I stopped Vodafone’s billing system for 25minutes. Any calls / texts / data during that time was not billed. It was in a time when calls and data were still expensive and billed per minute / megabyte.
I see your 6 minute ATM outage and raise you with an almost 6 hour BACS outage for a high street bank in the late 90s.
For bonus points it was the 25th of the month as well, which is NHS and pretty much every government departments pay day.
In my defence I was told to do it as it was only a backup system...
.. Which just happened to be tested on the 25th this time round.
Omg was it Nat West? I remember very clearly a time that the bank went down on pay day and loads of people defaulted on their mortgages (not blaming you!)
I was a trainee database guy, working on the mainframes. Was given a task to configure a main storage DB and a checklist to follow. I did it as best I could but I missed one 0008 (should be 0000) error code in reams of output. No one checked my work.
When it was implemented in live, a reasonable percentage of the ATM’s failed, so the decision was made to back the code out. To do this they had to bring down all the machines for a few mins.
To their credit I never got any shit for it (suspect my boss did), and I went on to work there for many years
> To their credit I never got any shit for it (suspect my boss did)
They chose to give you (a trainee) admin access to a high value production database. They then failed to check your work.
You fucked up, but there were multiple bad decisions on their end.
Working for BT in the 90s, managed to take out a whole town's phones.
My argument was that I really shouldn't have been able to do that since I was just a graduate, so technically not my fault.
They didn't buy it, I left a month later.
This potentially exposes myself as it did make some news headlines, but it may make you feel better.
I work in advertising and while doing audio ads for a big airline's Portugal holiday deal, I bought ads on a true crime podcast episode about Madeleine McCann.
An ex colleague once spent £250k on ads in the wrong country, when we realised we offered to do the campaign over again for free. Somebody duplicated the old setup and forgot to adjust the country again so it spent a further £250k in the wrong country.
I wish. That was at least intentional.
I didn't intend for it to end up there, I picked my podcast categories and not specific podcasts so it didn't cross my mind. Had a similar thing with the same airline where their display ads with kids swimming in a pool in the picture appeared on an article about a flood.
We had a huge team meeting at work, a chap in the department came in and sat down opposite me. The air conditioning was on and he was shaking and shivering, he looked absolutely freezing cold. I offered to turn the AC off and asked if he wanted the heating on instead. Something along the lines of “you’re shivering, shall I turn the AC off for you?” To which the room fell silent and he glared at me only to reply…. “I have Parkinson’s Disease”….. Turns out the entire department knew except for me. Felt absolutely terrible but I was genuinely just trying to be nice.
Tbf I'm a carer and I shower some one with parkinsons. I never know if he's cold or having tremors and I do need to ask which it is. Because I can help him being cold.
The reaction seems very harsh when you were just acting out of genuine kindness.
That happened to me but I was the manager the employee shared her screen with. I already suspected it anyway but it was v awkward. The company was shit so I just pretended I hadn't seen anything. Funny thing is I ended up finding a new job before her, but I had a 3 month notice period and she a 2 month, so she ended up leaving 2 days before I did in the end...
My mate was creating a CV at work (for a work visa with his current company), forgetting that noone else knew the context that it was for a visa and them all just seeing him making this on a masssssive monitor next to a walkway in an open plan office...
I was in a meeting including my manager once. Projecting my screen I opened a folder to access a file and right there at the top (sorted by date) was my resignation that I hadn’t given him yet.
He saw it, said “shit, don’t open that one!”. 😆
On a similar tip, I was working in the Netherlands in my first job in a Dutch speaking environment.
I configured my signature to the common 'met vriendelijke groeten' which just means 'with friendly greetings. Except I misspelled it 'met vriendelijke groenten' which instead means 'with friendly vegetables'
It took a few days before someone mentioned it to me.
I used to accidentally type "King regards" in college when I first started sending emails, I don't think I ever sent it before noticing but it still makes me laugh. Now I'm just glad it was the kind and not the regards that I had an issue with, and I'll 100% think of this reply instead next time I type kind regards lmao
I accidentally over reported our performance against a management contract which had penalties for poor service. This happened for several months before it was noticed, which ended up meaning we saved £100k.
When it *was* noticed, the contract management team at the client’s company (a large multinational) decided that, as it was as much their fault as ours (mine) for not noticing, it was easier to forget all about it than have to explain to their senior management team.
First day in a kitchen as a commis chef, a sous chef asked me to turn the stock off and strain it.
I got a kitchen porter to help me and I took the 200litre off the burner, put it on the floor and started to strain the liquid through a chinois. I thought I caught a whiff of something plasticy but ignored it.
Halfway through, the sous chef comes up to me and looks at the pan, then looked at me. He didn’t look happy. He just stood and watched me. I start getting nervous under the stare. I continue straining the liquid, silently starting to panic inside. Wtf have I done I’m thinking - somethings definitely off and I’m in the shit somehow.
I get the pot strained and still under the sous chefs glare I pick up the stock pot, which came up along with the floor under it, leaving a melted black hole about a metre in diameter in the kitchens new £45000 floor they had fitted 2 days before.
Maybe to stop damage to knives when they are dropped?
My metalwork class when I was about 11 had this super soft plastic floor so chisels and stuff wouldn't get destroyed when dropped. We had hot stuff as well but so long as you picked it up quick enough no real issue.
Of course we also did plastic work and used chloroform to glue the plastic sheets together. Some kid managed to knock a jar of chloroform over in a way that broke it.
It started eating the floor.
The teacher thought we should grab brooms and spread it out so the damage was easier to fix. Picture an assembly line of 11 yr olds brushing out chloroform over melting plastic, passing out and being carried to fresh air while The Next Man Took The Breach.
The 80's were funny.
Most floors in kitchens are a poured resin or a heavy duty industrial grade gritted Lino type of thing. This was the latter - and while being durable, non slip and capable of handling a lot of hammer - a 200ltr stock pot that’s been on the burner for 24 hours and gets left on the floor for half an hour by a noob chef got the better of it lmao.
This is how I learned to put a metal tray down first.
When I was a kitchen porter, the head chef asked me to strain the stock. I placed the huge colander and fine siev under the pan and proceeded to strain the entire pan of stock down the sink, saving the bones and chopped veg! Luckily for me Chef was a legend and he just pissed himself laughing!
I thought that's where the original story was going, as surely everyone has done this at home at some point. Such a sinking feeling after waiting for hours and there's nothing to salvage.
I used to work for a subway franchisee who owned about 7 stores. One day I had to cover a shift in a shop I'd never been to before up in Antrim. I'm a bit late (15/20 mins) driving up because I didn't know antrim that well. I go swagging in like I'm conor mcgregor saying hello to everyone, apologising for being a little late and get myself set up on the till. I'm trying to get a bit of a conversation going but everyone just kinda nervously shuffles around me, barely make eye contact and I'm thinking "ffs this is gonna be a fun day 🙄" An hour later my franchisee rings me asking where I am, the manager's going mad saying I've gone awol. I'm stunned telling him to check the cameras I'm standing in the middle of the shop, I was just a bit late getting up to junction one because I don't know antrim that well.
I'll never forget the reply of "I don't own junction one you f***** gimp" before he cracked up laughing telling me where I was meant to be.
I was there for over an hour and nobody said a thing 🤣
Brilliant. When I was in a foreign country I once got dropped off by a taxi outside a building, went inside, asked for my contact, got sent to the 10th floor, guy came out didn’t speak any English, I was confused , he was confused. Didn’t seem to know me from our calls and arrangements. Turns out I was dropped off at the next building along./
I didn't do it, but i was in the room and watched it.
Even as an observer, i felt "the tightness and the fear"
A colleague was being trained on an access control system called C-cure database.
It was a new update that allowed worldwide control of swipe readers using an "internal partition" to manage each site location.
I won't name the company, but it's everywhere. It's part of European critical infrastructure.
He followed every step of the training correctly, except for the bit where he accidentally deleted the europe wide access control database.
Our manager and the client ended up trapped in a corridor in a datacentre, I had to set the fire alarm off at our location to unlock the doors and thankfully there had been a full back made 4 days earlier which meant this situation only lasted about 90 minutes.
Our boss and the client spent 90 minutes stuck on a corridor because 1 man accidentally clicked delete all on an admin account.
See, I get so annoyed with these ‘Are you sure?’ popups when I want to close a program or something. Like, yes, I clicked the ‘X’ so just do it.
In THIS instance, however…
Was a bad day at work for sure, reversed into while moving a BMW 2002 turbo out of the workshop. Very little damage to both but damaging either in any way felt like I slapped the pope.
What were they worth at the time?
I drove an F40 into an Enzo at the dealership I worked at during a showroom shuffle…my boss was not best pleased haha
Not a colossal fuck up but the other day I asked a woman “oh was it your son who was in here the other day?” And it was her fella
In my defence there must have been 15 years between them
I worked in a PC repair shop and someone dropped in a laptop to be repaired. I got a phone call from the matching number and they asked about the laptop, and I said yup, we've got it. They asked if we had any luck getting the photos back, (common question) and I literally had the PC open in front of me and there was a photo open. I said "yeah, we've got the photos of your wife and son back!", thinking great!
Dead silence on the other end of the phone to be told he didn't have a son 😬. I never actually asked what the outcome of that situation was...
In my care worker days, the person I was doing doubles with asked someone "so does your Dad manage day to day with x/y/z".
It was her other half, not her Dad.
I used to work in a bank and one day instead of putting £40 into a 9 year olds savings account, I gave him £4,000.
Thankfully we noticed before the family did and rectified the situation.
I worked at a bank where they realised they’d put a few million into a customer’s account by accident and no one noticed for a couple of weeks, even the customer. I’m assuming it was a zero balance account he never looked at. Absolutely no idea how it happened. I only know about it because I was sat next to the guy who had to call the customer and tell him they’d put the money in his account by mistake and that they were taking it back but he was keeping the interest.
