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 paid £250k to a supplier, it was a capital spend and we had used them before but not for about 3 years. They'd changed banks but not told us, I was getting frantic phone calls and said I paid Friday it will be in your account Tuesday and faxed a remittance. They then realised, more frantic phone calls, I got on to the bank, the account number had been allocated to someone else.

I did get it back about two weeks later and at that point I paid them.

I thought I was responsible for a million quid going AWOL after night of no sleep transpired it was a bank error

Exclaimed to a colleague "Oh you're going to have a baby! "
She wasn't pregnant.

Met someone from a different part of the site and although he was a bit unattractive lookswise he had a great personality. Several years later not only was he cheating but he was violent.

I lost a prisoner.

Working in a prison as admin staff at the age of 19. My office was next to the education block with a through door.

A prisoner comes knocking on my door...

"Oh miss, I'm late for education, can you let me through?"

Stupid me - "of course" unlocks door, waves him through.

Of course he just wandered on back through the building to his cell for a nice sleep.

Roll call is called and education is one down and the cell block is one down.

Fucking shat myself. Ran around searching. Ended up in the library, where the prisoner on enhanced duties sat me down, made me a cup of tea, told me to stop crying and sent his two teenaged orderlies off with the instruction to "find the twat and bring him here"

They did indeed find him and the library chap gave him a talking to about being nice to the admin staff

My fellow store manager did lock the safe properly the night the store got raided. 30k was in it

@Holeywalls please raise this as an issue with your line manager. We have a colleague who was given tasks she has no experience in & has had no training for so she makes mistakes regularly & we have to fix them for her but she's in blissful ignorance as bosses for some reason refuse to address the problem with her & we all quietly seethe about it as it adds to our already extensive workloads.

1st job I had I was given a brace of pheasants by a colleague (on a Friday) to take home to my mum for tea. Put them in the back of the company vehicle I was using that day (whilst boss was on holiday) and promptly forgot about them. End of day I dropped company vehicle at bosses house and stuck the keys through the letterbox. Was a week later when boss returned home to putrifying/decomposing pheasants reeking his car out.
Thankfully I just got the job of cleaning the car out rather than the sack.
2nd job I had was summoned to big office after a couple of months to get told off for repeatedly but accidentally calling my direct boss, Dad. I've no idea where it came from as he was nothing like my dad but I just could not help it. Ticking off came about as it was making him feel old.

@mrsbyers 'office bike' is such a hideous, horrible term.. I'd like to think you don't use that / think like that anymore...

My first ever job, at sixteen, was selling ice cream cones in the cafe at our local park. (There was an area beside the restaurant where people would queue up for cones.) I loved scooping out the ice cream and sticking it on to the cones and soon began to amuse myself by seeing how much ice cream I could balance on top of each cone without it falling off. Needless to say, I was very popular with the customers but after a couple of hours, the manageress came through to check on me and her eyes widened in horror when she saw the mountains of ice cream changing hands. I was promptly switched to waitress duty for the rest of the summer. Apparently it was the only day they had ever made a loss selling ice cream.

Sent my boss to the Middle East without a visa... they sent him strident back again. I found him in the office the next morning. My Nan died that morning and my bosses reaction was "wow you're having a really shit day aren't you!?" He was a complete arsehole of a boss so he deserved it 😂

Left a meeting, put the highly confidential file of the person who was the subject of the multi agency meeting on the roof of my car and drove off. Pieces of paper flying around behind me alerted me but it was too late for most of the file
God did I get in to trouble.....

Obviously that's meant to say straight back!

As a teen I worked on a supermarket checkout at weekends. Saturday morning, very busy, I was on the end checkout with a wall behind me. I'd picked up a 2l bottle of cola to scan, it somehow slipped out of my hand, then landed awkwardly on the metal trim of the conveyor belt. The next thing there's cola spraying everywhere, I never realised how much 2l could look like when it's splattering queuing customers. Half of them couldn't move out of the way because of the wall.
It was only a small puncture in the bottle but I think that made it worse, the pressure of the fizz 😂
When I got home I couldn't get a brush through my hair, so sticky with coke, but at least I only got it on my shop uniform, the poor customers had it on their own clothes.
For the rest of the time I worked there I could see brown coke spots on the ceiling, it was too high for the cleaners to reach.

