Biggest mistake(s) made at work?

[Pupik]

It's Friday!

So now it's time mark the occasion by noting your biggest mistakes, goof-ups, blunders, and times you went "up a certain creek without a paddle" in your workplace.

I'll start:

Back in 1995, I was working for a supermarket, and was in charge of the entire frozen food section. It was a fairly important position, considering the profit margins on frozen foods were the highest in the store. Twice a year, we'd clean out the freezers, take out all the debris and clean the outside freezer cases overnight. All the remaining product from the cases had to go back into the backroom's freezer storage.

I was out of room in my freezer, so I used the meat department's freezer instead. Except, the freezer was about 8 feet square, and was nearly full. So I loaded what I could inside, and put the rest of the ice cream in the meat cooler which was 20 degrees, instead of -10 degrees, figuring that I had to wake up at 5am anyways to put at all back. Well, it turns out, that was still warm enough to melt about $2000 (our cost) worth of ice cream.

Oops!

The mess created by the melted ice cream was quite the story of the following week or so; fortunately, the boss let me slide on that indiscretion, but he always reminded me about it until I quit.

Your moment-of-brain-fade-at-work story?

 

[DRIFT4EVA]

I don't work yet, but at my age school is work. One time in science. I was half asleep. We were studying Biology. My teacher asked me a question. I answered, but what I said, landed me in the stupid books. I said a living orgasm instead of a living organism. I was rather shamed out after that.

 

[Taurine]

I haven't had the chance to make too many costly big mistakes, but working in a supermarket now (last day on Sunday!) I have had a few run ins.

Building a display of 1.5L Coke bottles, cutting the front facing of boxes open so people can take the bottles out. I was getting pissed off because my knife blade wasn't cutting well (didn't register that it might be blunt) so I forced it and it cut a slit about 7cm long down the bottle. Okay now every grocery worker has popped a bottle while working but mine is a unique one. The spray of Coke not only went all over me and the floor it also hit the Store Manager, his daughter, about 4 customers, 3 workers at the Customer Service and also covered the whole CS counter. To make matter more comical, I swore, at my loudest right at the busiest part of the store. Everyone laughed and the Store Manager went and changed his shirt..

Cracking windows with 15 or so trolleys because it was a tight fit into the store also stands out.

 

[Mike Rotch]

My first ever job was at an upmarket home decor shop. It stocked upmarket porcelain ornaments, art, expensive cutlery etc. One day my boss asked me to take down a dusty piece of artwork (an oil landscape) and hang in its place a newly arrived, expensive watercolour. I didnt tell her I am scared of heights, so I fumbled my way up the ladder and exchanged pictures.

About 2 seconds after my foot reached the ground.......crash. I hadnt properly secured the picture to the nail and it gave under the weight of the artwork. Happily yet, this all occured when the store was packed with $90-a-teaspoon snobby customers. I had to pay for a new frame and it made her feel the need to remind me of it every time I saw her. I quit about 3 weeks later because her attitude stank and I had made enough lolly to see me through. I laughed when they closed down 4 months later.

 

[Carl.]

My first (real) job was to operate CNC milling machines / lathes in a workshop. You tend to become slightly nervous while working with machines worth between $50K and $500K, with tool heads (drills, facemills, boring mills, fly-cutters...) worth anywhere from $50 to $3-4K, so even little mistakes are quite costly, and pieces of metal you're working on can be even more expensive.

I got a reminder of some of the basic physic laws while working with a very long drill that we were using to drill camshaft holes in Chevy V8s. The drill (about .6 inch of diameter) was a bit longer than the blocks, and while I was reinstalling the set-up on a machine, I had the great idea to start the spindle without double-checking the RPM value first. Just imagine what a narrow drill that long does when it spins without a guide at about 1000RPM... It bend, teared up and the deadly projectile bounced and flew by about 1 feet from my head... (I've only heard the sound it made and felt the draft, it was too fast to actually see anything. )

Aside from the $2K drill, that could have been the costliest (and last) mistake I've ever made at work.

