What are your worst workplace cockups...?

[Bromley boy]

Mine? Introducing myself in a client meeting “it’s nice to finally meet you” to a client I was later reminded I’d met several times, and exchanged emails with almost daily.

One of the many reasons why I joined the railway and no longer work in a “customer facing” role!

Keen to hear any others...

 

[kevconnor]

Not mine, my sisters, but we worked at same place as students. One day hung over working in the kitchens she misread the recipe for something she was making, required i think 2-3 tea spoons of dried chilli flakes she misreads the measurement. Needless to say it was inedible and firary enough to have brought tears to your eyes.

 

[Cowley]

This makes me cringe even now.

When I first started painting and decorating for a living it’s probably fair to say that there were a few gaps in my knowledge...
I was working at a customers house and it had already been going quite badly (the lady of the house had been getting more and more worked up about the mess and confusion), a friend had plastered the bedroom I was working on but I had to finish it off and not knowing much about plastering, when I cleaned the buckets out I poured the waste into the bath.
When I realised that I’d completely blocked the pipes up with soggy plaster and the water wasn’t draining away I sat on the edge of the bath with my head in my hands (almost in tears) plucking up the courage to go downstairs and confess to the scary lady.

After being shouted at for a while I spent the rest of the day until 9pm dismantling the bath panelling and all the pipework under the bath plus the pipes that went through the walls to the outside drains etc. It was a Monday and I’d have achieved more if I’d stayed in bed.

I didn’t bill her for the extra time...

 

[RichmondCommu]

At the age of 23 I made a mistake and caused a client to lose a substantial six figure sum which the bank I worked for would have to make good. I went home feeling certain that I would be sacked the following morning and indeed was physically sick at London Bridge station on my way home. I didn't sleep a wink that night even though I'd at least found the courage to tell my girl friend (now wife) what I'd done.

The following morning I was sat at my desk at 06.00 pondering my fate and trying to find the words to tell my parents that I'd been sacked. In the end I was very lucky. After being shouted at and being made to feel very small and very stupid I was told that I wouldn't be sacked, a decision that I didn't deserve. When I left my employer 15 years later I think they were rather glad that they had not sacked me all those years a go and I will always be grateful that they kept their faith in me.

 

[fowler9]

Working in housing on the phones I will often ask for someones husbands or wifes name to discover that their partner is of the same sex. I'll say I'm sorry (For being presumptuous) and they will say "I'm not". Also getting someones gender wrong because how deep (or not) their voice is. To be honest most people are sound about it, its just me who feels bad.

I previously worked in finance and accidentally agreed to write off a debt that was substantially bigger than I thought it was. No one ever found out or at least never questioned it. It was a big company I worked for and the debt was large.

 

[Springs Branch]

Not the most major cockup, more a measure of my youthful arrogance.....

I was once ordering a specially made sheet of expensive quartz glass for some scientific equipment we were building. The sheet of quartz needed to be specific dimensions, roughly the size of an A5 sheet of paper.

I gave a sketch showing the dimensions to the technician who had to order the quartz & cut to size. "Are you sure this is right?" he asked, "Looks a bit small". "Of course it's right", I said, "just get on with it as quickly as you can, we need it asap".

A couple of days later the item was rushed through and delivered - about the size of a large postage stamp. "Is that what you wanted?" asked the guy. "Perfect", I said, "that's fine. Now can you make me another 10 times longer and 10 times wider?"

I'd messed up between millimeters and centimeters.

But not as expensive or embarrassing as this metric-to-imperial cock up at NASA. http://edition.cnn.com/TECH/space/9909/30/mars.metric/

 

[STEVIEBOY1]

A few, One blooper that cost me, when working in the travel trade, booked and issued tickets in Business Class for two people on a long haul flight, but forgot to add the supplement to their invoice. They were no doubt pleased, my bosses weren't. Low pay packets for the next few months....

 

[leightonbd]

kevconnor your post reminds me of the time I made a rice pudding with salt not sugar.