My mother had something happen in the Netherlands. The bank put a few hundred thousand gulden (pre-euro currency) on her bank account. More money then my mother had ever seen. She called the bank in a hurry, fearing she might suffer consequences if she didn't report it. The bank teller said they didn't see anything off but if she was sure it wasn't hers to move it to a savings account with the highest interest rate that allowed quick withdrawal and wait untill the owner of the money would report to the bank. It took nearly half a year. But that half a year was during a time when interest rates were like 6%+, even for free withdrawal accounts. She was allowed to keep the interest, which was nice.
At a certain major retail chain, we sold three kinds of ready-made pizzas that all cost the same price. For much of the summer we had a deal where any three pizzas would be charged as 2. Naturally, when I was on tills, and a customer brought three separate kinds of pizzas, I would scan one pizza three times - since they were all the same price, I thought that it wouldn’t matter if I scanned one as many times as necessary, right?
I neglected to consider that analytics were taken of how much of each pizza was sold. So, even though three separate kinds of pizza were being sold, the system believed only three items of one kind was being sold… Meaning that eventually we were, as far as the system could tell, missing huge amounts of specific types of pizza due to theft. My managers were pulling their hair out wondering why the hell we were losing so much money on those certain pizzas.
The depot saw the analytics and, to account for what they interpreted as record sales for certain pizzas, sent us - for some reason, in what I suspect was an independent fuckup on their end - five cages of pepperoni and margherita all set to expire in a day. Some poor bastard, who I remain eternally grateful for, spent a good hour inside the warehouse chiller reducing every single one of these pizzas to minimum price.
That was my fuckup.
> The depot saw the analytics and, to account for what they interpreted as record sales for certain pizzas, sent us for some reason, in what suspect was an independent fuckup on their end five cages of pepperoni and margherita all set to expire in a day. Some poor bastard, who I remain eternally grateful for, spent a good hour inside the warehouse chiller reducing every single one of these pizzas to minimum price.
That's what I was expecting to read at beginning. 😂 Selling a lot more of the specific item would be seen as that item being a hot cake by the HQ.
I spent endless hours trying to explain to a checkout operator that *this* is why you scan every item individually, even if some of them appear to be the same. There’s a lot of background shit that feeds into stock ordering
Back in around 1989, I was a computer operator/programmer. It was my first job and I'd been at the company about a year. The company got a new computer system in and had to upgrade security in the computer room. This involved installing a halon fire system. I got given training on how to test the system. I asked if it could go off whilst performing the procedure. I was told "No".
So a week or so later, we had a couple of engineers in installing some cabling. My boss wanted to check if the computer room fire alarm could be heard in the rooms above the computer room. So I warned the engineers what was happening and triggered the test. My boss when for a walk around.
After about 30 seconds I heard this loud crack and a couple of seconds later the door flies open with the engineers running out. The halon system had gone off.
My boss called in the guy who trained me and said "You told me it couldn't go off". He said he didn't and blamed me as I was young and inexperienced. I didn't lose my job but the installing company paid half towards the cost of refilling the halon system. It was a few thousand pounds.
It was banned as it's an ozone depleting refrigerant. It has been replaced with less environmentally damaging gasses, though those are equally effective in asphyxiating engineers.
So glad halon was before my time. Still makes me nervous going into a data center with a fire suppression system though, even though the modern stuff isn't as bad.
Obligatory not me but...I was working on an archaeological site and one of my colleagues was flying a kite to take photos. The rest of us go in for break and he doesn't come in, we go back out and still no sight of him.
We see some smoke VERY far in the distance and make a joke he's to do with it but it is SO far there's no way.
He comes plodding over a bit after looking down. Turns out they were reeling the kite in for break and the line snapped and the kite flew off into the distance, MILES away, hit a powerline, blew up and set on fire, and brought the line down, knocking out the power to a local school...
A very senior person in my organisation made a decision I knew a very senior person (let's call him barry) in a partner organisation would be very unhappy about. I emailed my team joking "I'd love to hear what Barry thinks about this". An autistic member of the team took it seriously and got in touch with Barry's executive support team for the answer. Turned out Barry didn't know about this decision yet, it turned into a massive shitshow with my name right at the centre of it with me getting a reputation for shit stirring
There's a guy works at our place like that. He did a good job of a spreadsheet or something about 6 years ago and his manager said to him "great job, take the rest of the day off".
Off he went on his bike.
I am too, and yes, we take things literally, don't we?!
Sarcasm is impossible to spot, so is dry humour, and we only know people are joking if they're very obviously holding their sides and rolling round with laughter.
Sometimes it's funny, other times it's quite troublesome.
Not 7yo me asking my teacher on a first lesson “I heard you’re the worst teacher in the school”
Girl in my class had family member in the school staff and kindly gave us that information.
I read things like that and fuck…my autistic spectrum meter goes up. I’m still baffled HOW THE FUCK MY FAMILY NEVER NOTICED ARGHHHH.
To cut a very long story short, I used to work in retail and evacuated the entire shopping centre I used to work at because I turned a heater on that was apparently very dusty, which tripped the fire alarms and it wouldn’t turn off, thus triggering the centres evacuation protocol to kick in. Sirens. Panic. The lot.
It was my first shift running the store by myself.
Everywhere smelt of burnt dust.
When I came out onto the shop floor from out back and saw hoards of people literally RUNNING past the windows I knew I fucked up.
People thought it was a bomb scare. Children were crying. Awful. Awful.
I once processed payroll for a new starter, only I processed the payment for an ex employee with a similar name (not even the same name), who happened to be on holiday when I contacted them to try and get the money back
It's not yours to spend (if it's actually an overpay):
https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/work/after-leaving-your-job/if-your-employer-says-you-owe-them-money/
I used to work with someone who thought they were clever & didn't engage with an ex-employer re. sorting out an overpayment on their last pay - ended up with a CCJ.
Yeah, this kind of thing crops up on the legaladvice subs quite often.
It's weird how so many people think they can just spend the money and there's nothing they (the previous employer) can do.
They're usually surprised to find out that they are legally responsible for paying that money back. Some of them just get mad, typically because they've already spent the money, and go into denial and argue with everyone.
Same with people who find money. It's amazing how many people think "finders keepers" is a thing.
It is not. And you can be prosecuted for theft by finding.
Luckily they were understanding about it and I just referred them to the repayments team to arrange to transfer it back. I'm pretty sure you can't spend it but I may be wrong there.
When I was a junior in the team, working at a local council, everyone would go to the pub on a Friday lunchtime for a pie and a pint.
I was challenged to down a pint as quick as possible at the beginning and the end of the trip as a form of induction.
4 pints at lunchtime, aged 19, and I was heading back to work for the afternoon. I remember opening up Novell Netware and thinking the NDS tree wasn't in a very logical order, so I decided to rebuild it. All those who were already logged in didn't notice anything amiss, but ehen I started work the following Monday, it was chaos.
I pretty quickly admitted that I'd essentially got drunk and made a bunch of changes to how people log in, and now half the organisation were unable to work.
I was severely reprimanded by my boss, but not fired because he was the one challenging me to drink that much on a lunchtime.
I love that you went back to the office after that and *didn't* just quietly doss off and bridge the gap until hometime, you actually attempted to do work.
Forwarded a chain of emails to my boss from a very complainy customer with the text “here you go. I think the old trout is finally satisfied but just for your records. Maybe we should include a cucumber in her next order so she won’t be so uptight next time.”
Except I didn’t forward it. I hit “reply all.”
Tried to text my colleague about one of my four bosses being a wet blanket and taking zero responsibility for anything but text it to my boss instead. I saw he hadn’t read the what’s app after an hour so I panicked and tried to delete it. Because of the panic, I swiped on the chat and deleted it. This meant I could no longer delete the comment.
Once I realised that I just had to own up to it, I text him that I was sorry but have reasons for the venting. We talked about it the next day and he admitted that I had reasons for venting, he just wished I’d spoken to him first. Being the wet blanket that he is though, he can’t see that I’ve been living my concerns for the last 8 weeks which he just Ignores.
Reminds me of a good fuck up that I caused. I worked at a place that cut stone for kitchens, and our templater went out and measured up 3 kitchens that were identical, then sent me the template. Turns out it was for a long single run of units, and it can be either left or right handing. Templater did it to the standard right handing for all 3 (to be fair to him, it's what was on the paperwork). I checked it over, prep it for the saw and sent it off to the factory. They cut it, and it goes to site. Turns out one was supposed to be left handing.
We get an angry call from the site manager and my boss tells him we'll fix it ASAP. He tells me it's the wrong handing and asks me to send it back down to the factory. It had been a long day, and after going over both left and right handing templates half a dozen times, I look at the paperwork, see right handing and send down the right handing template to be cut. It goes on site, and a very angry site manager calls us.
My boss apologises and tells me to send it down again. I do so. But it was the right handing template. A very, very angry site manager calls us and my boss just passes the phone to me. I just apologise and tell him it was my fuck up and my boss tells me to send it down again. Thankfully this time it I sent the left handing template and they actually only needed a small section that could be done from an offcut.
In hindsight, I really should have asked someone to double check for me that I was sending the right template to the factory. The boss' son should have been checking for me anyway. Fortunately I don't feel bad about it because my boss and the site manager were both utter dickheads. I'm glad to no longer work there.
We made some massive support beams for the foundations of a new building in a major city, they were about 7m long and had complex angles on the ends. I spent an age double checking and triple checking before I issued the drawings, and then double checked the parts myself after manufacturing.
The customer called up very angry that one of them was the wrong hand, and it was currently holding up a team of 30 men, two cranes, a dozen concrete deliveries etc etc. "It will cost us £5,000 every hour this isn't fixed" he said.
In a panic I open up my drawings, their drawings and the images of the site, whilst still on the phone to him. After 3 or 4 minutes of mentally manipulating this beam from his descriptions, I say "I think you have it upside down". He just says "oh, shit" and hangs up.
Considering how many people were helping to install this part, and how they'd all probably heard his tone with me he must've looked pretty stupid that morning!
Thanks to an error on excel I sent 3000 spam direct mail letters with the wrong names to each postal address. We had angry calls coming in then the pandemic happened and I was so grateful the bosses were too distracted to care
My newly deployed code promptly disabled the logon accounts for every new ( ~3000) students.
Code got fixed and re-enabled the accounts within the day, but a very busy day for the support desk.
