo to a bag manufacturer to print on plastic goody bags for a show. Sent it to a colleague assuming he'd send it on but he didn't and he didn't tell me either. Boss somehow realised but by then it was too late to go to print. So I rang the bag manufacturer and explained that we wouldn't be having the logo. He asked me if I then wanted clear or white bags. For some reason I said white. It occurred to me far too late that if I'd just said clear it would have showed our magazine logo through the bloody bag and the problem wouldn't have been half as bad. 🙄

I got such a bollocking for that. Bloody boss didn't realise either at the time so she was just as thick as me.

I once sent my DH to the shop for beetroots and he came home with BEETROOTS like fresh from the ground. I was totally bemused as i stupidly had no idea what they were. I thought beetroots only came sliced in jars ooops

English girl - that happened to my parents in Laura Ashley
Weeks of waiting and they ended up with crazy sized curtains.

dotdotdotmustdash – Something similar happened in our local hospital, in a new-build day surgery/outpatients block. Apparently, nobody spotted, until it was too late, that the shielding for the x-ray room meant that the fire exit route from the upper floors could only be via the day surgery theatre lower down.

Colonoscopy patients were seated in a waiting area dressed only in scanty gowns. The waiting area was completely open to the corridor down which every member of staff, every patient and visitor, walked down. Talk about patient dignity! But the waiting area was beautifully decorated.

stuntcamel - The worst IT disaster I know took place in a very large data centre. Contractors were brought in to remove redundant equipment for recycling. There was a push button to open the doors – helpful, as it’s not easy to manually open doors when carrying equipment. Some distance away there was a BIG! RED! EMERGENCY STOP‼! button. Yep, the contractor hit that button. That caused all power to all the equipment in the entire date centre to be dropped. There was an emergency back-up generator but that did not kick in, because protocol for the BRB being activated was to search the entire area in case the emergency button had been pressed in the case of someone having been electrocuted. Recovery from a power outage is normally pretty smooth. But in this case, every single server had to be checked to be off, and then brought back online manually in a specific order. That’s a case of anticipating every possibility, except for stupid.

Dh works for a shop that's a little distrustful of modern technology so only set up email and online sales recently. All the staff had to have a personal login with their own password and they caught DH at a bad time so he set up his password as Pissflaps (a family joke that's too tedious to explain!)

He got an icy phone call the next day telling him to choose something more appropriate to a work environment...

On leaving work my car wouldn't start , I tried and tried - nothing. I decided it was a flat battery (even though the radio and lights were working ) . I didn't have jump leads so phoned DD to go and buy jump leads and then drive to my work place with them. After nearly electrocuting myself by touching the crocodile clips together and failing to jump start the car , it dawned on me in a slow motion type way , that instead of depressing the clutch and turning the ignition , which I have only done thousands of times , I was depressing the accelerator. My DD's face was

I put in s big order for veg at the local farm shop for Christmas lunch. I thought I had only ordered 3 sprouts as no bugger likes the vile things them apart from DD2. Of course, I got 3kg of the damn things instead.

1. I fell asleep on the press bench in a magistrates court. I was nudged awake by a concerned court usher to find the bench had adjourned as they thought I'd fallen ill. Had to then pretend to be ill in fear of being found in contempt!

1. Interviewing a very well known TV star, asked her when she was ever going to get around to marrying her very long-term partner. She sarcastically raised her left hand and said "I did, six months ago." cringe

1. Wrote off the news room pool car - the day after head office sent a warning email that insurance claims were through the roof and anyone having accidents from then on would be fired. My contract was not renewed.

There have been a lot :) I'm a dick.

These are great

I've got a few..

Working in retail- mopped the whole shop floor, only to get to the last tiny bit and knocked the whole bucket of water everywhere! My shoes and trousers were soaked.

Put an announcement over a tannoy for a cleaner to go to 'twill 12' instead of till 12.

When I was young I worked in a well known DIY store. Five minutes before the store closed I removed the till and contents and was then a bit careless and desperate to get out on the town and walked off to find something, leaving the entire days takings on the counter!

It was around 20k! There were still customers in the store!

How I didn't get sacked I'll never know.