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?

Pressed post too soon!

Fallen over many many times and pretty much had the injury log book to myself 🙊

Said 'love you' to a customer on the phone because I got muddled up with lovely and thank you.

I went into the local library and asked the man at the counter if they had any Tolstoy. After a long wait the man came back with - a DVD of Toy Story.

Not sure if this counts but when I was working for ToysRUs many years ago the guys in the stock room decided to play a prank on a newbie and told her to put a call out over the tannoy that 'Mike Hunt was wanted in the stock room - such a sight to see all of the management running towards the tower at top speed to stop her!

When I was working for Debenhams on the YTS I had a placement on the display dept and had to dress one of the mannequins but lost my grip on it- I managed to grab it only to have the arm of the one I was changing catch a group of two together and hit them over - apparently they were pretty expensive too (modelled on Joanna Lumley! )

Difficult names to pronounce...Cathal O'Laoghaire was a regular traveller to our international offices, hearing the attempts at pronouncing his name in the office in England were amusing but some people turned it into a challenge, "Seattle" er no! "Allow hairy" nope!

Go on, how would you pronounce it? Hehe

I once forgot to send a document to a crematorium for a funeral the next day...everything else was booked, the funeral was in Devon...I was all the way in North East, cue getting my poor DF to drive down, deliver and drive back, my boss was puzzled how I got it sorted as he received a call about it that morning...then one saying it had been delivered. Biggest lesson I learnt in rechecking and rechecking thrice!

Also a crematorium/name one, wrote on the cheque to crematorium, Mr.Burn...I meant Mr.Burr!

My worst was when I had not long started my first job. My boss had been on a long haul work trip but his company car was due to be changed over by the lease company while he was away.

He asked me to coordinate the swap, which I did, and then collect him from the airport.

I didn't realise Manchester airport had more than one terminal so I parked in one, looked at the board and thought he was coming into t2 but then waited ages to find he was actually waiting for me in t1. Got thoroughly muddled and completely forgot where I'd parked. Even which car park.

He had no idea what the car or reg plate were. I only knew it was a white one! We had to walk along every floor of 2 car parks pressing the key before we found it. It took an hour!

He was very nice about it to start with but was getting a bit more tense as time went on.

Ohh I remember an embarrassing tannoy one: When I was 16 working in a supermarket a customer asked for some Bonox (like marmite), I miss heard and thought he said Bollocks. And I didn't know what bollocks were back then,so I called for some Bollocks to be brought to register 4. I was wondering why everyone was laughing at me

I once told my boss I loved him after a phone conversation, he thought it was hysterical
I was working behind a bar when someone asked for a bottle of wine, this particular bottle was at the back of the fridge so I grabbed it and managed to knock another bottle of wine out the fridge, plus 8 bottles of Guinness. It happened in slow motion and there was a huge smash. The breakages came out of my wages.
I also once in a different bar, changed a barrel of carling but I had left the carling tap down so when I got back up to the bar carling was pouring out everywhere.

I managed to ship something to Australia instead of Austria once. I remember the shipping cost as being really expensive so I had to get it signed off by my supervisor which she did as it was a huge order.

I'll never forget the feeling in my stomach when the Austrian guy called up to see where his order was. I had a look at our tracking system to see it bobbing along off the coast of Senegal.

Regarding the Dublin tunnel, my firm's doubledeck trailer fleet has two sizes, full height and Irish. These are marked up as such, after a full height was sent over and promptly sent back.

not me but a colleauge years ago worked for bt and he needed a new transformer for a piece of kit , think of a mobile phone charger type of thing .He order it from our stores system, tbf it was just loads of item codes and vague descriptions .Fast forward 2 weeks and he got a phone call saying he had a delivery . He went downstairs and what can only be described as a small sub station was on the back of a low loader in the carpark

A few year age we went to a restaurant with DH and 2 DCs. My 8 year old DS asked for a bitter lemonade as a drink. The waiter came back with a pint of bitter with lemons floating on the top - for an 8 year old boy!! I've no idea what he was thinking.

Bought my first flat. Came to winter and the heating wouldn't come on. Many conversations with my dad on the phone about tapping various pipes with spanners, etc, flipping switches, etc. Nothing worked. My dad then drove the 400-odd miles to come to mine and fix it. His first morning there he phoned me at work to tell me he'd fixed it. How? He'd turned the thermostat up. blush This was around 20 years ago and still gets brought up at family gatherings.

When I was young I moved into my first flat ever, with 2 other, ditsy girls, we couldn't work out how to turn the heating on. If was the middle of December and eventually we called out the plumber.
"You see this thing here, this is the thermostat. You have to turn it up"
We must have looked so stupid! Luckily he was really nice and wrote down that there was something to fix so our landlord would have to pay the £60 call out charge

The tannoy ones remind me of a woman in my first job, she was a bit of a gossip and worked on reception. One day over the tannoy in Pauline's gleeful conspiratorial tone came " well apparently, according to Viv ..." I have never seen a woman sprint to reception faster than Viv did that afternoon. Good old Pauline, Viv was a cow.