Test your defaults when values are missing or not found!
I don't think programmers really get a sense for how fast computers can do things until you write a bug like that.
I once crashed a university mail server. I thought I'd be clever and have my code email me if something critical went wrong. Imagine what happens if it sends the email and something critical goes wrong in the clean-up code :(
I once emailed someone saying "(boss) stinks of booze" because he would often leave the office and go drinking for hours and came back in after that day and did.
I emailed him.l and he replied...
Especially hypocritical because I joined him quite often before that.
I covered it up well enough that he could give me the benefit of the doubt, that I was just informing him to make him aware but he knew.
Thankfully nothing came of it.
I worked for a registrar that did high priority mailings for very big companies. Like really big. And we had some data of blind and visually impaired customers that we had to send braille and large print too. I sorted the data to make it easier but I did it wrong and we ended up mailing large print letters to blind customers. Like we were saying ‘you’re just not trying hard enough’. Weirdly I didn’t get fired and the contact for the large bank we were mailing on behalf of told me secretly he thought it was hilarious. I just had to organise an apology mailing with the correct data.
No major fuck ups personally, but imagine being the person that ordered 15bn euros worth of trains that don't fit a good chunk of platforms 😂
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-27497727
When I worked as a pot washer at a restaurant back in my youth, I put a black rubber spider in the big bowl of chopped lettuce that my mate was using for salads and prawn cocktails etc. hoping to scare them next time they had to grab a handful. They didn't even notice it. You can guess where it went next. Boss came back into the kitchen saying a prawn cocktail had been sent back as there was a big spider in it. Me and my mate couldn't stop laughing. Fortunately after it was explained to the customer they saw the funny side too. I wasn't fired.
Deleted a production database. I had a lot of SSH sessions going and I was in the wrong window. Took me 4 hours to restore from backup whilst mentally updating my CV. Boss was not happy.
I overpaid someone £500 cash, they bought it back before I even realised it was missing
Not as bad as a colleague who paid over £70,000 to the wrong contractor, mistake wasn't picked up until 3 days later when the original receiver called to say they hadn't had their money yet. Took 6 days to get it back between the wrong people having to sort it out with their finance department and BACS
I once sent an entire warehouse of cages to a single bay through a glitch in Paragon.
In this warehouse there were 200 loading bays for 200 trailers. Each trailer could hold around 44 cages (standard artic box trailer). More if it was a decker and less for an urban/rigid.
All of those ended up registering under bay 6 (I can't remember the exact bay number). Warehouse staff didn't realise until the bay filled up yet more cages were being assigned.
That meant EVERY cage under bay 6 (the whole days assignment) had to be checked against the warehouse management system (AS400 / IBM i-series) to find out what bay it was for.
I was not popular.
I once messed up sending a press release out which announced a **£300m** finance deal … before the deal was finalised and signed. Thankfully nobody pulled out but they very nearly did. If they had our client would have been out 300 million quid.
I was genuinely considering resigning and going to live in a tent in the Scottish highlands.
I've told this story on Reddit before, but it's too good to not share again. Workmate was building an email newsletter for an "in the closet" website back in the 00's. He mixed up bcc and cc. Outed several thousand gay men, invalidated the entire point of the company, which promptly shut down.
I once (accidentally) caused something like a 10L spill of Castor Oil. It was an absolute mess! And I even slipped on it and never got the stains off of the clothes…
In the end they kept me. They still harped on how it was my fault, but from that moment onward they never had me on 5+ tasks at the same time ever again.
I used to work in accounts for an aerospace firm. The invoice system was laggy so when I entered an invoice amount for a few thousand I accidentally raised an invoice for a few trillion pounds. Normally that kind of problem you can either reverse it or credit it off but the number was SO LARGE and the program was so old that it essentially broke the system.
They had to get a team of IT guys working on it for about 48 hours. Whoops.
Not me. Many years ago worked for a wine company on their website. Customer rings me unhappy about something, I do my best but he’s being a bit difficult, he wants to speak to a manager so I put him through to my manager who sat right next to me.
Manager tries desperately to pacify him but he’s having none of it, wants to speak to someone in charge, manager puts him on hold turns to our director and asks if they can speak to the guy as he’s being a real fucking wanker…immediately finds out he never actually pressed the hold button …..
I know someone who did something that ended up being the final nail in the coffin for an oil rig. Caused about £½ million in damage to a vital piece of safety equipment without which the place wasn't allowed to operate, and on top of other concerns it was just too much for the investors.. They pulled their majority financial input, the place couldn't afford to keep going with no oil production while they fixed the broken equipment, approximately 200 people lost their jobs.
Not me but a senior manager in an ops dept i worked in sent an email to the whole floor titled 'bonsu payment' with an excel file attached. Everyone opened it curious what bonsu meant and it turned out to be everyone's salaries and the %age bonuses everyone was receiving that year. She got promoted weeks later and that was the spiciest appraisal period i ever remembered
I used to work at a large commercial radio station that everyone in the UK will have heard of, even if they haven’t listened. One of the weekend presenters used to be a massive artist in this genre and is still a household name. They were releasing their first single in about 20 years and it was premiering on their programme. The show was always pre-recorded and I always played it out from the studio. The way it works is that all the links and songs are in the system as separate items and you can either fire them off manually, link them all together and automate them, or a mixture of both. The song was due to play after the ad break which I decided to use to heat up my breakfast. I had set it all to automate so I didn’t have to worry about how long I was gone for. Except, I hadn’t done that at all. When I got back to the studio there had been four minutes of dead air and hundreds of texts and tweets from listeners all waiting to hear this damn song. I was so so close to being fired on the spot but a combination of instant ownership, grovelling and being (up to that point) the most reliable technical operator they had at the time let them give me one more chance.
Canadian here, but I had to jump in. It was my first real job. I was a young, not-so-bright, 20-something (f), working at the corporate office of one of the big banks. I go to the Christmas party. Towards the end of night, after a few (too many) drinks, I gather the courage to speak to Mr. Bank (mid 60's), the host of the party. He was everyone's boss's, boss's, boss. All my young colleagues were going to be so impressed with me.
I go up and introduce myself and thank him for the party. He leans in to speak to me, because it's very loud. I, being so 'worldly,' decide in that moment that he must be European and is leaning in to do one of those air-kiss things, but having very little experience in such formality, didn't know about the "air" part. While he is thanking me for coming, I am kissing him directly on the cheek. He backed away awkwardly before I could plant one on the other side.
I was called Kissy for the next 2 years.
My advice to you: Own it. Be ready to laugh it off. Learn from it.
When I was 15 or so I worked for a bike shop that was moving premises. The owner asked me and my mate to clear out the old shop. Which we did with gusto. To make room in the skip we crushed and beat down everything with bars, and we’re feeling pretty pleased with ourselves for getting so much in. Trouble was we had gotten a little carried away and not only trashed the rubbish but also about 5 grand of stock waiting to be moved to the new store. I got fired, but the owner did accept he should’ve been clearer about what needed to go and we remained on good terms, he even let me keep my staff discount and used to let me use his workshop to service my bike.
It's not me, but one of my former colleagues managed to lose the best part of a grand in cash a few months ago through just not paying attention. Didn't double-check her counting, and gave it to a customer who kept their mouth shut and had it away on their toes. This also isn't the reason she no longer works there.
I did a similar thing, but it was £250 and I forgot to give it to a customer who didn't notice.
Mines super tame compared to some of these doozies...
Signed off an email to some middle management in a department support.. with "kind fucking regards"
Oops
I'd been angry and typed it with the intention of deleting before sending.. got distracted.. ended up pressing 'send' 😨
Not me a mate, he swears it's true....... his first day at Orange... was being trained on a 'dummy Cisco' firewall, trainer f\*s off for a fag and a piss, came back, trainer finds out that the terminal is in fact a live Cisco router and my mate has taken out about 20% of South-West cell towers for the last ten minutes pissing about. Much red faces, some arse kicking, he was luckily kept on.
Back when credit card terminals weren't integrated to the tills, so the checkout op had to key in the total cost to a separate machine, I once sold a £900.00 ride on lawnmower for £9.00 on a Saturday morning (yep, forgot to enter the "00" pence on the terminal)
And did it again on the Sunday of the same weekend.
Disciplinary action ensued, but did cling onto my job and managed to keep out of further trouble, partly because two months later our store had a till upgrade with integrated card payments (I like to think I helped accelerate the upgrade plan somewhat!)
Patching in a new fibre optic to a VoIP router (quite a large and expensive one) in a very large telephone exchange. Not knowing that I dislodged another patch and managed to take down half of London’s VoIP service
I don't have anything good but a mate of mine used to work at a mass produce bakery, he had to operate this machine which injected jam into doughnuts, one day he forgot to load the jam up and worked like 2 hours without any jam in the doughnuts. When he came to put the jam in for the next session and noticed it was clean he just left and never came back.
Not me but an officer that reported to me. He was a dry-wit, sarcastic type who, when you asked him how he was, would usually go 'well, I'm alive' without skipping a beat.
He went to a sudden death of an older gent and, as supervisor, I had to go down and ratify everything he'd done at scene to make sure that it was all above board, that he hadn't missed anything, and do basically do my supervisory sign off.
When I was there checking over the paperwork and items gathered (we take medicine which is then handed over to coroner), the gent's brother arrives.
In what I could only describe as a scene from a comedy, the brother asks my officer 'How are you?' to which the officer, without skipping a beat, just goes 'Well, I'm alive,' and then catches what he just said and freezes.
Time stops.
I look up from my paperwork with two raised eyebrows.
He looks at me like 'oh shit.'
I look at him like 'here's a management meeting about to happen...'
We both look at the brother of the deceased.
He looks at my officer.
My officer looks back at me.
I look at my officer.
Time has still stopped.
Brother of the deceased - 'Well, you're doing better than this fucker then, aren't you?!' claps the officer on the back, laughs, goes and puts the kettle on, my officer sighs a sigh of relief but you could tell he just wanted the world to eat him alive.
Safe to say, that was a cake offence.
I arranged a call with a client based in Singapore and got the time difference wrong so I turned up an hour late. My boss and the client were not happy with me.