 

[Duke]

Well, when you're working on paper before the building gets built, you can hopefully avoid the costlier mistakes by paying attention, but it doesn't always work.

My worst mistake to date centered around a fire station I was designing. It had a lot of intake and exhaust louvers, some of them quite large, scattered around. I designed them into the project, but smehow they got left off of the architectural elevation drawings we sent the contractor to build from. So the masons built a lot of flat brick walls with no holes in them, and we had to pay about $10k to have the holes cut and the louvers installed after the fact instead of during the wall construction. Luckily I didn't get in too much trouble.

I didn't make this next mistake, but I was in charge of the cleanup crew. A little thing ended up costing our company probably $60-80k in corrections and extra work. One of the guys in our office was designing a building for a very large grocery store. The store people decided they wanted to reverse the layout of the store. So the guy flipped the building around, but he didn't bother to reverse the column arrangement. So the building got built that way, and then when the grocery store people started installing the shelves and cases and racks etc. all the columns were in the wrong place. There where columns coming down in the middle of some aisles, some aisles had to get squeezed very small, cases had to get modified, and in a few places we had to move the existing columns and rearrange the just-built roof structure.

It wasn't pretty. The guy who made the mistake solved the problem by quitting and going back to school.

 

[TwinTurboJay]

I used to work for IBM Canada doing technical support, administration, logistics yadda, yadda, yadda...

Well, Ever part that we used to stock in out inventory that cost over $10'000 would be tagged with a serial number, ( or so a certain inter-corporate email said the morning I didn't check my email ) so I received 3 of these new parts in stock, all with these serial number tags that I had no clue about, had a tech in westerrn canada call and he needed it shipped cir overnight, so I ready it, and ship it....( no idea it was a $32'000 part ) didn't record the serial number, and didn' get shipping insurance, I figured it was under $100 ,,,) so purolator lost it intransit, and kindly offered $100 coverage...

Needless to say, I was under strict observatiion for 6 months ! ( didn't loose my job though )

 

[LoudMusic]

As the system administrator of a small advertising firm I ... failed ... to ... create a backup domain server. And our primary (solitary?) one died. No rescue attempts could be made.

The creek and I became old chums the following weeks.

 

[///M-Spec]

As the system administrator of a small advertising firm I ... failed ... to ... create a backup domain server. And our primary (solitary?) one died. No rescue attempts could be made.

The creek and I became old chums the following weeks.

Wow dude. No BDC and no recovery method for the PDC? Bad, bad LoudMusic. Just teasin.

I used to be the network administrator for a newspaper here in Florida. It had a daily circulation of about 68,000 copies. 95,000 sunday copies. One day in late 1995, the IT director told me he wanted us to go from NetBIOS and AppleTalk to TCP/IP. He also wanted to improve performance, so I suggested a segmented FastEthernet network to keep the Publishing side (Mac and DEC Alpha) and the Business side (PCs) of the paper separate. A big Cisco 7600 series router would handle traffic between the networks.

The place had about 300 nodes. It operated 24/7 with the presses rolling every 10-14 hours. We figured we had, if we pushed it, 16 hours of downtime if we got started right after we put the Sunday to bed.

So we had to touch 300 nodes, install AppleTalk over IP on the Macs, IP stack on the Windows for Workgroups 3.11 computers, deploy DHCP, 3 WINS servers and 6 BDCs. We also had to deploy about 8 brand new switiches and relocate about 10 others.

And since we had everything down, I decided to personally re-wire every switch in the building... which was about 24 of them... and arrange all the CAT5 in neat ziptied bundles.

Everything was a huge success until I turned everything back on discovered nothing on the network would talk to anything else. A couple of frantic hours later, the best I could manage was each sub-net talking to each other, but NO routing between the subnets. NOT COOL.

