So how's your new life in Boston going? Because if I made that big of mistake I'm just leaving the truck and completely starting my life over in Boston.
I worked at a trucking company and we had an idiot of a driver do this once but it was V6 engines they had picked up from a Chrysler plant. They were dumping massive car engines all along the freeway for the better part of an hour paying ZERO attention. Even after that they couldn’t keep this lady fired. It wasn’t until a year later that they drove into traffic and almost killed several people that they were finally let go. Sometimes a union is *too* protective of its employees.
Was giving a presentation to 300+ people and rested my arm on top of the podium in a spot where there was a button that turned the entire system off, taking ~10 minutes to reboot and get my presentation back up. 2 minutes into talking again, I did it again.
Seriously. Terrible, terrible presenter design.
Presenters should have two buttons. One to progress the slide show, and one to go back.
I understand that a live demo might be different. But the big red shutdown button should be nowhere near the presenter's hands.
But also, there's no lesson to be learned from the second kick from a mule...
This one makes me laugh when I think about it:
I was sixteen pushing grocery carts outside a grocery store. “Lot attendant” was my title, and my job was to make sure chaos didn’t break out in the parking lot. But I also had some other duties, like taking out trash, emptying ashtrays, and doing a few other little odd jobs around the store.
One day a woman taps me on the shoulder in the store and says “I’m sorry, but my kid just threw up over that display.”
She points at this display of Entenmann’s snack cake that was freestanding in between some aisles. And I can seethat this toddler had clearly projectile vomited all over it. There was some on most of the boxes.
And I think “I’ll handle this.”
So I scoop up all the boxes, take them out to the dumpster, and throw them all away. And as I’m dusting my hands off and congratulating myself on being so helpful, a manager was like “what did you just do?”
And I said “I cleaned up a big mess, a kid threw up on everything.”
And he said “yea but you can’t just throw a whole display away. There’s a process. Inventory. We have to report these losses.”
I said “I push shopping carts man. I don’t know anything about any of that.”
And he let out a long sigh and said, “this isn’t going to be fun for either of us.”
Then he lowered me by my ankles back into the dumpster and I had to fish out all the snack cake boxes covered in child vomit and then learn how to scan them through some kind of computer.
And in case you’re wondering, I haven’t eaten an Entenmanns snack cake since.
Edit: fixed a typo
My manager accidentally left a box of fake knockoff cologne bottles in with some boxes with spoiled produce. I threw everything down the chute into the compactor. He wanted me to go in there and get them. I said, "Huh. Wonder what OSHA would think of that?"
He got super pissed and went in there himself. Crazy stupid thing to do
Lol he had me watch the start button. Right after he ripped me a new one. That guy was not the sharpest knife in the drawer. I wonder what ever happened to him. Might be dead by now it was many moons ago
> I wonder what ever happened to him.
Probably asked an employee who *really* hated him to watch the start button, right after he ripped him a new one, then climbed into the garbage compactor.
I remember when I was a cart boy at Target and someone smeared shit all over the bathroom. They tried telling me to clean it up, I ended up quitting that day.
I worked for a guy who previously had a high end restaurant. He told me a customer once brought to the attention of the wait staff that some had “made a mess“ in the women’s toilet.
He sent someone to clean it up. They came back and said nope. He said clean it or you’re fired. They took off their apron and walked. He told another worker to go clean it up. They came back and said nope. He said clean it or you’re fired. They took off their apron and walked…
He thought he better have a look. He said you could smell it before opening the stall. He opens the stall. He said everything from halfway back was sprayed with shit. Like just floor to ceiling wall to wall.
The only explanation he could give was that someone had bent over to take their pants/underwear off and just exploded shit while touching their toes.
He realised he had to clean it. He went full hazardous water suit, rubber gloves, boots, mask, the whole deal. It took 30 minutes. He called the two staff who walked and apologised, offered their jobs back.
He said the worst thing was walking through the restaurant and knowing that whoever had done it was still there as no one had left for some time after they were aware of it…
When I was a teenager I worked in a a movie theater. I was doing concessions that day. I went to the bathroom and, I'm not fucking around - there was the biggest explosion of shit I have *ever* seen in my life. and it took up TWO STALLS. One of those stalls was empty, but still had the door locked. So this individual managed to crawl underneath the stall, into the next stall, and while simultaneously spewing shit in every direction.
