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What are your worst workplace cockups...?

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PeterC

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I once accidentally saved a file to the wrong folder. Carried on working and saved correctly. Then sent the version from the wrong folder to the printer and ended up pulping £700 worth of brochures.
 
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Intended to print an email. Had been on a series of long night shifts and was very tired.

Accidentally printed the attachment (rather than the email). It didn't appear to work.

Waited briefly, tried again. Saw a message flash up....

'Printing page 1 of 3566'....

Twice.

Then the printer wouldn't stop. Switched it off at the wall... when I switched it on, it started printing again.

Took all the paper out while I thought about what to do!
 

Lockwood

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Driving to a well known hospital in London, that I had never driven to before. Been a passenger for. Been on buses near. Walked near. Never driven, so not used to the driver's view.
Gone through a junction on red and not having a route to get to the other side due to traffic not wanting to come to a complete stop on the yellow box, and not having a gap a size I was comfortable with, I decided to go round a traffic island on the wrong side and rejoin.

That wasn't a traffic island. It was a short stretch of railing, and then beyond that it was a central reserve between the one way street and the contra-flow bus lane.

I saw another place I could cross back to where I should have been. Except the geometry wasn't designed for anyone to do that turn, and traffic then filled the only space I could use to do it.



Luckily there was nothing coming the other way and everything worked out ok, but after I had finished the journey, I realised just how wrong everything there could have gone. At the time, I was more focused on getting out of that situation and getting to my destination than on doing a reflection on a misjudgment.
 

skyhigh

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Quite a few things I've done over the years, most of which probably shouldn't be aired in public.

One time I was tasked to collect the log books out of each vehicle in the (14 strong) fleet to make sure they were up to date. I dutifully took the keys off the board, went down to the car park... and suddenly realised that none of the keys were numbered, and the vehicles were spread out across 4 car parks. When they're all Ford keys, it doesn't half make life difficult!
 

WelshBluebird

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When I worked in the cafe when I was at uni I ended up serving a meat pasty instead of a vegetarian one to a customer. In my defence someone else had someone else had put them out on the hotplate wrong, and I know it isn't anywhere near as serious as some of the posts here, but I still think of it every now and again!

Probably got a few more from my more recent work, though not sure I am comfortable sharing them considering the nature of the work. Lets just say if you work on a live website, make sure you double check what you are doing, and then triple check it too!
 

talltim

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I once deleted all of a secondary school's email accounts, teachers and pupils. Luckily they could be restored from tape, but it took the guy about 2 days to get it all back to how it was.
At least I didn't delete more than one school's emails while I was at it, at the time it was the biggest Exchange cluster in Europe and had about 110 000 users
 

ComUtoR

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One of my first more important jobs was doing the admin for a well known clothing store. Just a typical day cashing up and going into and out of the safe...

What we used to do was leave the safe key in the lock. It was a two part safe key that is designed so that you can keep both parts separate and link them only when using the safe. ( 0==== + ==MM) = (0======MM)

Being well used it was well known for falling off. Just my luck I managed to split the key when it was inside the lock. The key head dropped inside and I pulled out the shaft. Now we had an open safe that we cannot close with about 20-30k worth of cash inside.

I had to tell my boss who was less than pleased to say the least. Fortunately I managed to resolve the issue thanks to a Houdini escapology trick. Other than my boss being stunned at my safe cracking skills nothing else was said. However, a new key was ordered.
 

PeterC

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One of my first more important jobs was doing the admin for a well known clothing store. Just a typical day cashing up and going into and out of the safe...

What we used to do was leave the safe key in the lock. It was a two part safe key that is designed so that you can keep both parts separate and link them only when using the safe. ( 0==== + ==MM) = (0======MM)

Being well used it was well known for falling off. Just my luck I managed to split the key when it was inside the lock. The key head dropped inside and I pulled out the shaft. Now we had an open safe that we cannot close with about 20-30k worth of cash inside.

I had to tell my boss who was less than pleased to say the least. Fortunately I managed to resolve the issue thanks to a Houdini escapology trick. Other than my boss being stunned at my safe cracking skills nothing else was said. However, a new key was ordered.
I worked at a place with two part keys. Luckily the shaft had a screw fitting to secure the head firmly.

In my IT life I did once bring the system to a halt at 2pm. I had been running an important batch job over the quiet lunch time period. This was against the rules but I knew that it wouldn't hurt at that time with the priority set to low. It was still running at 2 so I killed it. What I hadn't realised was that all the security settings were wrong and rather than just stopping it carefully backed out all the changes to the temporary work files at maximum priority, blocking everything else until it finished. I would probably have got away with it if I had just let it run.
 