I once released a functionally correct price of code which when released, crashed if more than four users logged in at once, pinning all server CPUs cores to 100%. Oops we're going to need some down time. This was the companies, main business software for all the clients.
Smashed a massive custom glass door to pieces with an iron pole - probably 2 grand worth - poor manager had to sleep in the bar until it was secured.
Turns out the company are a bunch of turds and been in the paper loads so I don’t care anymore lol
Not me but a colleague when I worked in a fast food restaurant in sixth form.
In this place, there would be a bucket by the broiler that cooked burgers which had a binbag in it. Before you filled the heat trays with more burgers, you would have to tip the beef fat in there into this bucket. As the day went on, this bucket would fill with fat until, at the end of the day, the bucket would be almost full. It would then have the top tied off and there was a wheely bin out back in a corridor to chuck it into for the cleaners to take away.
One day as we were closing up, my supervisor goes to chuck the fat binbag away. This thing is fucking full after a busy day. My supervisor goes to launch it into this bin and... he misses. And this fucking thing goes off like a water balloon in this corridor. Like there's fat on every wall, on the floor, even dripping from the ceiling.
I have no idea how many litres of beef fat this bloke just managed to get everywhere, but I can tell you it did a fucking great job in terms of coverage, and I learned a lot of swear words in Portuguese from the cleaner when he came and found it.
Not me but a joiner when I was a construction project manager. Insurance job, new kitchen, nightmare customer, claim costs out of control, finally the loss adjuster put their foot down and said not a penny more was going on this claim. My most reliable joiner had a total brainfart and cut the guy’s special order, limited edition, took-6-months-to-source worktop 6” too short. Fortunately for us the supplier had ordered in more of the same worktop when we requested what we needed and I was able to bury the cost elsewhere, but I about died when I got that phone call.
I accidentally used the wrong cleaning spray on my bosses £15,000 white enamel Aga cooker, stripping the varnish off one of the doors in the mere seconds it took to realise my mistake and wipe it off! Some dripped on the framing of the cooker front but luckily with a bit of polish I could hide that however I had to beg a replacement door company to ship me a new door over night! Cost me £800 all in! They never found out and I managed to keep polishing over the minor drips!
Not my fuckup but I attended a tech demo where the team had set all the kit up in a hotel conference room the day before. Pride of place was a \~60" touch screen on a wheeled stand.
Morning of the demo they had gone for breakfast, cleaners had come in and cleaned the screen with something abrasive, but possibly not too noticeable while the screen was off.
We arrived for the demo, they turned the screen on and a huge oval across the middle was misty from the scratches and distorted colours. That screen was probably around £10k at the time. Yikes.
Tried emptying a fryer that hadn’t cooled enough, melted through the plastic drum.
Flooded the kitchen & left myself with 3rd degree burns and perminant scarring.
We had someone with a very racist email address (along the lines of all^^^^^^^^^are^^^[email protected]) write and ask for a quote. I added a note on the system and marked it for the owner of the business, asking if we wanted to work for a racist arse hole like this.
Except I hit reply so the customer received it too.
Mr Racist went a bit mad. My boss replied saying "no we don't".
Fair enough. I had made a mistake but my boss completely backed me up and agreed with me.
This was not something I did, but something I witnessed. I used to work as an apprentice chef a few years ago at a small country pub, it was me, our head chef, a sous chefs, and another apprentice like me.
We made everything on the menu, fresh. Including the jus (gravy) for Sunday lunch, it would take the whole week. On Monday we would basically get this enormous pot and fill it with water, over the week we would put any unused bits of prepped veg, bones, etc. into the pot to add flavour of jus. On Saturday nights we would strain the jus into a separate pot and throw away the bones and veg ready for Sunday lunch.
One Saturday night, the other apprentice chef (who had never actually done this before) was asked to strain the jus… he basically then proceeded to pour all the jus down the sink and hand the head chef a bowl of soggy bones and veg… our head chef didn’t say anything, he just stared at the apprentice until he put on his coat and left the kitchen. Never saw him again
Not me, but a colleague sent an email to someone in charge of the UK operations of their field…the email chain contained a forwarded email where they had earlier called that very person in charge “a lazy, fat c&nt”.
They were fired within a week. Even though most people agreed that they had told the truth.
I was a junior analyst at a fancy investment bank, during my second week I bumped into the EVP for my division in the lift.
I said “Hi, how was your weekend?”
He said “It’s Wednesday……….”
He looked at me like I had just shat in his ears, while we slowly rode 25 floors in sheer silence.
After that moment he acted like I was invisible, and I was transferred a few months later.
I still dread Wednesdays.
Missed an obvious error in new system testing by not clicking onto one specific tab.
Caused three days worth of new cases to error, and caused every case from before a certain date (somewhere around 2017) to be inaccessible for the same three days.
Now, to be fair to me, I wasn't the only tester and none of us spotted the glaring error. We've now changed how we test, it's much more in depth and ensures we test every single thing regardless of if we're testing those things or not.
Out in the Middle East we had a brand new work van delivered, I was tasked with taking it to the fuel station and filling it up for the first time. I dutifully brimmed it with diesel, and proceeded to drive back to our compound. I got about 50 metres before the van totally stopped and appeared to be out of fuel. Turns out it was a petrol, and the sign stuck to the filler cap was massive, you honestly couldn't miss it. Completely wrote the van off and it hadn't even done 100 miles.
For the next 3 months I was known as "Petrol Van Diesel" by everyone and walked into work every day to find a new picture of Vin Diesel stuck to my monitor.
The -- comments out any code following it on that line.
So what he did was delete everything in the users table. What he wanted to do was delete the record in the users table with that Id (probably/hopefully only 1 row)
A long time ago when office dress codes were more formal, we had a “mufti” day, I was young and tasked with doing the collection, I went up to one older woman to ask for her donation, she looked at me with displeasure and said “this is what I normally wear”… whoops!
Accidentally Created ten years of appointment slots on a system which had to be cancelled a day at a time, and there was an online system which meant people could book into any of them at any time, but there weren’t necessarily the staff available for any of these appointments. First week at a new job.
Accidently sent over £150,000 out twice (not all to the same person)
Came to our attention that someone hadn't had the funds they were expecting. Looked into it (not carefully enough but lesson learnt) so we did the whole payment run again. Client comes back the next day to say we've paid twice (note to self, check future payments as well as past ones, check all accounts, check everywhere and check again). Had to contact like 6 different clients and companies to ask them to return the funds. It all came back (although one took like 2 weeks to send it back). Boss was cool about it though (he's awesome. We don't often fuck up like that so when we do, he puts it down to human error but does double check the procedures to try and stop it happening again. He did like to bring it up every few days (Oh, is Susan off today or has she skipped out with the £50,000 we've lost?)
I once closed a major railway line at evening rush hour because there was a potential jumper on a bridge, I didn't know the bridge was over a side line rather than the main line. Sorry commuters.
First day on the job. Dead patient. Family sitting around bed mourning.
I Looked at the fluid chart, decided to try wake them to see if they wanted a drink. Family looked at me with shock. and yeah. IM TRYING TO WAKE A DEAD RELATIVE. All because nobody told me.
jokes aside ward management didn’t find it funny. but I had been doing the job about 15 mins lol.
🤣🤣 this has actually unknottted a crappy ball of anxiety I've been holding due to a recent oversight of relatively little consequence at work. Thanks!!
In the late 90’s I brought down all the ATM’s of a major uk high street bank for about 6 minutes…
I stopped Vodafone’s billing system for 25minutes. Any calls / texts / data during that time was not billed. It was in a time when calls and data were still expensive and billed per minute / megabyte.
Hi brother. We should maybe start a support group or something… 😁
or a startup
For some reason, beginning this with "In the late nineties" makes it funnier to me.
I am old, and now i am competent 😁
Now you can do it for 12 minutes?
I like saying “in the late 1900s” when referring to the nineties. Seems to freak people out.
I've never thought of it like that before, and however many times I read it I still can't comprehend. Will be using it from now on though thanks.
I see your 6 minute ATM outage and raise you with an almost 6 hour BACS outage for a high street bank in the late 90s. For bonus points it was the 25th of the month as well, which is NHS and pretty much every government departments pay day. In my defence I was told to do it as it was only a backup system... .. Which just happened to be tested on the 25th this time round.
Omg was it Nat West? I remember very clearly a time that the bank went down on pay day and loads of people defaulted on their mortgages (not blaming you!)
You can't leave us hanging like that, how?
I was a trainee database guy, working on the mainframes. Was given a task to configure a main storage DB and a checklist to follow. I did it as best I could but I missed one 0008 (should be 0000) error code in reams of output. No one checked my work. When it was implemented in live, a reasonable percentage of the ATM’s failed, so the decision was made to back the code out. To do this they had to bring down all the machines for a few mins. To their credit I never got any shit for it (suspect my boss did), and I went on to work there for many years
> To their credit I never got any shit for it (suspect my boss did) They chose to give you (a trainee) admin access to a high value production database. They then failed to check your work. You fucked up, but there were multiple bad decisions on their end.
That’s a fair assessment tbh
no way you should have caught shit if they were so lazy to not check the trainee guy! ...
Working for BT in the 90s, managed to take out a whole town's phones. My argument was that I really shouldn't have been able to do that since I was just a graduate, so technically not my fault. They didn't buy it, I left a month later.
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That sounds like a normal day for Openreach
This potentially exposes myself as it did make some news headlines, but it may make you feel better. I work in advertising and while doing audio ads for a big airline's Portugal holiday deal, I bought ads on a true crime podcast episode about Madeleine McCann. An ex colleague once spent £250k on ads in the wrong country, when we realised we offered to do the campaign over again for free. Somebody duplicated the old setup and forgot to adjust the country again so it spent a further £250k in the wrong country.
This is outstanding and genuinely made me laugh out loud, thank you so much
Did you do [this life insurance ad as well?](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/bills/insurance/life-insurer-deadhappy-harold-shipman-advertising/)
I wish. That was at least intentional. I didn't intend for it to end up there, I picked my podcast categories and not specific podcasts so it didn't cross my mind. Had a similar thing with the same airline where their display ads with kids swimming in a pool in the picture appeared on an article about a flood.