My confession is to getting a decimal point in the wrong place, so 1.2% when the figure should have been 0.12%. Not in itself a killer but the real damage was the narrative I went on to write about what the figure supposedly proved. Cost me a potential client relationship which I had invested a lot of time in.

That happened in about 1997 so you can see I am still mortified fully twenty years on.

 

[pemma]

Not my one but someone sent out a pre-Christmas mass mailing with the title "Is Satan Coming Down Your Chimney This Christmas?"

And a few similar ones when people did the mail merge wrongly
- Someone was told "To enter the competition go to" and instead of a personalised link it said "Hull."
- A customer number was put where a spend target should be so customers were told to spend something like hundreds of thousands of pounds in a supermarket in a 4 week period to get a £10 bonus!

My worse ones seem insignificant in comparison!

 

[tsr]

In a previous job, many years ago now, I once tripped on a customer's extremely steep downhill driveway, made of concrete with sharp pebbles embedded for grip (!) and scraped off the skin from my knees down to my ankles. Last time I ever wore shorts for any job, no matter how casual.

 

[Kite159]

I once ordered a large box of tippex, it was a big mistake.

Also a random fresh salmon due to a typing error (hit a 5 instead of a 2 and got unlucky the code existed, it was on the buying list & it didn't get spotted when the order got checked.

 

[GusB]

This wasn't entirely my fault, but when I worked for a supermarket a while back we had a particular single malt on offer. I would order a unit (case) of the stuff and we'd never receive any. It was only when I ordered six cases that we finally received one (the system was set up for one unit per case instead of six). Meanwhile, I'd been recording huge amounts of missing stock... It wasn't one of the cheaper ones either.

 

[STEVIEBOY1]

kevconnor your post reminds me of the time I made a rice pudding with salt not sugar.

My confession is to getting a decimal point in the wrong place, so 1.2% when the figure should have been 0.12%. Not in itself a killer but the real damage was the narrative I went on to write about what the figure supposedly proved. Cost me a potential client relationship which I had invested a lot of time in.

That happened in about 1997 so you can see I am still mortified fully twenty years on.

Yes, these things can stay with you for along time.

 

[43021HST]

Working in housing on the phones I will often ask for someones husbands or wifes name to discover that their partner is of the same sex. I'll say I'm sorry (For being presumptuous) and they will say "I'm not". Also getting someones gender wrong because how deep (or not) their voice is. To be honest most people are sound about it, its just me who feels bad.

I use to do 1st line support for hotels via the telephone and I can sympathise with that entirely.

This didn't happen to me but a co-colleague at the same 1st line support company. We used to handle the wifi for all the Premier Inns and Travelodges. The wifi had a big outtage lasting several days meaning people couldn't log onto the wifi network. A team of 15 was left to deal with over 500 calls a day, anyway near the end of the day we were all getting ratty and tired, part of 1st line support is writing a log of the issue and sending it on (called a ticket). Anyway our tickets were getting more and more course in tone but still remained professional. Until a colleague wrote 'system still f****d. 3rd line being useless f***s'. However out of all the thousands of tickets generated, the management decided to review a sample of tickets and his ticket ended up in the sample.

Funnily enough this colleague was a very amiable chap and it came as massive surprise to the management, his comments somehow even reached one of the main managers for Premier Inn and they requested he never took any calls for them ever again. Incredibly he still retained his job though.

 

[Bromley boy]

Some excellent responses so far, much appreciated.

Please, keep em coming!

 

[Cowley]

Some excellent responses so far, much appreciated.

Please, keep em coming!

I’ve just remembered one that I did recently.
In summer I was decorating a private school down near a certain Devon seaside town that begins with the letter E.
One of last jobs was to paint a load of banisters on a very grand staircase that had the reception desk underneath.
I covered everything over with sheets etc and asked the receptionist to move to another room for a couple of days.

During the two days I was working on the stairs I became aware that the school was having problems with the phone system and nobody could work out why they weren’t receiving any calls. They had their IT guy looking at it and when he conceded defeat they got a proper engineer in to go through everything.
I saw him at lunchtime and asked him how it was going and he said “I don’t know what’s wrong it. I’ve been through everything and I can’t find any faults anywhere, it’s completely doing my head in.”

