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 was a junior reporter for a daily newspaper covering a court case. I didn't fully understand the case, and when I wrote it up, I got a few key facts wrong. Very understandably, the defendant and his family didn't like having the case written so badly and inaccurately, complained to their solicitor and the following day I had to take the stand while I got a massive bollocking by the judge. I will never forget how tearful and terrified I was. I am not in that line of work any more but afterwards I was extremely careful with my reporting. To this day I am utterly mortified. Thankfully the outcome was unaffected and the jury hadn't read the story.

Prepared a mailshot for 50K customers and prospects and then sorted them by postcode.

Only I didn't. I sorted the post code column all right but not the rest of the data. Mercifully I did one final last check before authorising the printing and sending.

I still go hot and cold at the memory and that was 20 years ago now

Years ago when I first worked in care I gave mary A Mary B’s meds and vice versa, fortunately they both had similar meds on no bad effect.

In hospital 4 people came out of surgery all had really bad infections and had to have wash out or replacement surgery, later it was found he equipment wasn’t cleaned properly (not my actual mistake, I worked on the ward, but someone hadn’t done it properly)

Shagged a boss when I was new at Christmas party, I started just before Christmas, later found out who he was, I left soon after (but looking back I was 20 he was 40? It should have been him feeling crap about it)

My first job (centuries ago). I deleted the Company database. It couldn't be retrieved. I could offer no explanation as to why.

I kept my job.

Aged 17, accidentally tipping off a suspected drug dealer that he was of interest to the British authorities. Don't ask me how. It's complicated. And probably an inadvertent breach of the Official Secrets Act. I fessed up and no-one seemed that bothered.

Oh and I also gave away 3,000.
I worked at a dodgy furniture shop when I was a student that was runny a pseudo gangster.
He stupidly didn't bank the takings overnight but instead left them in a chest in the area of the shop where people came to collect the furniture they had bought.
You guessed it - I gave someone the chest with a weeks takings inside.
Luckily they were incredibly honest and brought the money back. If they hadn't there is no way we could have traced them - he didn't think to keep details like addresses or phone numbers.

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

Well I was going to fess up to the time I franked about 200 letters with £1 rather than whatever first class was at the time (40/50pish) but yours is so much worse that I think I’m off the hook.

Not that long ago I deleted all the folders on the server rather than just one file. There was a backup (hurrah) but it was 3 weeks out of date (booo). Fortunately for me it was New Year so not much work lost and a much bigger deal to not do daily backups so I got off with a light telling off rather than a whole department audit!

I once interviewed a lady who confessed that she had been dismissed from her previous job as she had authorised printing of 1000s of leaflets with the logo back to front and they all had to be scrapped and reprinted. (it was the old days before we all went digital).

@LuckyBitches - that’s brilliant 🤣🤣🤣🤣

As a florist, I sent out a bunch of flowers with the message on the card that read “to the sweatiest Girl I know”. It was a phone order and I couldn’t spell !

Few hours later the 16 year old came in all swollen red eyed from crying with her mother. The order was checked, and the card was meant to say “to the sweetest girl I know” from her boyfriend.

I was never allowed to write the cards again !

I was temping in the recruitment dept of a huge IT company and they were desperate to recruit.
I had to send out the invitation to interview. I sent a letter to Dear Mr Cardiff...
You can guess my mistake.
He didn’t come in. Saved himself the train fare from Cardiff to London, though. But thus was in the 90s when people were doubling their salaries when they came to work for us...

@mcscotty sounds like you had a good old dig around in the emails- you’re lucky not to have got a bollocking for that as the company would have been able to tell.

Two that weren't mine, but someone I worked with:

1. Failed to pay me not one but two months in a row after I started. I was annoyed but accepted the first one but furious about the second. They asked me whether I could borrow money from my parents! When I said no, no I needed to be paid they eventually said they could do it by transfer 'but it costs us £50 so we really don't like doing this'. There was no suspicion that it was my fault, it was 100% their mistake and this was a large organisation!
2. I worked on a research project at a university. Around one in four times that my boss meant to email our team administrator he emailed a random student with the same very common surname - the same student each time - instead. This sometimes included reasonably confidential financial information and also I think it was just very annoying for both the student, who was getting a couple of emails a week and gave up writing back to point it out in the end, and the administrator who kept not getting important information they needed.

Another one I was nominally responsible for was send £30m to the wrong bank account. It was actually a joint cock up between one of my team and the accounts department. I should have been more concerned but I'd discovered that morning i was pregnant and was a bit distracted. although I knew we would get the money back anyway.

Many years ago placed the order for the Xmas mince pies for the supermarket chain I worked for. There were 6 pies to a box, six boxes in a unit, 6 units in an outer and 6 outers in a shipping unit.

I carefully worked out a forecast based on pies needed for 400 coffee shops for xmas season and then translated that to an order in shipping units. This was all done in April.

In November stock arrived and I'd over ordered by a factor of 6!

That Christmas whenever there was a queue we were giving them out to customers, donating for charity hampers, giving then to staff as motivators when busy etc

We got rid of them all: down on profit but up on positive customer feedback so got away with it, but never placed orders without double checking again!

gave someone an extra £10k in cash (banking) didn't realise until the end of the day and seriously blagged to get it back, still makes me feel nervous 10 years later....

@OhMyDarling

Shagged my manager. Accidentally told his wife in the toilets at the the xmas do. Didn’t know she was his wife. Whoops.

I actually gasped at this . What happened next

In my days of training I told an elderly patient on a hospital ward that I had come to take to the other side. Really? She said at this time? Yes, I said, you are ready and I just couldn't wait any longer for someone else to do it -when you're ready, you're ready and so I clicked the bed and in my white coat started to move the bed. Don't I just float or something ?she said -This is must nicer that I thought it was going to be? I don't feel frightened or anything. ....Don't worry I said I'll take you there it very like this side. So I took her over the other side of the ward towards the window.................. She looked at me strangely. And said 'So am I dead or not I don't understand' - I looked at her strangely and said I'm moving you over the other side of the ward before I do your chart, no porter available to do it. She and I both realised at the same time that my phrase 'I've come to take you to the other side' had two meanings. We didn't half laugh about it over hte next few weeks.

Sent sIx trainees to wrong city for their final qualifying exams. I'd booked and paid for flights and hotels and only discovered night before exams.

Had to hire minibus to take them to correct city on day of their exam - about 2hrs away.

@Coffeecak3

Not noticing that a patients details had come up with a different name when entering blood tests on the system. For 30 long minutes the consultant believed a young woman had gone home whilst suffering from acute leukaemia. I got a very restrained bollocking for that.

I once spent a whole weekend thinking I had leukaemia until they realised it was a mistake, was it you ????

Big presentation. Described some data as being on 'the bellend shaped curve' instead of the bell shaped curve. Didn't realise I'd said it until the room went silent.

Chuckling away here - particularly at the poster who kissed the taxi driver on a business trip.

I drove a tractor into a ditch with a full trailer load of grain.

I put an online product on sale at the wrong, much cheaper price. By time it was spotted we’d lost £20k! ooooops

1. Not blocking my ex immediately.

2. Sprayed a laptop keyboard with multi surface spray. It died. I must've been a bit groggy that day or something.

@TumbledGlass

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.

I am peeing myself laughing.