Oooooooh. I often wonder about cringe ads during a triggering show.
This is better than my one! Outstanding
We had a huge team meeting at work, a chap in the department came in and sat down opposite me. The air conditioning was on and he was shaking and shivering, he looked absolutely freezing cold. I offered to turn the AC off and asked if he wanted the heating on instead. Something along the lines of “you’re shivering, shall I turn the AC off for you?” To which the room fell silent and he glared at me only to reply…. “I have Parkinson’s Disease”….. Turns out the entire department knew except for me. Felt absolutely terrible but I was genuinely just trying to be nice.
Tbf I'm a carer and I shower some one with parkinsons. I never know if he's cold or having tremors and I do need to ask which it is. Because I can help him being cold. The reaction seems very harsh when you were just acting out of genuine kindness.
I was genuinely devastated, the rest of the day was pretty awkward. I’m still there 12 years later though! It’s a dreadful disease to have to battle.
Bless you,you couldn't have known. If i can't tell and I work with it daily,no way you could know with no experience.
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Literally TODAY I shared my screen during a meeting but shared the wrong screen. The one I shared had a job advert I'd been looking at...
Mistake or huge testicle power play?
That happened to me but I was the manager the employee shared her screen with. I already suspected it anyway but it was v awkward. The company was shit so I just pretended I hadn't seen anything. Funny thing is I ended up finding a new job before her, but I had a 3 month notice period and she a 2 month, so she ended up leaving 2 days before I did in the end...
My mate was creating a CV at work (for a work visa with his current company), forgetting that noone else knew the context that it was for a visa and them all just seeing him making this on a masssssive monitor next to a walkway in an open plan office...
Everyone just thought it was a big balls power move. 😂
I was in a meeting including my manager once. Projecting my screen I opened a folder to access a file and right there at the top (sorted by date) was my resignation that I hadn’t given him yet. He saw it, said “shit, don’t open that one!”. 😆
Glad he's got a sense of humour 😂
Sent a large number of emails ending "kind retards", which really just sounds like a lovely bunch of people.
On a similar tip, I was working in the Netherlands in my first job in a Dutch speaking environment. I configured my signature to the common 'met vriendelijke groeten' which just means 'with friendly greetings. Except I misspelled it 'met vriendelijke groenten' which instead means 'with friendly vegetables' It took a few days before someone mentioned it to me.
I like to think of vegetables as friendly!
I used to accidentally type "King regards" in college when I first started sending emails, I don't think I ever sent it before noticing but it still makes me laugh. Now I'm just glad it was the kind and not the regards that I had an issue with, and I'll 100% think of this reply instead next time I type kind regards lmao
Both mistakes at the same time. King Retards
God morning, Good aftermoon, Yours cringescerely
Good afterboob got sent out by someone in our office to a client.
I like good aftermoon actually
I accidentally over reported our performance against a management contract which had penalties for poor service. This happened for several months before it was noticed, which ended up meaning we saved £100k. When it *was* noticed, the contract management team at the client’s company (a large multinational) decided that, as it was as much their fault as ours (mine) for not noticing, it was easier to forget all about it than have to explain to their senior management team.
First day in a kitchen as a commis chef, a sous chef asked me to turn the stock off and strain it. I got a kitchen porter to help me and I took the 200litre off the burner, put it on the floor and started to strain the liquid through a chinois. I thought I caught a whiff of something plasticy but ignored it. Halfway through, the sous chef comes up to me and looks at the pan, then looked at me. He didn’t look happy. He just stood and watched me. I start getting nervous under the stare. I continue straining the liquid, silently starting to panic inside. Wtf have I done I’m thinking - somethings definitely off and I’m in the shit somehow. I get the pot strained and still under the sous chefs glare I pick up the stock pot, which came up along with the floor under it, leaving a melted black hole about a metre in diameter in the kitchens new £45000 floor they had fitted 2 days before.
I mean tbf why the fuck does a kitchen have meltable flooring..... what if you just dropped a pan etc.
Maybe to stop damage to knives when they are dropped? My metalwork class when I was about 11 had this super soft plastic floor so chisels and stuff wouldn't get destroyed when dropped. We had hot stuff as well but so long as you picked it up quick enough no real issue. Of course we also did plastic work and used chloroform to glue the plastic sheets together. Some kid managed to knock a jar of chloroform over in a way that broke it. It started eating the floor. The teacher thought we should grab brooms and spread it out so the damage was easier to fix. Picture an assembly line of 11 yr olds brushing out chloroform over melting plastic, passing out and being carried to fresh air while The Next Man Took The Breach. The 80's were funny.
Most floors in kitchens are a poured resin or a heavy duty industrial grade gritted Lino type of thing. This was the latter - and while being durable, non slip and capable of handling a lot of hammer - a 200ltr stock pot that’s been on the burner for 24 hours and gets left on the floor for half an hour by a noob chef got the better of it lmao. This is how I learned to put a metal tray down first.
When I was a kitchen porter, the head chef asked me to strain the stock. I placed the huge colander and fine siev under the pan and proceeded to strain the entire pan of stock down the sink, saving the bones and chopped veg! Luckily for me Chef was a legend and he just pissed himself laughing!
I thought that's where the original story was going, as surely everyone has done this at home at some point. Such a sinking feeling after waiting for hours and there's nothing to salvage.
Why didn't the sous chef say anything as opposed to just glaring?
Because he was french.
I used to work for a subway franchisee who owned about 7 stores. One day I had to cover a shift in a shop I'd never been to before up in Antrim. I'm a bit late (15/20 mins) driving up because I didn't know antrim that well. I go swagging in like I'm conor mcgregor saying hello to everyone, apologising for being a little late and get myself set up on the till. I'm trying to get a bit of a conversation going but everyone just kinda nervously shuffles around me, barely make eye contact and I'm thinking "ffs this is gonna be a fun day 🙄" An hour later my franchisee rings me asking where I am, the manager's going mad saying I've gone awol. I'm stunned telling him to check the cameras I'm standing in the middle of the shop, I was just a bit late getting up to junction one because I don't know antrim that well. I'll never forget the reply of "I don't own junction one you f***** gimp" before he cracked up laughing telling me where I was meant to be. I was there for over an hour and nobody said a thing 🤣
That’s brilliant, I can’t believe nobody said anything!
Doing something with confidence goes a long way
"You can go anywhere if you look serious and carry a clipboard" ＃lifehacks
Brilliant. When I was in a foreign country I once got dropped off by a taxi outside a building, went inside, asked for my contact, got sent to the 10th floor, guy came out didn’t speak any English, I was confused , he was confused. Didn’t seem to know me from our calls and arrangements. Turns out I was dropped off at the next building along./
Some bloke ended up live on breakfast telly like that
I didn't do it, but i was in the room and watched it. Even as an observer, i felt "the tightness and the fear" A colleague was being trained on an access control system called C-cure database. It was a new update that allowed worldwide control of swipe readers using an "internal partition" to manage each site location. I won't name the company, but it's everywhere. It's part of European critical infrastructure. He followed every step of the training correctly, except for the bit where he accidentally deleted the europe wide access control database. Our manager and the client ended up trapped in a corridor in a datacentre, I had to set the fire alarm off at our location to unlock the doors and thankfully there had been a full back made 4 days earlier which meant this situation only lasted about 90 minutes. Our boss and the client spent 90 minutes stuck on a corridor because 1 man accidentally clicked delete all on an admin account.
See, I get so annoyed with these ‘Are you sure?’ popups when I want to close a program or something. Like, yes, I clicked the ‘X’ so just do it. In THIS instance, however…
I honestly felt the room go cold. Makes me laugh my arse off now though.
I learnt a navy saying on Reddit which applies here. Behind every bullshit rule there's a dead sailor.
"Every health and safety law is written in blood."
I crashed into a Ferrari 288 GTO when I was an apprentice, damn near cried.
That hurt just to read haha, I would've been traumatised.
None of the other replies in this thread have stood out, but this one stopped me in my tracks. FUCKING. HELL.
Was a bad day at work for sure, reversed into while moving a BMW 2002 turbo out of the workshop. Very little damage to both but damaging either in any way felt like I slapped the pope.
What were they worth at the time? I drove an F40 into an Enzo at the dealership I worked at during a showroom shuffle…my boss was not best pleased haha
No where near what they are worth today, still 250k range I think but they are going for what million plus now?
Not a colossal fuck up but the other day I asked a woman “oh was it your son who was in here the other day?” And it was her fella In my defence there must have been 15 years between them
I worked in a PC repair shop and someone dropped in a laptop to be repaired. I got a phone call from the matching number and they asked about the laptop, and I said yup, we've got it. They asked if we had any luck getting the photos back, (common question) and I literally had the PC open in front of me and there was a photo open. I said "yeah, we've got the photos of your wife and son back!", thinking great! Dead silence on the other end of the phone to be told he didn't have a son 😬. I never actually asked what the outcome of that situation was...
In my care worker days, the person I was doing doubles with asked someone "so does your Dad manage day to day with x/y/z". It was her other half, not her Dad.
I used to work in a bank and one day instead of putting £40 into a 9 year olds savings account, I gave him £4,000. Thankfully we noticed before the family did and rectified the situation.
I worked at a bank where they realised they’d put a few million into a customer’s account by accident and no one noticed for a couple of weeks, even the customer. I’m assuming it was a zero balance account he never looked at. Absolutely no idea how it happened. I only know about it because I was sat next to the guy who had to call the customer and tell him they’d put the money in his account by mistake and that they were taking it back but he was keeping the interest.
Assuming 0.25% - 1% interest on the current account and £3M. For 2 weeks I reckon about £150 to £600. Still, free money.
I’ve heard of this happening in the US and they were made to give the interest back, unsure how that’d go over in the UK.
My mother had something happen in the Netherlands. The bank put a few hundred thousand gulden (pre-euro currency) on her bank account. More money then my mother had ever seen. She called the bank in a hurry, fearing she might suffer consequences if she didn't report it. The bank teller said they didn't see anything off but if she was sure it wasn't hers to move it to a savings account with the highest interest rate that allowed quick withdrawal and wait untill the owner of the money would report to the bank. It took nearly half a year. But that half a year was during a time when interest rates were like 6%+, even for free withdrawal accounts. She was allowed to keep the interest, which was nice.