Ianno87

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Accidentally printing a 200 page A4 report on our A0 plotter printer...
 

Pinza-C55

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I was working on the Underground in about 1999 at Paddington and two men of middle eastern appearance approached the ticket barrier and did what was known as the "double shuffle" where the second one put a ticket in and pushed the first one through. I rushed over in full Terminator mode and challenged them. The second guy babbled something and my eyes went to the first guys face, which was slightly scarred as if he had been in an explosion. Then I looked down to his arms or rather the space where his arms should be because he only had empty sleeves tucked into his pockets. I muttered an apology and slunk off back to sit in the box.
 

D365

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Can driving to work be considered a “workplace cockup”?

Well, the having to park at the end of it...
 

fowler9

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I had one today which I'm not sure is strictly a cock up. Had a customer tell me I hadn't done all I could to help, after being on the phone to them for thirty minutes trying to help I told them the only thing I hadn't done to help was call to their house and try and fix their gas boiler myself which I'm not qualified to do. Don't think I would be in bother in work though, I was polite when I said it.
 

Busaholic

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Briefly worked at Victoria Coach Station in their Cash Office almost fifty years ago. There was a time once a week when we were busy counting the cash (two of us, the boss made himself scarce) and we were locked inside the office while this went on i.e. someone outside locked us in and then went off somewhere else; they came back after half an hour or whatever. Smoking in the office was allowed in those days (some would say compulsory!) and one of us (could have been me!) emptied the ashtray into the wastepaper bin at some point. Trouble was, one fag was still burning and the bin and its contents were set alight. and we had no fire extinguisher of course. My normally phlegmatic colleague, who hailed from Ulster and was never known to smile or joke, went into panic mode and somehow managed to get to speak to someone on the end of the phone who, once they'd stopped chortling, got us released (by which time the fire was out, anyway). Somehow, our boss never found out, and that even brought a smile to the Ulsterman's face.:smile:
 

Cowley

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I had one today which I'm not sure is strictly a cock up. Had a customer tell me I hadn't done all I could to help, after being on the phone to them for thirty minutes trying to help I told them the only thing I hadn't done to help was call to their house and try and fix their gas boiler myself which I'm not qualified to do. Don't think I would be in bother in work though, I was polite when I said it.

:lol: That reminds me of a friend of mine who’s a plumber/gas fitter.
He told me last year that he’d replaced a load of parts on a lady’s boiler down in Starcross and given her the bill. Week after week went by and she didn’t pay him despite numerous calls and reminder letters.
In the end he realised that she had no intention of paying for the work and in anger he decided to take matters into his own hands.

He went to the house one afternoon and the lady’s teenage son answered the door so he told him that he had to finish off some work on the boiler.
The son let him in and left him to it.
My friend then isolated the boiler and took the new parts off, replaced them with the old broken parts (that he’d kept in his garage) and stuck a ‘CONDEMNED!’ sticker on the boiler.
He told me about this just after his second police interview under caution when he’d just managed to avoid being struck off (oh and after he’d finally confessed to his wife who still wasn’t talking to him)...
It turns out you’re not allowed to do that kind of thing.
 

fowler9

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:lol: That reminds me of a friend of mine who’s a plumber/gas fitter.
He told me last year that he’d replaced a load of parts on a lady’s boiler down in Starcross and given her the bill. Week after week went by and she didn’t pay him despite numerous calls and reminder letters.
In the end he realised that she had no intention of paying for the work and in anger he decided to take matters into his own hands.

He went to the house one afternoon and the lady’s teenage son answered the door so he told him that he had to finish off some work on the boiler.
The son let him in and left him to it.
My friend then isolated the boiler and took the new parts off, replaced them with the old broken parts (that he’d kept in his garage) and stuck a ‘CONDEMNED!’ sticker on the boiler.
He told me about this just after his second police interview under caution when he’d just managed to avoid being struck off (oh and after he’d finally confessed to his wife who still wasn’t talking to him)...
It turns out you’re not allowed to do that kind of thing.
Ha ha, nightmare. This is the worst time of year where I work. The customer I was dealing with was in a horrible situation but I tried to get the boiler fixed same day and also offered the alternative of a hotel stay which the company would pay for. The customer wasn't happy with a hotel stay and I couldn't get an engineer and the relevant parts there same day. Stalemate.
 

Busaholic

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:lol: That reminds me of a friend of mine who’s a plumber/gas fitter.
He told me last year that he’d replaced a load of parts on a lady’s boiler down in Starcross and given her the bill. Week after week went by and she didn’t pay him despite numerous calls and reminder letters.
In the end he realised that she had no intention of paying for the work and in anger he decided to take matters into his own hands.