We have a similar receptionist at my school except she's called Paula

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

Sounds like something my 16 yr old son would do

Back when my dad was a head teacher his school did an aid appeal to help earthquake victims in India - people were asked to bring in packages of clothes / blankets etc.

One morning a woman he vaguely recognised came in wheeling a huge trolley full of boxes. My dad thanked her and said she was just in time - shortly after the woman left the lorry arrived to take all the donations away.

Not long afterwards a flustered school cook came looking for my dad, explaining that there was a problem with the ovens and the neighbouring school was supposed to be bringing over some pre-prepared meals for the kids' lunches to help them out. Then the penny dropped - the woman he spoke to was from the other school and now the meals were enroute India!

I often wonder what on earth they thought when those boxes were opened after a 4500 mile journey.

When I first left school, I took a job in a factory canteen. We didn't cook anything but the workers would give us tins of soup to warm up for them for their lunch.
The canteen lady asked me to place the tins in the hot oven at around 11 so they would be warm for the workers coming for lunch at around 12.30, so I did.
Around an hour later, there was a huge bang as the tins of soup exploded, blowing the oven door clean off and redecorating the canteen various shades of soup.
Well, she could have told me to puncture the tins prior to putting them in the oven!

Nothing on the scale of some of these posts, but early in my career I sent out a long email on behalf of my boss explaining to a client that their application had now been granted and we were effectively closing the file.

Only I managed to typo now as not throughout. Fortunately the client was a good egg and rang me to check, rather than ringing my boss

Not me, though very similarly, I had to deal with the minor fallout when at the end of a very lengthy prosecution the examiner suggested that the word shite throughout the patent specification might profitably be replaced with the assumed correction white. This was in the days before patents went paperless, so we didn't have an electronic copy, and around 100 pages had to be carefully photocopied, Tipp-Exed and overtyped. Patent proceedings are a matter of public record so it's all still there if you know where to look.

My mum used to type up and copy the quarterly newsletter of a horticultural group she belonged to. Back then, this involved typing it all onto stencils, then using a gestetner machine to run off the copies (you put the stencil round the drum, and turned the handle, and the ink inside the drum printed through the stencilled type).

You could correct a typo, but it was not easy - basically you used a special correction fluid to fill in that letter or letters, then you could type over it and cut the new letter/word into the stencil. Once the stencil had been take out of the typewriter, it was much, much harder, because you couldn't easily line up the stencil so you were typing level with the original type, if you see what I mean.

Once you had started copying, you couldn't take the stencil off and correct it, because the ink made it damp, and it would tear.

Copying and assembling each newsletter was a two-person job, so dad was helping mum assemble the newsletter, when he happened to glance at the bottom of a page, where mum had typed up a report on a garden visit that had taken place - and I quote - "...near to the home of the late, great Bong Crosby"!!

Mum had to retype the whole sheet, and copy it again, and salvage the stencil sheet for the other side of the one with the mistake, and we had to take apart all the newsletters to take out the incorrect sheet and replace it with the new one.

Working in solicitors office - asked to go to court offices to fix High Court hearing for as soon as possible (there were then long delays in getting a hearing date - and so as soon as possible would mean a number of weeks / a few months).

Went there and submitted the request. I was asked what date we wanted. I was a bit flustered as said for 'as soon as possible'.

An hour later, my boss got a call saying Mr Justice XX was in Court Y and the hearing was ready to proceed and where were we?

I have never told anybody about this before.

A new colleague in our office only had one arm. It was a swelteringly hot day and the aircon wasn't working. She was trying to open the windows and I tried to explain to her that she needed to disable the alarm first, but what came out was "you need to disable the arm."
She gave me daggers and I wanted the floor to open up and swallow me.

One office I worked in was on the 12th floor, opposite a hotel. It was possible to see into the windows of the hotel's rooms but I don't think the guests realised as we often saw them getting up to all sorts.

The floor above us was unoccupied, so we used it as storage. One day I went up there to get an overhead projector only to find the cleaner ligging out of the window with his dick in his hand! Turns out he was wanking over a couple having sex in the hotel!

I was mortified, but he didn't seem remotely embarrassed - more annoyed at me for interrupting him!

I couldn't even tell the cleaning supervisor because she was his wife and that would have opened up a whole can of worms.

I am not a native English speaker and I started tp work as a legal assistant in the biggest UK law firm years ago.
I could not believe my luck even if for the first 3 months I was only allowed to do photocopies.
Then one day I was called to attend a meeting, (only to serve tea).
I was over the moon.
I also had to help the partner carry the files.
He had a last look at them and said " what a wanker!"
Me:"who?"
Partner " the client!"

Off we went to the meeting.
As a woman I was introduced first ( those were the days!). It was difficult to shake hands as I was holding the files but I was keen. So keen that I added " Morning Mr Wanker".

We lost the client.
It was a bank.

Straight out of uni I worked for a ceramic wholesalers as an account manager - we had a mug with a thrush bird on it.

I emailed the client back there order of this said thrush mug but replaced the i with an e in six.

Thankfully he found it very funny!

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.

This really made me laugh!