To ask you about the worst mistake you've made at work?

[800caloriesofwine]

Terrible, terrible day.
Please tell me the worst mistakes you've made in the workplace.
Mine were sending £6,000 of dental implants to the wrong dentist, two days before they were due to be placed in someone's mouth.
Also writing the wrong patient down as dead.

First day as an intern at a Film Production company and had to book flights for 5 senior staff to go to a film festival in America (bloody stupid thing to get an intern to do on their first day). Booked them for the wrong day.

The look on their faces when I announced i'd booked all the flights leaving at 8:34am on the 26th... and the quiet voice of the Director saying: "The screening is on the 26th. I asked you to book the 25th" nearly made me puke on the spot.

I managed to change them but at a cost of over £2k. Not a good first day. I didn't sleep for about a week.

@hermionegranger at least you clocked it before they flew out!
I started a new job once and my predecessor had booked my new boss flights to the US for a trip in a few weeks’ time. I only noticed a few days before that she’d booked them in her own name rather than boss’s name. Fucking nightmare!

I used to work for a company with county in its title. You can probably guess where this is going......We had a big event going on and I had to make lots of signs for different seminars and so on and I was in such a rush I missed the o out of county.

@SlightyJaded

In my first job as a receptionist at a big media agency, my boss was having a lunch meeting in our 'in house' dining place. He asked me to go and fetch a bottle of wine from the fridge, which I promptly did. I was about 19 and didn't know much about wine so only asked red or white...

Anyway, I uncorked it and took it over to his table and was walking away when he called me back. He was a really kind man and just said "Hmmm Slightly, my fault for not being clear about the fridge I meant. This is actually a superb claret that I bought at Auction last year for the best part of £1500. So since it's now open, it would be a shame for you to not have a taste". He poured me, the client and himself a glass and was completely lovely about it.

I'm still not a great wine connoisseur, but boy, did that slide down nicely.

Why was he keeping claret in the fridge? misses the point

I missed off a zero on a very large cheque. The recipient almost had a heart attack.

I broke a phone of a client before she had pics of her grandmother who had just passed away and didn't have them backed up ☹️

When I was about 17 I was super hungover and working in a fish and chip restaurant - one of the ones that are trying to be a bit fancy. It was always full of families after school. I was holding two plates one in each hand the smell of fish suddenly overpowered me and as a approached a table with a family on it I felt the vomit coming I couldn't catch it as I was holding the plates. I was sick on the table splattering the family. I’ll never forget the shock on the kids faces.

I put down the food as if it was fine and said ‘enjoy your meal’, no idea why.

I got fired on the spot.

Oh OP I feel your pain, I'm a Maxfax and Ortho dental nurse and this is so easy to do. I hate hate hate ordering implants! I've sent a retainer to someone's old address when they quite clearly told me in an email there new address! I can still feel the fear I felt then! Hope you're okay

Not my mistake.

My uncle called frantic about a letter from disability (USA) and how there was a letter from a lawyer and he had no idea what was going on. Turns out... Whoever stuffed the envelope put his paperwork and someone else's... All of the man's information... Including his social security number was in there. Had it gone to someone else his identity could have easily been stolen. Instead... I calmed my uncle down and then called the lawyers office on the letter to let them know mad ask what they wanted me to do. They just had me forward the letter to them. I called the social security office and the response was "oh". 🙄

Open evening at school.

I’d been preparing materials for the evening and left laser cutter cutting up the stuff for later on.

I’d had no tea and so went out to get a bite to eat.

I got back to find the firemen had been, come and gone. The laser cutter had caught fire, total wreck.

The area smelt of smoke and had to be shut off.

The Head was understanding and fine about it.

I know someone who caused an international incident as an intern as she copied an American document out but edited into British English. So people thought the document was planted by Brits 😬😬😬

Me personally? Not much but I did get my sister fired when she was 21... I'd been covering her shifts when she was hungover (I was 17) and told a customer my real name. Oops.

I work in children's services and was case lead for a family where the mother kept making allegations and complaints about staff. It got so bad that all home visits had to be done jointly due to potential for malicious allegations. This meant although I was working the case I always had to take someone with me when I visited, and no-one liked going with me as the mum was very difficult to work with. I had kind of worked my way round the office until the only person left to come out with me was my good friend. It was about a month before my friend retired and she had been suffering with insomnia. Once we got to the mum's house the room was dark as the mother never opened the curtains and hot as it was summer. Yep, my friend fell asleep while I was talking to the mother. I was desperate for the mother to not notice so had to be slightly more challenging than I planned, just so the mother would raise her voice at me to wake my friend up. I remember being sat in the mother's front room, half terrified and half desperate not to laugh. Luckily that visit was one of the few times the mum didn't complain!

Completely wiped my very busy boss’s electronic diary for an entire year. Saved by the sorcerers in IT.

Letsnotusemyname Um I've done similar with a crucible melting aluminium and forgetting to switch it off when I was a very fresh faced teacher (luckily the technician found it) and recently allowing sixth formers to leave stuff running on the 3-D printer overnight which caused a small fire.

This thread is awesome. I once rang up 6 million dollars worth of lighters on a till which totally blew its mind. My experienced colleague had only left me for ten mins. When he got back there was a queue of customers out the door which had never happened before, sleepy town in the outback

Was working in a bank, accidentally charged a customers account for a grand instead of crediting them it. Nobody noticed until they rang up a couple of weeks later, politely querying what the transaction was.