He went to the house one afternoon and the lady’s teenage son answered the door so he told him that he had to finish off some work on the boiler.
The son let him in and left him to it.
My friend then isolated the boiler and took the new parts off, replaced them with the old broken parts (that he’d kept in his garage) and stuck a ‘CONDEMNED!’ sticker on the boiler.
He told me about this just after his second police interview under caution when he’d just managed to avoid being struck off (oh and after he’d finally confessed to his wife who still wasn’t talking to him)...
It turns out you’re not allowed to do that kind of thing.
Funny how when someone doesn't pay you your due it's 'not a police matter' but as soon as rough justice is dispensed then they can't wait to get involved. Double standards.
 

Cowley

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Yes sorry chaps. It wasn’t my cock-up but I thought it worth sharing.
Busaholic - You’re right there. They tried to do him for unlawful entry and leaving the boiler in an unfit state. It cost him a fair bit in soliciters fees. Ouch...
 

Bromley boy

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:lol: That reminds me of a friend of mine who’s a plumber/gas fitter.
He told me last year that he’d replaced a load of parts on a lady’s boiler down in Starcross and given her the bill. Week after week went by and she didn’t pay him despite numerous calls and reminder letters.
In the end he realised that she had no intention of paying for the work and in anger he decided to take matters into his own hands.

He went to the house one afternoon and the lady’s teenage son answered the door so he told him that he had to finish off some work on the boiler.
The son let him in and left him to it.
My friend then isolated the boiler and took the new parts off, replaced them with the old broken parts (that he’d kept in his garage) and stuck a ‘CONDEMNED!’ sticker on the boiler.
He told me about this just after his second police interview under caution when he’d just managed to avoid being struck off (oh and after he’d finally confessed to his wife who still wasn’t talking to him)...
It turns out you’re not allowed to do that kind of thing.

There’s definitely a poetic justice element of that to doing that. Did the woman end up paying?

Although clearly a risky strategy, and not one I would condone (albeit in his position I’d be tempted to do the same). Doing that is likely to constitute criminal damage and would carry the risk of a manslaughter charge if the boiler was used and ended up exploding of asphyxiating the occupants.

I bet he will go down the small claims court route next time that happens!
 

Cowley

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There’s definitely a poetic justice element of that to doing that. Did the woman end up paying?

Although clearly a risky strategy, and not one I would condone (albeit in his position I’d be tempted to do the same). Doing that is likely to constitute criminal damage and would carry the risk of a manslaughter charge if the boiler was used and ended up exploding of asphyxiating the occupants.

I bet he will go down the small claims court route next time that happens!

It seemed like a good idea at the time but I think he ended up paying for everything but the new parts.
It didn’t go well...
 

skyhigh

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In my IT life I did once bring the system to a halt at 2pm. I had been running an important batch job over the quiet lunch time period. This was against the rules but I knew that it wouldn't hurt at that time with the priority set to low. It was still running at 2 so I killed it. What I hadn't realised was that all the security settings were wrong and rather than just stopping it carefully backed out all the changes to the temporary work files at maximum priority, blocking everything else until it finished. I would probably have got away with it if I had just let it run.

A family member was doing work on an important system (I think it was a data centre) for an ISP - due to no fault of his own, the system went down, taking most of the customers in Scotland offline for a couple of hours until the fault could be fixed... I think it even made national news at the time.
 

Bayum

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Before I trained as a teacher, I was in a school working on displays and sorting out ready for summer. The teachers knew at that point I was pretty dependable and was pretty much a teacher at that point so asked me to take the class for an afternoon. Between running a video through YouTube and getting the class to finish historical work from the video I had to speak to a child to tell them to stop getting out of their seat and sit down. Their name was Shamshir. The name was followed by 'sit down'. I'm sure you can imagine what came out of my mouth instead of the word 'sit'
 

GW43125

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

Not my doing, but I was told of how you'd think a school's academic planner may have been a cheese order form...
...It was spotted the day before they printed around 1500 of them that they had the word "dairy" in large print across the front rather than "diary". Cue a hasty update being sent to the printing company...
 

Busaholic

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Not my doing, but I was told of how you'd think a school's academic planner may have been a cheese order form...
...It was spotted the day before they printed around 1500 of them that they had the word "dairy" in large print across the front rather than "diary". Cue a hasty update being sent to the printing company...