In the afternoon I’d finished and was picking the sheets up when I found a phone on the reception desk underneath one of them...
And the receiver had been knocked off the hook...

Checking no-one was looking I carefully put it back on and carried on tidying up with a slight feeling of unease and sure enough about two minutes later I hear the engineer shout “Hey! It’s started working!”
I could hear people asking what had actually been wrong with it and him saying “I don’t know, it’s really weird. It just seems to be working again for some reason.”

I was just getting ready to carry my stuff to the van when he walked past me and I jumped as he said “I didn’t realise there was another phone there” pointing to the one on the desk.
“Ah well, it’s all fine now anyway, I’m off home.”

“Yeah” I said. “You did really well”...

 

[kevconnor]

Another one I can think of from a colleague, worked in recruitment and was part of their role to organise training for new starters each fortnight. This was alway normally the same location at the same time however for the period of a month the normal training rooms weren't available as they were being renovated so it was agreed to rent out a local community centre, the person organised the room booking and attendance of training etc admirably however there was one slight oversight, the confirmation of training sent out to the new recruits had a different address to the community centre, they all had the address of my colleague's mum who lived in the local area.

 

[alxndr]

I don't know how many people I served slightly off whipped cream to before we discovered that I prefer cream that's slightly off. Somehow no one ever complained, but I still dread to think of it.

 

[185143]

I was on an XC train once where the TM 'got a bit carried away' (his words) upon welcoming us to Birmingham New Street, announcing various destinations and TOCs you could change here for, and then wishing us a good afternoon.

Except it was about 9AM at Manchester Piccadilly!

I also know of someone who announced that his train was arriving into Hunts Cross, but got the H and C the wrong way round...

 

[bussnapperwm]

Completely deleted a whole load of correspondence templates off my work computer systems... whilst filling in paperwork!

A few weeks later I was filling in some paperwork whilst having an active file up on my laptop...the vibrations of the paperwork hitting the keys and creating a payment of a quarter of a billion pounds to an account (I have already put a legitimate payment on that account and was doing the paperwork for the office records to say that the cheque had arrived for that account!)

 

[STEVIEBOY1]

I use to do 1st line support for hotels via the telephone and I can sympathise with that entirely.

This didn't happen to me but a co-colleague at the same 1st line support company. We used to handle the wifi for all the Premier Inns and Travelodges. The wifi had a big outtage lasting several days meaning people couldn't log onto the wifi network. A team of 15 was left to deal with over 500 calls a day, anyway near the end of the day we were all getting ratty and tired, part of 1st line support is writing a log of the issue and sending it on (called a ticket). Anyway our tickets were getting more and more course in tone but still remained professional. Until a colleague wrote 'system still f****d. 3rd line being useless f***s'. However out of all the thousands of tickets generated, the management decided to review a sample of tickets and his ticket ended up in the sample.

Funnily enough this colleague was a very amiable chap and it came as massive surprise to the management, his comments somehow even reached one of the main managers for Premier Inn and they requested he never took any calls for them ever again. Incredibly he still retained his job though.

Ha Ha, No excuse, but I can understand this, having to deal with the general public can be very trying.

 

[TheNewNo2]

I once deleted most of our Access databases when trying to unmap a network drive from my PC.

Luckily now I'm a database system administrator, so I can **** things up much more efficiently.

 

[trash80]

Early in my career i was asked to set up an IP address on the live web server (with about 20 client websites on it), so i read the man page for the command - thought i knew what i was doing - and then proceeded to kill the server (and the client sites) stone dead

 

[telstarbox]

I once deleted most of our Access databases when trying to unmap a network drive from my PC.

Luckily now I'm a database system administrator, so I can **** things up much more efficiently.

But presumably your IT department would have recognised this risk and had set up a system to regularly back up the data?