I'd been awake and working about 20 hours straight, and we still didn't have a network. Finally, I realized that what I THOUGHT were a set of cross-over cables that linked 5-6 backbone switches together were in fact, standard wiring. In addition, they also exceeded the acceptable CAT5 length spec

We were late that day. But only by an hour or so. In retrospect, everything else about the project went very smoothly... except for the the minor detail about not having a working network


M

 

[Klostrophobic]

Well, I work for a catering service and we were catering the grand opening to a furniture on Mass Ave. in Boston. Partway through the function, my boss asked me to move the van from the front of the store to the back. I go to move it and the first right is a one way, so I take the next right, then the next right, and then I don't know what the **** I did. Somehow I successfully got lost within 1/8 of a mile and 1 minute. I thought I could find my way back within a few minutes at most, but when you have no idea where you are in Boston, on a dark, rainy night, in a van you've never driven, a few minutes turns in 90 minutes. So there I am yelling at myself for getting lost taking a couple right turns and there are wine and water glasses in the back crashing around and breaking. Oh great. I'm lost while I should be working, and I'm breaking hundreds of dollars worth of glasses. After 90 minutes of ****ing about on Mass Ave., Memorial Drive, Harvard Square, and wherever the **** I was, I find my way back to the store.

As I pull up, my boss is on the phone with my mother and she comes running up to me, thankful that I was still alive. Apparently she had called my parents about 20 minutes after I left to go park the van. She even sent one of my coworkers down the street because she saw flashing police lights and thought I might be down there in a fiery wreck.

Best of all is that I got paid for the 90 minutes I was lost and I didn't have t pay for the broken glasses.

They still give me **** everytime I go to work, though.

 

[ExigeEvan]

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Well, I work for a catering service and we were catering the grand opening to a furniture on Mass Ave. in Boston. Partway through the function, my boss asked me to move the van from the front of the store to the back. I go to move it and the first right is a one way, so I take the next right, then the next right, and then I don't know what the **** I did. Somehow I successfully got lost within 1/8 of a mile and 1 minute. I thought I could find my way back within a few minutes at most, but when you have no idea where you are in Boston, on a dark, rainy night, in a van you've never driven, a few minutes turns in 90 minutes. So there I am yelling at myself for getting lost taking a couple right turns and there are wine and water glasses in the back crashing around and breaking. Oh great. I'm lost while I should be working, and I'm breaking hundreds of dollars worth of glasses. After 90 minutes of ****ing about on Mass Ave., Memorial Drive, Harvard Square, and wherever the **** I was, I find my way back to the store.

As I pull up, my boss is on the phone with my mother and she comes running up to me, thankful that I was still alive. Apparently she had called my parents about 20 minutes after I left to go park the van. She even sent one of my coworkers down the street because she saw flashing police lights and thought I might be down there in a fiery wreck.

Best of all is that I got paid for the 90 minutes I was lost and I didn't have t pay for the broken glasses.

They still give me **** everytime I go to work, though.

👍

 

[LoudMusic]

Wow dude. No BDC and no recovery method for the PDC? Bad, bad LoudMusic. Just teasin.

I used to be the network administrator for a newspaper here in Florida. It had a daily circulation of about 68,000 copies. 95,000 sunday copies. One day in late 1995, the IT director told me he wanted us to go from NetBIOS and AppleTalk to TCP/IP. He also wanted to improve performance, so I suggested a segmented FastEthernet network to keep the Publishing side (Mac and DEC Alpha) and the Business side (PCs) of the paper separate. A big Cisco 7600 series router would handle traffic between the networks.

The place had about 300 nodes. It operated 24/7 with the presses rolling every 10-14 hours. We figured we had, if we pushed it, 16 hours of downtime if we got started right after we put the Sunday to bed.

So we had to touch 300 nodes, install AppleTalk over IP on the Macs, IP stack on the Windows for Workgroups 3.11 computers, deploy DHCP, 3 WINS servers and 6 BDCs. We also had to deploy about 8 brand new switiches and relocate about 10 others.