The England cricketer Ashley Giles had, as part of his benefit season with Warwickshire, mugs made with the legend 'King of Spin': trouble was they actually read 'King of Spain':lol: If it happened today he'd probably be extradited to Madrid and face a 25 year jail sentence for sedition.
 

Cowley

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The England cricketer Ashley Giles had, as part of his benefit season with Warwickshire, mugs made with the legend 'King of Spin': trouble was they actually read 'King of Spain':lol: If it happened today he'd probably be extradited to Madrid and face a 25 year jail sentence for sedition.

I loved that :lol:.
 

fowler9

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The England cricketer Ashley Giles had, as part of his benefit season with Warwickshire, mugs made with the legend 'King of Spin': trouble was they actually read 'King of Spain':lol: If it happened today he'd probably be extradited to Madrid and face a 25 year jail sentence for sedition.
Saw the King Of Spain play for England a few times at Old Trafford. Ha ha.
 

Cowley

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Well this one isn’t great and I was very young at the time but bear with me while I tell the tale...

Between 1991 and 1996 I worked in a local health authority residential home for young people with learning disabilities.
We had four young adults (two male and two female) between the ages of 22 and 26 that lived there including two people with challenging behaviour.
One of the guys who had challenging behaviour also had epilepsy and was 6’ 7” tall - a really big guy. He was great though and I got on really well with him.
We used to send him out with a local ‘Outward Bound’ group once a week on a Wednesday to go for a long walk on Dartmoor which he loved and got a lot out of...

Here’s the thing though - Craig (which wasn’t his name) usually had one almighty seizure about once a month, and if you were reasonably tuned into these things you would start to get an idea of when it was going to happen thus preempting it and making sure that he had a day at home around that day, rather than him going to his normal day centre or (God Forbid) being in the middle of Dartmoor when the inevitable happened.

We had a strong feeling one week that he was going to have one...
I had a busy week this particular week as I was doing a bit of moonlighting driving a van for a friends car parts company, and Keith, the guy I was working with (that actually is his name but what’s he going to do? :lol:) couldn’t stay for the day shift looking after Craig this particular day either for some important reason (both our shifts finished at 1030am as the people we looked after went out in the daytime)...
We knew Craig didn’t look right but convinced ourselves (because we had no choice) that he’d be fine if he just went out for a good head clearing walk on Dartmoor for the day.
I mean he was probably alright wasn’t he? He’d been a bit funny for a few days but other staff had kept him at home for the two days previously and there’d been no sign of any seizure and sometimes you’ve just got to trust your judgement haven’t you?

When I came back to work on the Friday for the first of my weekend shifts one of my colleagues said hello and then asked me if I’d heard about what had happened to Craig on Wednesday?

“Er, no” I said

And she said - “Well, apparently he went out with the Dartmoor walking group and they were walking along a hilltop in the middle of nowhere and he had a massive fit and fell off the path and down the side of a hill...
The only thing that stopped him from falling down a hundred foot drop” ...
(my mouth went dry and I gulped at this point)
... “was a little scraggy tree that he got hooked up in.
Lord knows how it held his weight!”

Back then we had just one mobile phone for the entire house and luckily the lady who did the walks had it with her because Keith had made sure she’d taken it that morning.
This meant she was able to ring 999 who scrambled Dartmoor Rescue to winch Craig (who luckily once he’d had a seizure always fell into an incredibly deep sleep for about six hours afterwards and knew virtually nothing of his rescue) up the side of the cliff and basically saved the day.

I still sometimes think about this and what could’ve actually happened. I’ve never written it down before and the older I get the more the mind boggles.

Sorry Craig... o_O
 
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roversfan2001

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Not me personally but a couple of years back a friend accidentally sent about 3000 pages to print using the school printer as he'd gone right to the bottom corner of a spreadsheet and entered text and forgot about it when it came to printing out the work we'd done during lesson. The technicians had to be called to sort it out, it took all morning to stop the job.

Safe to say all members of the class, including the teacher, made sure he never forgot about it for the rest of the course. :lol:
 

tsr

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Not me personally but a couple of years back a friend accidentally sent about 3000 pages to print using the school printer as he'd gone right to the bottom corner of a spreadsheet and entered text and forgot about it when it came to printing out the work we'd done during lesson. The technicians had to be called to sort it out, it took all morning to stop the job.

Safe to say all members of the class, including the teacher, made sure he never forgot about it for the rest of the course. :lol:

I may or may not have done that to a headteacher's printer on a last day of school.

The page count was somewhat higher. In fact it was several times the capacity of all the printers in the school put together.

Bear in mind this is a number of years ago, when school IT was a little less sophisticated (I presume it's better now, anyway).
 
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