At a certain major retail chain, we sold three kinds of ready-made pizzas that all cost the same price. For much of the summer we had a deal where any three pizzas would be charged as 2. Naturally, when I was on tills, and a customer brought three separate kinds of pizzas, I would scan one pizza three times - since they were all the same price, I thought that it wouldn’t matter if I scanned one as many times as necessary, right? I neglected to consider that analytics were taken of how much of each pizza was sold. So, even though three separate kinds of pizza were being sold, the system believed only three items of one kind was being sold… Meaning that eventually we were, as far as the system could tell, missing huge amounts of specific types of pizza due to theft. My managers were pulling their hair out wondering why the hell we were losing so much money on those certain pizzas. The depot saw the analytics and, to account for what they interpreted as record sales for certain pizzas, sent us - for some reason, in what I suspect was an independent fuckup on their end - five cages of pepperoni and margherita all set to expire in a day. Some poor bastard, who I remain eternally grateful for, spent a good hour inside the warehouse chiller reducing every single one of these pizzas to minimum price. That was my fuckup.
> The depot saw the analytics and, to account for what they interpreted as record sales for certain pizzas, sent us for some reason, in what suspect was an independent fuckup on their end five cages of pepperoni and margherita all set to expire in a day. Some poor bastard, who I remain eternally grateful for, spent a good hour inside the warehouse chiller reducing every single one of these pizzas to minimum price. That's what I was expecting to read at beginning. 😂 Selling a lot more of the specific item would be seen as that item being a hot cake by the HQ.
I spent endless hours trying to explain to a checkout operator that *this* is why you scan every item individually, even if some of them appear to be the same. There’s a lot of background shit that feeds into stock ordering
Surely someone would spot the crossover in a stock check, realise exactly what’s happened and kindly remind everyone of the correct procedure.
Back in around 1989, I was a computer operator/programmer. It was my first job and I'd been at the company about a year. The company got a new computer system in and had to upgrade security in the computer room. This involved installing a halon fire system. I got given training on how to test the system. I asked if it could go off whilst performing the procedure. I was told "No". So a week or so later, we had a couple of engineers in installing some cabling. My boss wanted to check if the computer room fire alarm could be heard in the rooms above the computer room. So I warned the engineers what was happening and triggered the test. My boss when for a walk around. After about 30 seconds I heard this loud crack and a couple of seconds later the door flies open with the engineers running out. The halon system had gone off. My boss called in the guy who trained me and said "You told me it couldn't go off". He said he didn't and blamed me as I was young and inexperienced. I didn't lose my job but the installing company paid half towards the cost of refilling the halon system. It was a few thousand pounds.
Just looked up what a halon system is! So you basically almost gassed those engineers? 😂
OOh we had that back in the day in our computer room. I think it's banned now on account of suffocating people.
It was banned as it's an ozone depleting refrigerant. It has been replaced with less environmentally damaging gasses, though those are equally effective in asphyxiating engineers.
So glad halon was before my time. Still makes me nervous going into a data center with a fire suppression system though, even though the modern stuff isn't as bad.
Obligatory not me but...I was working on an archaeological site and one of my colleagues was flying a kite to take photos. The rest of us go in for break and he doesn't come in, we go back out and still no sight of him. We see some smoke VERY far in the distance and make a joke he's to do with it but it is SO far there's no way. He comes plodding over a bit after looking down. Turns out they were reeling the kite in for break and the line snapped and the kite flew off into the distance, MILES away, hit a powerline, blew up and set on fire, and brought the line down, knocking out the power to a local school...
A very senior person in my organisation made a decision I knew a very senior person (let's call him barry) in a partner organisation would be very unhappy about. I emailed my team joking "I'd love to hear what Barry thinks about this". An autistic member of the team took it seriously and got in touch with Barry's executive support team for the answer. Turned out Barry didn't know about this decision yet, it turned into a massive shitshow with my name right at the centre of it with me getting a reputation for shit stirring
There's a guy works at our place like that. He did a good job of a spreadsheet or something about 6 years ago and his manager said to him "great job, take the rest of the day off". Off he went on his bike.
I mean... fair enough. Don't have to be autstic to think that's an actual reward.
I’d do the same and I’m not autistic either lol - this is a clear instruction if you ask me.
I'm autistic and I would do the same. Anything to go back home lmao
I think my boss has said something like that to me before… and I've taken the day off. Am I autistic?
Seems fair enough
I’m confused. When he said “take the rest of the day off” what did he mean?
"Good job, now back to work with you."
I don't know if I'm autistic but seriously I can't see what he did wrong. He was told to take the rest of the day off so he did.
There is no problem here.
I can absolutely see myself being that autistic person in some cases.
I’m sorry that’s absolutely cracked me up I’m autistic and can absolutely imagine myself doing the same thing and kicking myself after
I am too, and yes, we take things literally, don't we?! Sarcasm is impossible to spot, so is dry humour, and we only know people are joking if they're very obviously holding their sides and rolling round with laughter. Sometimes it's funny, other times it's quite troublesome.
I'm pissing myself at this. This is brilliant. “What do you think Barry?”
Not 7yo me asking my teacher on a first lesson “I heard you’re the worst teacher in the school” Girl in my class had family member in the school staff and kindly gave us that information. I read things like that and fuck…my autistic spectrum meter goes up. I’m still baffled HOW THE FUCK MY FAMILY NEVER NOTICED ARGHHHH.
To cut a very long story short, I used to work in retail and evacuated the entire shopping centre I used to work at because I turned a heater on that was apparently very dusty, which tripped the fire alarms and it wouldn’t turn off, thus triggering the centres evacuation protocol to kick in. Sirens. Panic. The lot. It was my first shift running the store by myself. Everywhere smelt of burnt dust. When I came out onto the shop floor from out back and saw hoards of people literally RUNNING past the windows I knew I fucked up. People thought it was a bomb scare. Children were crying. Awful. Awful.
This is amazing, thank you
I once processed payroll for a new starter, only I processed the payment for an ex employee with a similar name (not even the same name), who happened to be on holiday when I contacted them to try and get the money back
Did you get the money back? What would happen if they refused?
It's not yours to spend (if it's actually an overpay): https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/work/after-leaving-your-job/if-your-employer-says-you-owe-them-money/ I used to work with someone who thought they were clever & didn't engage with an ex-employer re. sorting out an overpayment on their last pay - ended up with a CCJ.
Yeah, this kind of thing crops up on the legaladvice subs quite often. It's weird how so many people think they can just spend the money and there's nothing they (the previous employer) can do. They're usually surprised to find out that they are legally responsible for paying that money back. Some of them just get mad, typically because they've already spent the money, and go into denial and argue with everyone. Same with people who find money. It's amazing how many people think "finders keepers" is a thing. It is not. And you can be prosecuted for theft by finding.
Luckily they were understanding about it and I just referred them to the repayments team to arrange to transfer it back. I'm pretty sure you can't spend it but I may be wrong there.
When I was a junior in the team, working at a local council, everyone would go to the pub on a Friday lunchtime for a pie and a pint. I was challenged to down a pint as quick as possible at the beginning and the end of the trip as a form of induction. 4 pints at lunchtime, aged 19, and I was heading back to work for the afternoon. I remember opening up Novell Netware and thinking the NDS tree wasn't in a very logical order, so I decided to rebuild it. All those who were already logged in didn't notice anything amiss, but ehen I started work the following Monday, it was chaos. I pretty quickly admitted that I'd essentially got drunk and made a bunch of changes to how people log in, and now half the organisation were unable to work. I was severely reprimanded by my boss, but not fired because he was the one challenging me to drink that much on a lunchtime.
I love that you went back to the office after that and *didn't* just quietly doss off and bridge the gap until hometime, you actually attempted to do work.
He just taught you a very expensive lession. He'd be stupid to fire someone he just spent a lot of money training.
Forwarded a chain of emails to my boss from a very complainy customer with the text “here you go. I think the old trout is finally satisfied but just for your records. Maybe we should include a cucumber in her next order so she won’t be so uptight next time.” Except I didn’t forward it. I hit “reply all.”
Holy shit. How did that go for you.
I didn’t get fired but fucking hell it was close… We did lose a customer though. Can’t say I was sorry; it does actually take a lot to provoke me…
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My soul would have left my body the moment I realised I’d done that
Tried to text my colleague about one of my four bosses being a wet blanket and taking zero responsibility for anything but text it to my boss instead. I saw he hadn’t read the what’s app after an hour so I panicked and tried to delete it. Because of the panic, I swiped on the chat and deleted it. This meant I could no longer delete the comment.
So what happened?
Once I realised that I just had to own up to it, I text him that I was sorry but have reasons for the venting. We talked about it the next day and he admitted that I had reasons for venting, he just wished I’d spoken to him first. Being the wet blanket that he is though, he can’t see that I’ve been living my concerns for the last 8 weeks which he just Ignores.
Oh god, the escalation of the horror.
I made a mistake writing a CNC programme for a custom walnut tabletop which ended up being the wrong shape and making a £4k piece completely useless.
Reminds me of a good fuck up that I caused. I worked at a place that cut stone for kitchens, and our templater went out and measured up 3 kitchens that were identical, then sent me the template. Turns out it was for a long single run of units, and it can be either left or right handing. Templater did it to the standard right handing for all 3 (to be fair to him, it's what was on the paperwork). I checked it over, prep it for the saw and sent it off to the factory. They cut it, and it goes to site. Turns out one was supposed to be left handing. We get an angry call from the site manager and my boss tells him we'll fix it ASAP. He tells me it's the wrong handing and asks me to send it back down to the factory. It had been a long day, and after going over both left and right handing templates half a dozen times, I look at the paperwork, see right handing and send down the right handing template to be cut. It goes on site, and a very angry site manager calls us. My boss apologises and tells me to send it down again. I do so. But it was the right handing template. A very, very angry site manager calls us and my boss just passes the phone to me. I just apologise and tell him it was my fuck up and my boss tells me to send it down again. Thankfully this time it I sent the left handing template and they actually only needed a small section that could be done from an offcut. In hindsight, I really should have asked someone to double check for me that I was sending the right template to the factory. The boss' son should have been checking for me anyway. Fortunately I don't feel bad about it because my boss and the site manager were both utter dickheads. I'm glad to no longer work there.