And since we had everything down, I decided to personally re-wire every switch in the building... which was about 24 of them... and arrange all the CAT5 in neat ziptied bundles.

Everything was a huge success until I turned everything back on discovered nothing on the network would talk to anything else. A couple of frantic hours later, the best I could manage was each sub-net talking to each other, but NO routing between the subnets. NOT COOL.

I'd been awake and working about 20 hours straight, and we still didn't have a network. Finally, I realized that what I THOUGHT were a set of cross-over cables that linked 5-6 backbone switches together were in fact, standard wiring. In addition, they also exceeded the acceptable CAT5 length spec

We were late that day. But only by an hour or so. In retrospect, everything else about the project went very smoothly... except for the the minor detail about not having a working network


M

FAAAAAAAAK - large scale networking back in the day was a nightmare. I'm so glad I don't have to deal with that.

 

[Event]

Me and my friend brought an XBox and TV into work to play at night when it was slow and the owner's sister came in. Thatnk god the TV didn't work, or we would've gotten in even more trouble...

 

[LoudMusic]

Me and my friend brought an XBox and TV into work to play at night when it was slow and the owner's sister came in. Thatnk god the TV didn't work, or we would've gotten in even more trouble...

The owner of my company actually asked me to buy an XBox for our office. We need lots of "stress relief" here (:

Unfortunately someone stole it this summer.

 

[NoQuarter]

When I started my current job at Alcon Laboratories, on about my third week I dropped a very expensive laser power meter from my workstation to the ground. Just a cracked case, the meter still worked, but definitely a bit embarrassing. Two days later, I dropped another one, this time with more dire results...it needed to be sent out for repair. On both of these meters, when I submitted it to out calibration lab, I wrote on the ticket "Failed Drop Test".

To this day, whenever I take a power meter to the Cal lab for it's regularly scheduled PM and calibration, the Cal Tech asks me, "Failed the drop test again?"

 

[Pupik]

....( no idea it was a $32'000 part ) didn't record the serial number, and didn' get shipping insurance, I figured it was under $100 ,,,)

About 2 months ago, I wrote up a "warranty repair" for a customer. It was for a navigation system's back-up battery. I wrote the car up as having ~41,000 miles in the computer, which was under warranty. When the tech typed up the car to leave the service bay, he typed ~61,000 miles. Well, when I saw this, I checked the car. Sure enough, the odometer was at 61K...firmly out of warranty! I goofed.

Usually, if you make a little goof-up, you just inform the customer. After all, you just say..."it's not covered", because it's not covered. Except for one thing: That stupid little back-up battery costs $900! My boss said, "If it's a little bit, we'll take the hit...but this is a big hit!"

The next day's service meeting started with a quiz to all the other managers, service writers, valets, and assistants: "How much do you think that battery costs?" and "Please! Think twice before giving away a back-up battery!" I just laughed.

The best part was that since I had never told the owner of the situation, he was so pleased that it was working again that he even wrote a letter thanking me for my work!

 

[toyomatt84]

I had a great one just happen this last Friday. Although, it wasn't my doing.

We were receiving a shipment of the Lucky Charms boxes in Spanish. (We were to print in foil on the covers.) And they come on skids of about 15,000 boxes unfolded. They are layed out in a 3x3 pattern if you were to look at the stack from the top. Well, the shipment was for 9 skids of this stuff. So, the driver, a 62 year old 350lbs+, was supposedly not allowed to look at how the company stacked the skids in his truck. I know... uh-huh? So, the skids were stacked in a 1-2 pattern, meaning 1 skid up front, followed by 2 skids right behind it, then 1 skid, and so on. Not exactly the wisest stacking order ever.