Dropping a very expensive meat slicer on the floor. Blowing up a freezer full of meat.
Fusing a whole factory’s electrics.

Surprised anyone actually employs me.

Ugh and Boss's - stupid typos.

Travelled abroad with work. Got there to meet the team, kissed the taxi driver on the cheek thinking it was a worker 😂

I got two people who'd applied for medical retirement mixed up. Jan #1 had terminal cancer, Jan #2 had depression and had been turned down for medical retirement twice and was on her final appeal and not sure she'd get it, we'd had a few chats about it . She did, I phoned her up to congratulate her and said bet you're so pleased etc. Yup wrong Jan I just congratulated someone who was dying.

I sent an internal, pisstake email to a lady who worked for a financial adviser we dealt with 😀

I was sending out exam results. I accidentally got my mailmerge files mixed up. Everyone who had really got a distinction got a letter saying they had failed and, you guessed it, everyone who had failed got a letter saying they had got a distinction.

hundreds of letters out with £18 postage on each one instead of 18p. I didn't confess, rationalising that people think solicitors letters are a rip off anyway so they probably wouldn't complain

@Crystaltree Of course they wouldn’t complain, your boss would have been paying for the postage, not the people who recieved it!

Working in admin and responsible for keeping employee details up to date. A lady had changed her bank account and I transposed to account number when updating her details for payroll so her wages ended up bouncing back.

She was a lone parent so I was absolutely mortified. I got a well deserved proper bollocking for it but nothing compared to how awful I felt for doing that to a colleague.

Locked a customer in the shop

@cstaff when you wipe your pc as a user it's funny

Not quite so funny when you are IT. I asked the user if they have backed up their c drive drive.. Yes yes yes.. I wiped the whole thing and put a new operating system on it.
I handed it back and he said where is my 10 years of research. He had a split hard drive and I had just wiped 10 years work.. Which he had never backed up..

I wanted to throw up.. Luckily we managed to retrieve his data..

I learned to ask have you backed up everything on thus pc

Not many mistake but someone else's.
I was working New Year and I guess they had skeleton IT support on. I couldnt get access to my emails so had to call them. They clicked a few buttons remotely and said log on in a few minutes.
I logged back in and they had given me me access to our executive chairman's personal emails.
This is a world famous name.
And it was in the middle of a global scandal. I saw EVERYTHING. From legal wrangling from lawyers. Financial deals and personal emails with movie stars and international sports people. Brown nosing and flattery from famous employees. Family photos world famous names sent them with 'thanks for lending us your super yacht here we are having fun in Greece!' type emails. Personal numbers and addresses of international political leaders and their unguarded thoughts on meetings.
I could have gone to the papers and sold any number of stories for God knows how much money.
It actually scared me.
The next day I went into work and it was back to only my emails.
I can imagine a poor IT cover worker realising what they had done and praying nothing came of it.
I have never mentioned it to a soul before.....

It's one a still have cold sweats when I think about it! Years ago now first proper job after graduating I asked by a colleague for the details couple of suppliers in order for them to place some orders direct - dutifully sent an email back to them with this info along with the message - these are the current contact details but watch this space for an update as we were planning on ditching these guys (not my decision this had come from higher up in the company).....and of course in order to quickly get the relevant contact details I'd simply started typing the suppliers email in to the cc box and allowed it to the autofill from outlooks address book to do its thing and then copy and pasted it into the body of the email....yeah but then I then obviously didn't actually delete their email from the cc box so they got the email too.... they obviously had no idea about their impending loss of business until my email and my phone starts ringing almost instantly! I instantly understand the gravity of my cock up and litterally run into my bosses office crying. My boss was actually awesome about it - her attitude was oh well I needed to tell them anyway so I guess now is a good time. Don't worry about it go calm down then make us both a cup of tea come back and I will tell you about some of my most memorable and impressive cock ups. Best boss ever. Proper mentor. We are still good friends to this day even though we have both moved on to other things.