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.

I used to pay bills for a client from their bank account. Client sent me an email asking me to pay a bill. So I did. And another. And another. Turns out they were scam emails and Id fallen for it. £18,000 !!! Luckily my insurance paid out and in my defence I was home seriously ill and shouldn't have been working but was trying to keep them running.

How cool and kind and lovely the expensive wine guy was.

School Chapel opening.

For some reason it was decided I was good with microphones and sound systems.

The school was to have a small chapel, an ex classroom, dedicated as a chapel. It was a small room and so only the favoured few could go. The rest of the audience were to stay in the main hall and listen to the proceedings via speakers. They party would then return for the rest of the evenings music etc.

I was in the hall on the stage behind the curtain. I could see what was going on in the hall and hear events in the chapel via headphones.

Everything had been set up, it worked, I’d been given a running order, timings etc. What could possibly go wrong.

Well the room had been reorganised, my microphone put behind a pile of chairs, the running order changed.

I could hear nothing but shuffling, it’d been agreed not to broadcast shuffling etc , just the brief service.

So I kept the volume off. Those in the hall waited..........and waited...........and waited. Eventually I thought sod it and turned the mics up to hear the last Amen and them proceed out.

After the post mortem, at which I mentioned the mics being moved, nothing more was ever said.

@handbagsatdawn33 - what happened after that? I'm thinking that several hundreds of pounds then must equate to thousands now. Did the cost just get written off (or were the stamps not something that had to be purchased?)

@DanceToTheMusicInMyHead

My DH once lost a snake on the Shetland Islands that he had taken there as part of his work. Massive search, in local media etc.

Two weeks later, several hundred miles away, he was vacuuming his car. Lifted the boot carpet and found the snake! Completely unharmed

I'm trying to work out what job necessitates taking a snake to the Shetland Isles!

I made a mistake that was 100% not my fault once but still got so much shit after it.

The crazy old dragon I job shared with left me to do payroll alone for the first time while she was on holiday. It happened to be the first month of the year and the company was entitled to Employment Allowance which I knew absolutely nothing about and she’d never told me because it obviously hadn’t applied before this month (I hadn’t been there the previous year) so I arranged to NI payment of the company to be the full amount of NI due - I didn’t take off the EA amount and she went APESHIT.

My husband trained as a classical percussionist. He was in a concert once, leaned back for a discreet stretch during the slow movement, and knocked a set of cymbals off the table behind the curtain

A little one from me with a lucky outcome.

At the time I was a senior leader in a secondary school and I was dealing with a few complaints from a notoriously tricky parent who was known to complain a lot about anything and everything in lengthy, very formal emails.

Some of the complaints were bordering on vexatious but one was justified so I spent ages on a very formal, careful, detailed response email. I paused for a few minutes to chat with a colleague, came back to my computer, proofread the response and then quickly signed it off and sent it.

I signed it off 'lots of love, Lizzie xx' by accident.

Immediately got very short, massively friendlier reply that started 'Hi Lizzie' and ended 'love Bob x'. Sorted that parent relationship right out, completely by accident. I have left the school now but think he's still a really supportive, helpful governor.

@FavouriteFightingFrenchman oh my god, it rare I can actually say I laughed out loud but I did for this 🤣

I was a student nurse on my final placement, had helped a patient use a bedpan for a wee and was taking it to the sluice to empty and clean it. Something I’d done hundreds of times, really basic. Walking down the main corridor of the ward, right in front of the nurses station and my mentor who was the ward sister and I just dropped the bedpan, it just fell from my hands. Cue fountain of piss splashing absolutely everywhere, I was mortified but my mentor thought it was hilarious and we cleaned it up together.

@TimeIhadaNameChange
I was frightened of losing my job, so I did something clever or awful - depends on POV.
It was a very large organisation, so I wrote out another payment voucher, got it counter-signed by a different senior person, & bought the stamps again.
Security was very lax, so I then found the second voucher & destroyed it. I never heard anything about it.

Just remembered the time that I did the classic sign off typo 'kind retards' instead of 'kind regards' in a work email cc'd to quite a lot of people.

So far so common. Plenty of people have done it.

However I was working for the Learning Disability Partnership at the time and right under my inept sign off my email signature was automatically attached containing the Trust strapline 'valuing people with intellectual disabilities'

Quite a number of the recipients pointed this out to me.

@calmama - thats so funny, I can almost picture/hear it in my head!