Anyways, he was coming from Michigan to Wisconsin, via Chicago, which is about 272 miles. Now, he said he made it in a little under 5 hours, meaning he averaged about 60 mph. I don't know about anyone else who's ever driven the route, but to do that 272 mile trip in 5 hours is hard, especially going through Chicago. He must have had some time where he used the brakes heavy, or something. Anywho, he arrived to our place and backed up to the door. When we opened up the tail of his truck, 6 of the skids had completely slid off of their base and tipped over. Granted, they were only plastic wrapped without banding, but still, to completely come off the skid is tough. It's cardboard with ink on one side.

So, first off, he blames the supervisor of Shipping & Receiving (Who just happens to be Lao, and can hardly understand this old hick's english slang.) by saying the skids are too large. WTF??? Too large? They are the exact same size of the last cereal boxes we got, and the ones before that, and so on... 40x43 in skids are the Standard for these things, and the fact that he was blaming us (Like we stacked them) was outstanding.

So, guess what happened next? Me and my good mexican buddy Eric were called to clean it up. And, to add to this catastrophe, any box that was touching the ground had to be tossed, due to the fact that it's a food cartridge. So, about 2000 had to be tossed (quite a loss for our company). Fortunately, we only had to re-stack 6 of them... which still sucked. It took 3 hours, of which this old fart wanted to help with. Eric and I were working quite quickly and now, this old fat fogey wants to help. He couldn't lift a 2" stack without going into respiratory problems.

So, being the nice guy (and also aggrevated) I am, I said (and I quote), "Sir, can you please go in the truck?" He replied with a no, and asked for a reason why. I repeated my question and added, "We have this covered." He, yet again, said no and asked why. So I said, "You're slowing us down." He returned, "Well, if you were 62 years old you'd be slowing you down as well." And, quickly, I said, "If I were 62, I'd be in the ***king truck." He, later on, mentioned that he had 5 major heart attacks and over 20 minor heart attacks in his life. I don't know how that could help him.

Eric and I finished up the remaining stacks, and left (for once last week) on-time, due to how tired we were.

 

[Blackbird.]

Same thing as DRIFT. I don't go to work but at school:

2 years ago I was playing kickball in P.E. with the rest of my class and there was a kick and it was far and I was backing up for it and as I saw the ball I saw a basketball net and I said "s***." and I ran right into a basketball pole. It hurt badly. I was clutching my head for like 5 minutes.

 

[Touring Mars]

I was about to make a thread about mistakes in general, but found this one, and it seems appropriate...

There is one thing worse than screwing up a whole week's work by a simple mistake, and that is screwing up someone else's whole week's work by a simple mistake

Last night I had to remove my own samples from a benchtop shaker in the lab... in order to do this, you need to stop it shaking first... unfortunately I forgot to switch it back on once I had taken my stuff off... This meant that everything on the shaker sat idle from 6pm last night until 8am this morning, and the whole lot was ruined.... worse still, all the samples belonged to one person, a very kind woman I work with who has been helping to train me and has been doing loads to help me out in the last couple of months...

I must admit, the thought did cross my mind to just switch the shaker back on and pretend it didn't happen, but I couldn't... the fact is, she would have gone on to use those samples for the whole of next week as well (possibly) and would have beed wasting her time, so I had to come clean and tell her that I had ruined her experiment

Actually, she is very highly experienced, and even before I told her what I had done, she knew what had happened, because she could tell just by looking at her samples that they were not right... She was very ticked off that I had ruined her experiment, but she was also very nice to me, acknowledging that mistakes like that are inevitable, and that atleast I didn't compound the error by trying to pretend it didn't happen...

Anyway, I'm learning loads at the moment, and scarcely a week goes by without some sort of goof... but it's the only way to learn I suppose

 

[yeti]

Such is the way of life... You learn from your own mistakes...

In my last job... I had just started and I was learning a new Language called "APL"... So part of the learning process is debugging and fixing existing bugs in the code.

So there I was working away and feeling very proud of myself having fixed several bugs and releasing the code into the live database...

I'd tested it and it all worked beautifully... of course the breakpoints that I'd put in to debug the code happened but I knew that they would be compiled out and the real live code wouldn't be affected...