 

[PeterC]

This wasn't entirely my fault, but when I worked for a supermarket a while back we had a particular single malt on offer. I would order a unit (case) of the stuff and we'd never receive any. It was only when I ordered six cases that we finally received one (the system was set up for one unit per case instead of six). Meanwhile, I'd been recording huge amounts of missing stock... It wasn't one of the cheaper ones either.

Not me but one office I worked at the stationery clerk ordered dozen rubber thimbles (as used for counting banknotes). She didn't realise that the unit was a box of 12 thimbles so we ended up with a gross instead of a dozen.

I never mis-ordered but when I first worked in a bar (decades before the smoking ban) I was very confused when trying to order new stock for the cigarette machine. They were shipped in wrappers containing 10 packs of 20 (not sure how 10s came, we only stocked 20s) but the unit that you had to quote was the individual cigarette.

 

[DarloRich]

Once, as a student working on building sites during the summer holidays, I was working with a guy digging a trench with a bob cat. When it was my turn to drive ( which I wasn't trained to do) i dug through the gas main. It was a big gas main. Amazing how fast & hard you can run away from that.

Turns out, after much legal argument, the plans provided by the gas board via the developer were wrong & had been transposed.

 

[eastwestdivide]

Managed to prevent a workplace foul-up when checking a newsletter due to go out to the entire customer base:
"With the launch of XYZ, we will not be offering our customers a better service..."
quickly changed to:
"With the launch of XYZ, we will now be offering our customers a better service..."

The marketing manager who wrote it said he'd spell-checked it, but of course that's never enough.

 

[Mike99]

Back in the very late 90s I was a bus driver for one of the big companies at a Depot in the South of England although the head office was in Perth. I got talked into doing some admin work in the depot and every day I was offered a couple of cups of (awful) coffee and after each cup I would tip the remains into a dead looking plant on the window sill in front of the desk. Thinking the plant was doing well I kept this up for a fortnight or so; turned up one morning and the fire brigade were in the depot, so I went in to be told there had been a small fire (more smoke than flames) with the wiring, traced back to the office area, the fire brigade thought water had got in to the wiring but couldnt for the life of them work out how. (oops) My revived plant which I had moved onto the desk the night before, and it seems wasn't drinking the coffee as I thought, but was just running through the pot, down the wall and into the wiring!!!. Did I own up...................................Nope

 

[gg1]

When I was at Uni I used to temp in the summer, usually warehouse work but one placement I had was in a Royal Mail sorting office on the night shift. One night in my second week there I was moving a large trolley full of parcels (a bit like a bigger version of an old British Rail BRUTE) but my steering wasn’t too good and I collided with a wall. Ordinarily this wouldn’t have been a major problem aside from the fact this particular bit of wall was the location of a ‘break glass in emergencies’ fire alarm which was linked directly to the local fire station. Oddly enough that was my last shift with the Royal Mail.

 

[pdq]

Very nearly a major cockup which would have led to my dismissal and major public embarrassment to my employer...
I was working for a Government agency and due to deadlines I needed to work at home on some data, prior to a major announcement of funding. I had a 'master spreadsheet' from which I was producing the result letters (not as straightforward as that sounds). Rather than use the work's VPN (slow) I put the spreadsheet and templates on a USB stick. You can probably guess where this is going now.

So, yes, I did the work at home and then lost the USB stick. I searched, panicked, searched again etc and assumed it had dropped out of my pocket on the train. If someone had found the stick and knew what they were looking at, then a huge amount of confidential and commercially sensitive information would have been in the public domain.
I hardly slept for a couple of days and eventually told my line manager, who said we'd give it another day or two, but after that would need to go to senior management. Later that day or the next, while in a meeting, I became slouched in my chair and felt something dig in to my abdomen. The stick had got lodged in the top corner of the pocket of my trousers (wore jeans to work in that job) and I simply hadn't felt it there while frantically patting myself looking for it a day or two earlier. The relief went through me in waves - and, I imagine, through my manager as I showed her what I'd found.
Looking back, I was lucky to have such a great manager; I could easily have been subject to a disciplinary or worse. I don't work with confidential info much now - but unencrypyted memory is a no-no.