Different job, sent a customer a letter saying they'd be getting a payout in the region of 10k. Followed by a correction letter the next day, in which I had to admit they were only getting about 200 quid. Never heard if they complained about that one.

Should probably mention that the sister I got fired from the cafe was not a waitress... she was the cook/chef.

Was it her fault for letting a 17-yo take over as chef? Yes. Was i a better cook than her with more formal culinary training? Also yes. But still... we were both skint for months

The second part was 3WY and instead of saying 'three, whiskey, yankee', I kind of merged the last two words and said 'three wanky'

This really made me laugh. Thank you!

So did the other typo ones: ‘Margaret and Satan’ instead of ‘Margaret and Stan’, and ‘to the sweatiest girl I know’ by the poster who worked in the flower shop and couldn’t spell!

I also laughed massively at the NI stamps blowing into the Thames because the poster carrying them couldn’t resist having a look, the pub cellar flooded with beer, the pub umbrellas catching fire when the poster put the heaters on without checking whether the umbrellas had been opened and the poster who paid somebody their six digit sort code instead of the payment amount.

Mine are quite boring by comparison. I’m an accountant. I once transposed two digits in a set of glossy published (at great expense) accounts. So eg £629 million was £692 million. It was too late to change them. We had to get an addendum slip printed. The shame of it!

I also got the sign of a number the wrong way around in a spreadsheet and understated the collectibility of some debts by £300 million. When I make mistakes, I like to make them big!

I have a couple that comes immediately to mind.

First up, as another poster mentioned, having a workplace relationship. I was working in the transport industry at the time...

I was newly separated, he was older with a well-known drinking problem. In hindsight I think I did it as a bounce back from my marriage, either or, it made great gossip about the workplace. One day someone had an open niggle at me as to who I was seeing, and I told them my private life, was private. That brought gales of laughter from those who heard my comment. I felt about 5 cms tall, I hadn't realised until then the guy I was seeing was very loose-lipped after downing a few...

Secondly, also at the same workplace, I received a call from ''john's mum'' (name change of course) saying John's Dad had been rushed to hospital, could I let him know asap. All of the guys were in a union meeting and I called John out of the meeting to let him know. His face dropped, and he raced to the phone. Shortly after, John approached me to say it wasn't his Dad at all. It then dawned on me we had two John's at the workplace... it was just this one was the one who came to mind.

I profusely apologised for my mistake and the correct John was informed. When the union meeting found out about my mistake, the union delegate wanted to call a walkout and asked for my employment to be terminated. The first John was a very decent chap and stood up for me, he was happy with my apology and that it was a genuine mistake. They then tried to work on the second John to file a complaint as he ''should have been told sooner''.

Needless to say I felt terrible over the whole thing, but it was an honest error. I was eventually pleased to leave that company for other reasons. Knowing the married union delegate was having an affair with another workplace friend who used me as an excuse to her Hubby as to her absences from home made things tricky at times too.

Drug error..wrong patient and wrong dose ..patient was ok....phew !!

I thought someone was making fun of me during a big presentation trying to pronounce a VERY specific technological term and wasn't very impressed. NOPE! They just had a speech impediment.....

I lost a very very important document - and didn't remember even having set eyes on it. I spent 3 weeks having my boss go mental at me every day that it didn't turn up, 3 weeks searching for it, 3 weeks of sleepless nights and worrying about going in to work the next day. Then one day my boss appeared waving this envelope at me saying she had found it in the other office, she must have taken it there and left it by mistake. Not even a hint of remorse and no apology. It had been nothing to do with me. I didn't remember seeing it because I hadn't seen it. I have never to this day set foot in the other office. So I guess that one was her mistake but she had me thinking it was mine!

Receiving end of this one. I get a very expensive medication by IV infusion every 8 weeks. My insurance pays for most of it and the pharmaceutical company that makes it sends the hospital a check to cover my portion of the cost. I have to track this pretty closely to make sure all of the paperwork is completed correctly to get the additional payment.

One day I get a notice that the hospital is preparing to take legal action to collect what I owe them. They claim they never got the check from the pharmaceutical company. The pharma claims that the hospital deposited the check and it cleared the bank.

So many phone calls, faxes and a visit to patient accounting later, it turns out that the check had been posted to another patient's account, apparently because we have the same first name. It took more faffing about to get me off of the deadbeats list.

Some of these are brilliant.

Not a work mistake so much as a mistake that happened in the office... I was wearing this blouse/bodysuit thing with some high waisted trousers and I thought it looked super classy with its chiffon sleeves. I went to the loo and pulled the bodysuit down to pee... didn't realise the sleeves had fallen into the bowl and yup - I peed all over my sleeves. Real classy.

@CaptainNelson it was actually a proper wine storage thingy so was temperate for red. I didn't know that when he said fridge he meant the normal hotpoint in the kitchen (which was full of cheap and cheerful'). I was even quite pleased with myself that I remembered seeing the wine storage and knew where it was.

There were bottles in the storage worth even more than the one I opened and this was about 25 years ago and the boss in question now owns and runs a respected vineyard in New Zealand.