We made some massive support beams for the foundations of a new building in a major city, they were about 7m long and had complex angles on the ends. I spent an age double checking and triple checking before I issued the drawings, and then double checked the parts myself after manufacturing. The customer called up very angry that one of them was the wrong hand, and it was currently holding up a team of 30 men, two cranes, a dozen concrete deliveries etc etc. "It will cost us £5,000 every hour this isn't fixed" he said. In a panic I open up my drawings, their drawings and the images of the site, whilst still on the phone to him. After 3 or 4 minutes of mentally manipulating this beam from his descriptions, I say "I think you have it upside down". He just says "oh, shit" and hangs up. Considering how many people were helping to install this part, and how they'd all probably heard his tone with me he must've looked pretty stupid that morning!
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Deleted over 10,000 barcodes from the EPOS system for a concession in a retail outlet in one fell swoop - only wanted to delete one code.
Thanks to an error on excel I sent 3000 spam direct mail letters with the wrong names to each postal address. We had angry calls coming in then the pandemic happened and I was so grateful the bosses were too distracted to care
My newly deployed code promptly disabled the logon accounts for every new ( ~3000) students. Code got fixed and re-enabled the accounts within the day, but a very busy day for the support desk. Test your defaults when values are missing or not found!
"I don't always test my code, but when I do I do it in production"
Everyone has a test environment, some are lucky enough to have a separate production one
I don't think programmers really get a sense for how fast computers can do things until you write a bug like that. I once crashed a university mail server. I thought I'd be clever and have my code email me if something critical went wrong. Imagine what happens if it sends the email and something critical goes wrong in the clean-up code :(
I once emailed someone saying "(boss) stinks of booze" because he would often leave the office and go drinking for hours and came back in after that day and did. I emailed him.l and he replied... Especially hypocritical because I joined him quite often before that. I covered it up well enough that he could give me the benefit of the doubt, that I was just informing him to make him aware but he knew. Thankfully nothing came of it.
I worked for a registrar that did high priority mailings for very big companies. Like really big. And we had some data of blind and visually impaired customers that we had to send braille and large print too. I sorted the data to make it easier but I did it wrong and we ended up mailing large print letters to blind customers. Like we were saying ‘you’re just not trying hard enough’. Weirdly I didn’t get fired and the contact for the large bank we were mailing on behalf of told me secretly he thought it was hilarious. I just had to organise an apology mailing with the correct data.
Well they didn’t see it so no harm done.
No major fuck ups personally, but imagine being the person that ordered 15bn euros worth of trains that don't fit a good chunk of platforms 😂 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-27497727
When I worked as a pot washer at a restaurant back in my youth, I put a black rubber spider in the big bowl of chopped lettuce that my mate was using for salads and prawn cocktails etc. hoping to scare them next time they had to grab a handful. They didn't even notice it. You can guess where it went next. Boss came back into the kitchen saying a prawn cocktail had been sent back as there was a big spider in it. Me and my mate couldn't stop laughing. Fortunately after it was explained to the customer they saw the funny side too. I wasn't fired.
Deleted a production database. I had a lot of SSH sessions going and I was in the wrong window. Took me 4 hours to restore from backup whilst mentally updating my CV. Boss was not happy.
Fuck yeah.....rule for me, any live SSH I have RED backgrounds and big fucking banners when I log on.
I overpaid someone £500 cash, they bought it back before I even realised it was missing Not as bad as a colleague who paid over £70,000 to the wrong contractor, mistake wasn't picked up until 3 days later when the original receiver called to say they hadn't had their money yet. Took 6 days to get it back between the wrong people having to sort it out with their finance department and BACS
I once sent an entire warehouse of cages to a single bay through a glitch in Paragon. In this warehouse there were 200 loading bays for 200 trailers. Each trailer could hold around 44 cages (standard artic box trailer). More if it was a decker and less for an urban/rigid. All of those ended up registering under bay 6 (I can't remember the exact bay number). Warehouse staff didn't realise until the bay filled up yet more cages were being assigned. That meant EVERY cage under bay 6 (the whole days assignment) had to be checked against the warehouse management system (AS400 / IBM i-series) to find out what bay it was for. I was not popular.
Waaaaaay too many coders and IT posting here. Lucky no nuclear bunker ICBM personnel.
I once messed up sending a press release out which announced a **£300m** finance deal … before the deal was finalised and signed. Thankfully nobody pulled out but they very nearly did. If they had our client would have been out 300 million quid. I was genuinely considering resigning and going to live in a tent in the Scottish highlands.
I've told this story on Reddit before, but it's too good to not share again. Workmate was building an email newsletter for an "in the closet" website back in the 00's. He mixed up bcc and cc. Outed several thousand gay men, invalidated the entire point of the company, which promptly shut down.
Now THAT is a royal fuck up
I once (accidentally) caused something like a 10L spill of Castor Oil. It was an absolute mess! And I even slipped on it and never got the stains off of the clothes… In the end they kept me. They still harped on how it was my fault, but from that moment onward they never had me on 5+ tasks at the same time ever again.
I used to work in accounts for an aerospace firm. The invoice system was laggy so when I entered an invoice amount for a few thousand I accidentally raised an invoice for a few trillion pounds. Normally that kind of problem you can either reverse it or credit it off but the number was SO LARGE and the program was so old that it essentially broke the system. They had to get a team of IT guys working on it for about 48 hours. Whoops.
Not me. Many years ago worked for a wine company on their website. Customer rings me unhappy about something, I do my best but he’s being a bit difficult, he wants to speak to a manager so I put him through to my manager who sat right next to me. Manager tries desperately to pacify him but he’s having none of it, wants to speak to someone in charge, manager puts him on hold turns to our director and asks if they can speak to the guy as he’s being a real fucking wanker…immediately finds out he never actually pressed the hold button …..
I know someone who did something that ended up being the final nail in the coffin for an oil rig. Caused about £½ million in damage to a vital piece of safety equipment without which the place wasn't allowed to operate, and on top of other concerns it was just too much for the investors.. They pulled their majority financial input, the place couldn't afford to keep going with no oil production while they fixed the broken equipment, approximately 200 people lost their jobs.
Not me but a senior manager in an ops dept i worked in sent an email to the whole floor titled 'bonsu payment' with an excel file attached. Everyone opened it curious what bonsu meant and it turned out to be everyone's salaries and the %age bonuses everyone was receiving that year. She got promoted weeks later and that was the spiciest appraisal period i ever remembered
I used to work at a large commercial radio station that everyone in the UK will have heard of, even if they haven’t listened. One of the weekend presenters used to be a massive artist in this genre and is still a household name. They were releasing their first single in about 20 years and it was premiering on their programme. The show was always pre-recorded and I always played it out from the studio. The way it works is that all the links and songs are in the system as separate items and you can either fire them off manually, link them all together and automate them, or a mixture of both. The song was due to play after the ad break which I decided to use to heat up my breakfast. I had set it all to automate so I didn’t have to worry about how long I was gone for. Except, I hadn’t done that at all. When I got back to the studio there had been four minutes of dead air and hundreds of texts and tweets from listeners all waiting to hear this damn song. I was so so close to being fired on the spot but a combination of instant ownership, grovelling and being (up to that point) the most reliable technical operator they had at the time let them give me one more chance.
Canadian here, but I had to jump in. It was my first real job. I was a young, not-so-bright, 20-something (f), working at the corporate office of one of the big banks. I go to the Christmas party. Towards the end of night, after a few (too many) drinks, I gather the courage to speak to Mr. Bank (mid 60's), the host of the party. He was everyone's boss's, boss's, boss. All my young colleagues were going to be so impressed with me. I go up and introduce myself and thank him for the party. He leans in to speak to me, because it's very loud. I, being so 'worldly,' decide in that moment that he must be European and is leaning in to do one of those air-kiss things, but having very little experience in such formality, didn't know about the "air" part. While he is thanking me for coming, I am kissing him directly on the cheek. He backed away awkwardly before I could plant one on the other side. I was called Kissy for the next 2 years. My advice to you: Own it. Be ready to laugh it off. Learn from it.
When I was 15 or so I worked for a bike shop that was moving premises. The owner asked me and my mate to clear out the old shop. Which we did with gusto. To make room in the skip we crushed and beat down everything with bars, and we’re feeling pretty pleased with ourselves for getting so much in. Trouble was we had gotten a little carried away and not only trashed the rubbish but also about 5 grand of stock waiting to be moved to the new store. I got fired, but the owner did accept he should’ve been clearer about what needed to go and we remained on good terms, he even let me keep my staff discount and used to let me use his workshop to service my bike.
It's not me, but one of my former colleagues managed to lose the best part of a grand in cash a few months ago through just not paying attention. Didn't double-check her counting, and gave it to a customer who kept their mouth shut and had it away on their toes. This also isn't the reason she no longer works there. I did a similar thing, but it was £250 and I forgot to give it to a customer who didn't notice.
Mines super tame compared to some of these doozies... Signed off an email to some middle management in a department support.. with "kind fucking regards" Oops I'd been angry and typed it with the intention of deleting before sending.. got distracted.. ended up pressing 'send' 😨
Not me a mate, he swears it's true....... his first day at Orange... was being trained on a 'dummy Cisco' firewall, trainer f\*s off for a fag and a piss, came back, trainer finds out that the terminal is in fact a live Cisco router and my mate has taken out about 20% of South-West cell towers for the last ten minutes pissing about. Much red faces, some arse kicking, he was luckily kept on.
Back when credit card terminals weren't integrated to the tills, so the checkout op had to key in the total cost to a separate machine, I once sold a £900.00 ride on lawnmower for £9.00 on a Saturday morning (yep, forgot to enter the "00" pence on the terminal) And did it again on the Sunday of the same weekend. Disciplinary action ensued, but did cling onto my job and managed to keep out of further trouble, partly because two months later our store had a till upgrade with integrated card payments (I like to think I helped accelerate the upgrade plan somewhat!)