So the release was made and several CD's were burnt sent out to the customers and over the next week or so they were installed...

Rather dubiously one by one our customers complained of their applications just suddenly stopping with no error messages and no way of restarting the code...

Every single customer complained of the same problem in the same place...

Rather worried I went back... tested the code... it looked fine to me... So I asked my boss...

She had a look and then asked... why are these breakpoints here? I simply replied... I was debugging... they'll be compiled out for release...

She replied... not in APL they don't...

Bugger I replied!!!

C.

 

[Evolution.]

I don't work yet, but at my age school is work. One time in science. I was half asleep. We were studying Biology. My teacher asked me a question. I answered, but what I said, landed me in the stupid books. I said a living orgasm instead of a living organism. I was rather shamed out after that.

One of our substitute teachers did that once.He was talking about organisms and said "orgasm".The whole class just busted out laughing.

 

[Dave A]

Telling the MD to **** off. Actually that was one of the greatest things I ever did at work.

 

[GT4freak32492]

In 8th grade, during a game of kickball someone kicked the ball well over my head. After catching it I threw down to home but missed and hit my principle . Also, at my last job (a waiter) I wasn't paying attention and reversed the orders of all my customers. Two people got the same order but one had no cheese (he was allergic). The allergic one all of a sudden went down on the floor and wasn't throwing up blood . I got fired after that slick move.

 

[kennythebomb]

When I started my current job at Alcon Laboratories, on about my third week I dropped a very expensive laser power meter from my workstation to the ground. Just a cracked case, the meter still worked, but definitely a bit embarrassing. Two days later, I dropped another one, this time with more dire results...it needed to be sent out for repair. On both of these meters, when I submitted it to out calibration lab, I wrote on the ticket "Failed Drop Test".

To this day, whenever I take a power meter to the Cal lab for it's regularly scheduled PM and calibration, the Cal Tech asks me, "Failed the drop test again?"

 

[NSX-R]

Not my story but a guy I know work at PizzaHat (same place I work at), he was making dough, forgot to put the blender in the right speed. Eailer that day, they were mixing vegetables, so the speed was high. The guy put the flour in, turned the blender on (it is a HUGE blender, industrial sized), then PUFF, now he was wearing black, after that PUFF, he was covered in flour from head to toe, all white, HAHAHAHAHA, it was HILARIOUS!

 

[Lamboracer]

once i dumped a mop bucket on my like 3rd day and flooded the whole back of mcds.

 

[Speedbird223]

..................

 

[Saleen Man]

I worked for a delivery/moving company and we had this call to bring a new glass table-top to a house and bring back the old one. So we got there, took the new one out of the box and removed the old one. Now, there was protective cardboard that you put around the edge of the glass to prevent damage. The new table-top wasn't the same shape as the old one, so I put the cardboard around as best I could. We put the old one in the original box and started to carry it out to the truck. We got about three steps when the glass ripped through the cardboard and put a good sized chip in this lady's hardwood floor. It was a beautiful house too, I felt horrible. Yeah, I don't work there anymore.

 

[Touring Mars]

Not my story but a guy I know works at PizzaHat (same place I work at)

Now there's an idea!

 

[Jetboy.]

I work at an Auto Bodyshop...

The very first week I was stripping out a junker car (taking off worthy pieces for my boss' project car) I had taken out most of the headliner and all the door-pannels, save for the passenger side. Door handles were gone, as were all window cranks (once again, except the passenger side). They were laying in a box, by the open door. I had the door propped open, starting to take out the dash, when all the sudden, the door blew shut.

Theoretically, the average person would think, "Okay, he can just get outside via Passenger Side." Guess what? That door managed to catch on the front fender and would only prop open 8 inches. It took 15 minutes, but I managed to climb out through that thin space, and get on the roof. Thank god I am so thin.


My co-worker just laughed his ass off....


Can this count as Stupidest mistake(s) made at work?