The universe has not let you repress that memory so that one day you could make a bunch of strangers on the internet laugh! See, everything happens for a reason!

I've got two.

First mistake, I used to order new cars for customers, this was before it was computerised and you ordered over some kind of electronic box over a phone line. Ordered car etc only I had put in the wrong trim code. Some how we managed not to notice despite checking it off. Car is delivered a couple of months later, so I have a mad panic to find a replacement in the exact spec I should have ordered. Of course there is only one in the whole of the UK 400 miles away, luckily, the dealer agrees to swap it with mine phew.. Fleet Manager was on holiday so he never found out that I had two send two of his drivers and borrow a trailer to make an 800 mile round trip.

2nd one I managed to knock a full mug of boiling hot chicken soup into the company switchboard oops a daisy. Mopped it up and carried on as normal feigning innocence about why the calls were going to wrong extensions and frantically trying to remember which extensions calls were rerouting too. Luckily it all went back to normal after it had dried out.

Another panic button pusher here!

I was 17 and working in a jewellers - I had no idea it was my fault when half of the local police station around the corner came flying through the doors.

The boss tried to tell me off, until I pointed out that I'd been working there for weeks and not a soul had told me what the weird box was on the wall in the staff room. It turns out that I wasn't the only person who didn't know, just the only one daft enough to have touched it.

Wrote a plan for what to do if some very sensitive information was leaked to the press.

Then accidentally emailed it to a journalist, creating the kind of leak I'd just planned for.

Oh and another one, I used to work in a bank and was filling in an application for a customer. We used to do the typing with the screen pointed towards the customer so they can verify what you are entering.

I asked him what his occupation was, he said farmer but I mistyped and entered "Farter"

He said, "that is not my occupation" I laughed a bit but he was so stoney faced and frowny over it that I literally went into uncontrollable hysterics and couldn't even breathe, he was so mad he just walked out of the bank

Thoroughly enjoying these, although the drug misdoses are a little scary, I guess that's why there's more pairs of nurses etc doing double checking now.
I would also love to know if the Claret Chap is who I think it is ...

I accidentally shot the big boss in the leg. Fortunately he wasn't seriously injured.

First ever job working in an office, using computers. I wasn't always given much work therefore had free time during the day. I had a pen pal and thought I would show off and type a letter using the work computer rather than the usual hand written one. One of the secretaries absolutely hated me, and would try to bully me. I'd write about her in my letters and not be the most complimentary shall we say.

I'd press 'save' when I needed to stop writing, but didn't understand computers and could never find it again. Instead I'd begin a new one, and the same would happen again.

Eventually I got called in by the boss, who wanted to know why I was using company resources for personal things, had numerous personal letters saved on the client file and why I was slagging off the Secretary. Of course she'd been the one to find them. I didn't lose my job, but her hate for me was a lot stronger after that

@Candyflosscookie

Thoroughly enjoying these, although the drug misdoses are a little scary, I guess that's why there's more pairs of nurses etc doing double checking now. I would also love to know if the Claret Chap is who I think it is ...

That's a very good point about the double rounds.

Because ultimately we all know that every single human being on the whole planet makes mistakes from time to time. So if your work is safety critical, the institutional system needs to be designed to be fail-safe (in the technical sense of fail-safe, where if a mistake is made/something mechanical fails the system defaults to an outcome which doesn't harm people).

I was having a massive row with DP and sent a ranty horrible text to her... except I didn't, it went to a woman with the same first name who was one of our biggest national clients, and outed myself in the process ( this was 20 years ago when being out to a client was NOT the done thing)
I rang her the next day to apologise worried she'd go batshit as I didn't know her that well and she was literally the Chief Exec, and she was lovely thank god. Told me she was glad she wasn't the only one who had blazing rows with their girlfriend. Phew.

I fed a vegetarian kid meat.

also the last time I used the work mobile for any personal calls or texts!

[quote HuggedTheRedwoods]@calmama - thats so funny, I can almost picture/hear it in my head!

The universe has not let you repress that memory so that one day you could make a bunch of strangers on the internet laugh! See, everything happens for a reason! [/quote]
I'm so glad. I'm a truly terrible joke teller. Pathetic. Luckily (?!) I have enough real-life stories like these to make people laugh. One day I will laugh too. Maybe... Maybe not...

Not sure if it matters but those two bosses were male. Their faces were priceless. Not that that stopped me. I kept going. They were snorting with disbelief and disgust. #firstimpressions