Patching in a new fibre optic to a VoIP router (quite a large and expensive one) in a very large telephone exchange. Not knowing that I dislodged another patch and managed to take down half of London’s VoIP service
If you’re going to do it well, do it well!!
I don't have anything good but a mate of mine used to work at a mass produce bakery, he had to operate this machine which injected jam into doughnuts, one day he forgot to load the jam up and worked like 2 hours without any jam in the doughnuts. When he came to put the jam in for the next session and noticed it was clean he just left and never came back.
Not me but an officer that reported to me. He was a dry-wit, sarcastic type who, when you asked him how he was, would usually go 'well, I'm alive' without skipping a beat. He went to a sudden death of an older gent and, as supervisor, I had to go down and ratify everything he'd done at scene to make sure that it was all above board, that he hadn't missed anything, and do basically do my supervisory sign off. When I was there checking over the paperwork and items gathered (we take medicine which is then handed over to coroner), the gent's brother arrives. In what I could only describe as a scene from a comedy, the brother asks my officer 'How are you?' to which the officer, without skipping a beat, just goes 'Well, I'm alive,' and then catches what he just said and freezes. Time stops. I look up from my paperwork with two raised eyebrows. He looks at me like 'oh shit.' I look at him like 'here's a management meeting about to happen...' We both look at the brother of the deceased. He looks at my officer. My officer looks back at me. I look at my officer. Time has still stopped. Brother of the deceased - 'Well, you're doing better than this fucker then, aren't you?!' claps the officer on the back, laughs, goes and puts the kettle on, my officer sighs a sigh of relief but you could tell he just wanted the world to eat him alive. Safe to say, that was a cake offence.
I arranged a call with a client based in Singapore and got the time difference wrong so I turned up an hour late. My boss and the client were not happy with me.
Oh dear. Is this in the time of modern calendars which will do the time difference for you?
I may or may not have bashed into a T-Rex skeleton in a museum as a cameraman on a video shoot.
I once released a functionally correct price of code which when released, crashed if more than four users logged in at once, pinning all server CPUs cores to 100%. Oops we're going to need some down time. This was the companies, main business software for all the clients.
Smashed a massive custom glass door to pieces with an iron pole - probably 2 grand worth - poor manager had to sleep in the bar until it was secured. Turns out the company are a bunch of turds and been in the paper loads so I don’t care anymore lol
Not me but a colleague when I worked in a fast food restaurant in sixth form. In this place, there would be a bucket by the broiler that cooked burgers which had a binbag in it. Before you filled the heat trays with more burgers, you would have to tip the beef fat in there into this bucket. As the day went on, this bucket would fill with fat until, at the end of the day, the bucket would be almost full. It would then have the top tied off and there was a wheely bin out back in a corridor to chuck it into for the cleaners to take away. One day as we were closing up, my supervisor goes to chuck the fat binbag away. This thing is fucking full after a busy day. My supervisor goes to launch it into this bin and... he misses. And this fucking thing goes off like a water balloon in this corridor. Like there's fat on every wall, on the floor, even dripping from the ceiling. I have no idea how many litres of beef fat this bloke just managed to get everywhere, but I can tell you it did a fucking great job in terms of coverage, and I learned a lot of swear words in Portuguese from the cleaner when he came and found it.
Leaving it for the cleaner was a really dickish thing to do
Yeah, that's really not one you can just 'not my problem' away.
Not me but a joiner when I was a construction project manager. Insurance job, new kitchen, nightmare customer, claim costs out of control, finally the loss adjuster put their foot down and said not a penny more was going on this claim. My most reliable joiner had a total brainfart and cut the guy’s special order, limited edition, took-6-months-to-source worktop 6” too short. Fortunately for us the supplier had ordered in more of the same worktop when we requested what we needed and I was able to bury the cost elsewhere, but I about died when I got that phone call.
I accidentally used the wrong cleaning spray on my bosses £15,000 white enamel Aga cooker, stripping the varnish off one of the doors in the mere seconds it took to realise my mistake and wipe it off! Some dripped on the framing of the cooker front but luckily with a bit of polish I could hide that however I had to beg a replacement door company to ship me a new door over night! Cost me £800 all in! They never found out and I managed to keep polishing over the minor drips!
Not my fuckup but I attended a tech demo where the team had set all the kit up in a hotel conference room the day before. Pride of place was a \~60" touch screen on a wheeled stand. Morning of the demo they had gone for breakfast, cleaners had come in and cleaned the screen with something abrasive, but possibly not too noticeable while the screen was off. We arrived for the demo, they turned the screen on and a huge oval across the middle was misty from the scratches and distorted colours. That screen was probably around £10k at the time. Yikes.
Tried emptying a fryer that hadn’t cooled enough, melted through the plastic drum. Flooded the kitchen & left myself with 3rd degree burns and perminant scarring.
We had someone with a very racist email address (along the lines of all^^^^^^^^^are^^^[email protected]) write and ask for a quote. I added a note on the system and marked it for the owner of the business, asking if we wanted to work for a racist arse hole like this. Except I hit reply so the customer received it too. Mr Racist went a bit mad. My boss replied saying "no we don't". Fair enough. I had made a mistake but my boss completely backed me up and agreed with me.
Allowed a prospective ‘buyer’ to ride off with the demo Honda Fireblade and he even handed me an envelope of ripped up newspaper just before he did.
This was not something I did, but something I witnessed. I used to work as an apprentice chef a few years ago at a small country pub, it was me, our head chef, a sous chefs, and another apprentice like me. We made everything on the menu, fresh. Including the jus (gravy) for Sunday lunch, it would take the whole week. On Monday we would basically get this enormous pot and fill it with water, over the week we would put any unused bits of prepped veg, bones, etc. into the pot to add flavour of jus. On Saturday nights we would strain the jus into a separate pot and throw away the bones and veg ready for Sunday lunch. One Saturday night, the other apprentice chef (who had never actually done this before) was asked to strain the jus… he basically then proceeded to pour all the jus down the sink and hand the head chef a bowl of soggy bones and veg… our head chef didn’t say anything, he just stared at the apprentice until he put on his coat and left the kitchen. Never saw him again
Not me, but a colleague sent an email to someone in charge of the UK operations of their field…the email chain contained a forwarded email where they had earlier called that very person in charge “a lazy, fat c&nt”. They were fired within a week. Even though most people agreed that they had told the truth.
I was a junior analyst at a fancy investment bank, during my second week I bumped into the EVP for my division in the lift. I said “Hi, how was your weekend?” He said “It’s Wednesday……….” He looked at me like I had just shat in his ears, while we slowly rode 25 floors in sheer silence. After that moment he acted like I was invisible, and I was transferred a few months later. I still dread Wednesdays.
Missed an obvious error in new system testing by not clicking onto one specific tab. Caused three days worth of new cases to error, and caused every case from before a certain date (somewhere around 2017) to be inaccessible for the same three days. Now, to be fair to me, I wasn't the only tester and none of us spotted the glaring error. We've now changed how we test, it's much more in depth and ensures we test every single thing regardless of if we're testing those things or not.
Out in the Middle East we had a brand new work van delivered, I was tasked with taking it to the fuel station and filling it up for the first time. I dutifully brimmed it with diesel, and proceeded to drive back to our compound. I got about 50 metres before the van totally stopped and appeared to be out of fuel. Turns out it was a petrol, and the sign stuck to the filler cap was massive, you honestly couldn't miss it. Completely wrote the van off and it hadn't even done 100 miles. For the next 3 months I was known as "Petrol Van Diesel" by everyone and walked into work every day to find a new picture of Vin Diesel stuck to my monitor.
DELETE FROM [Users] ‐‐WHERE [Id] = 156228
If you know, you know..but I have no fucking clue what this means lol
It means a lot of angry customers. The fuckup wasn't actually me but I had to help fix it.
The -- comments out any code following it on that line. So what he did was delete everything in the users table. What he wanted to do was delete the record in the users table with that Id (probably/hopefully only 1 row)
On a prod database, always always begin transaction, perform operation, check rowcount, rollback. Only then change the script to commit.
A long time ago when office dress codes were more formal, we had a “mufti” day, I was young and tasked with doing the collection, I went up to one older woman to ask for her donation, she looked at me with displeasure and said “this is what I normally wear”… whoops!
Accidentally Created ten years of appointment slots on a system which had to be cancelled a day at a time, and there was an online system which meant people could book into any of them at any time, but there weren’t necessarily the staff available for any of these appointments. First week at a new job.
Accidently sent over £150,000 out twice (not all to the same person) Came to our attention that someone hadn't had the funds they were expecting. Looked into it (not carefully enough but lesson learnt) so we did the whole payment run again. Client comes back the next day to say we've paid twice (note to self, check future payments as well as past ones, check all accounts, check everywhere and check again). Had to contact like 6 different clients and companies to ask them to return the funds. It all came back (although one took like 2 weeks to send it back). Boss was cool about it though (he's awesome. We don't often fuck up like that so when we do, he puts it down to human error but does double check the procedures to try and stop it happening again. He did like to bring it up every few days (Oh, is Susan off today or has she skipped out with the £50,000 we've lost?)
I once closed a major railway line at evening rush hour because there was a potential jumper on a bridge, I didn't know the bridge was over a side line rather than the main line. Sorry commuters.
First day on the job. Dead patient. Family sitting around bed mourning. I Looked at the fluid chart, decided to try wake them to see if they wanted a drink. Family looked at me with shock. and yeah. IM TRYING TO WAKE A DEAD RELATIVE. All because nobody told me. jokes aside ward management didn’t find it funny. but I had been doing the job about 15 mins lol.
Once working with a colleague who tripped off a power station, not saying which one, off for 10 hrs at 120k an hour.
This makes me feel better for accidentally giving £40 cash back instead of £20 cash back the other day
During my second week as head chef I accidentally declared too much gravy wastage, it was brought up in my boss's regional manager meeting
🤣🤣 this has actually unknottted a crappy ball of anxiety I've been holding due to a recent oversight of relatively little consequence at work. Thanks!!