I was told I had to clean it up, but I honestly didn't know where to start. And ultimately I wasn't the one to handle it - as I shouldn't have! I was handling food! I didn't have the training to clean up a mess like that.
A friend of mine was a manager of a restaurant and he told me that when this happens “shit explosions” hell walking up to the dishwashers and ask “who wants to make $200 extra bucks tonight” and gets a volunteer. I think this is a great way of doing it
The thing about barcodes and stock is that they are all the same and all you need is one of them and the number of boxes you tossed. He probably didn't know this but you could have just taken a look into the dumpster, counted the boxes and then went back into the store and scanned one of the clean ones enough times.
For something like a case of food, sure. In my time in retail, I've come across products that were otherwise identical, but had different SKU numbers because they were different colors. A bit of a pain.
Long ago, was in IT and was moving data volumes on and offline. Misread and 8 for a 0 and took the Airline’s reservation system down for 30 minutes. At 2 million per hour, oops. Immediately reported what I did, it was fixed, mgr said you know what you did and I know it won’t ever happen again. Yup. Sorry. Okay, carry on. I Went on to a long career in IT. Clearly never forgetting that lesson and response
I have a superior like that... They are heaven sent and definitely not the norm. Said the same thing yours did, after the database debacle I mentioned in my own comment here
I used to be a groundskeeper at a country club; one of my coworkers did this with the fairway mower. Did the whole fairway before someone stopped him and told his he was going to have to redo all of it.
Yep learned that the hard way xD They just recently let me start using it after a year-ish (first timer, for a grounds/landscaping gig) so most of my brainpower is dedicated towards "GO STRAIGHT" right now
Sadly I was stone cold sober xD Since I was unfamiliar with all the equipment, etc and I have to drive a work truck, I've made it a point to not smoke on the job
Was on vacation and my boss told me to push a script another employee wrote before he quit. I was at Disneyland and didn't bother looking at it and just pushed it. Needless to say the former employee locked all our computers, 25000 of them. They tried to pin it on me but in the end my boss got in trouble for forcing me to work while I was on vacation and without anytime to prepare.
I needed to cut a 2 inch rubber hose. There wasn't a table nearby so I put the hose on my knee and pushed the box cutter through the hose, directly into my knee. Sometimes the brain just doesn't work.
Brand new manager trainee. Had to sit through death by 90’s OSHA videos. All stuff I had seen before and I was incredibly bored of it. At the end of the video there was a random guy in our office I assumed was a customer and I sarcastically said “well that was an hour I’ll never get back”. He goes “did you not enjoy it?” I said “yeah I didn’t at all but like, I get it, safety comes first so it’s necessary but the videos are so common sense it hurts. Anyway can I help you real quick? I have a meeting to get to, big guy from corporate merchandising team several states away is gonna be here in an hour or two”.
He goes “I’m filling in for big guy from corporate, I’m the North American safety director. Let’s have a chat about your vision of safety at our workplace since you have that all figured out”
I am a safety specialist for my company. I often get real and honest feedback(from the retail people I previously worked with), which I appreciate. I always laugh when people act like the safety standards are their most important topic when it's clear they're not
My mate used to work for a huge US computing multinational in Scotland. They were told that one of the top VPs was flying over from the US for meetings, so everyone had to look busy, no slacking off or sitting around.
Andy wandered through reception and saw a guy sitting waiting. Thinking he was doing the guy a favour, he said, hey bud you better move your arse, there's a bigwig coming in from the states and anyone slacking is going to get their arse kicked.
Everyone hates watching those videos, let's be real. Especially if it's not your first time watching them. I've had to watch them about 5 times now, and it gets worse each time.
If we assume the safety director is doing his job, then the feedback from OP could be quite useful in better figuring out ways to make the content engaging. Far too often the process of those videos is sort of self-affirming where they make the video and then ask if it ticked the boxes for content but not if anyone actually was interested in watching.
Working for an investment manager, he gave me an order to sell 80,000 dollars of Microsoft in a client account. Wasn’t thinking and entered a sell of 80,000 shares. MSFT was selling at $100+ per share at the time. Crapping bricks as I got the brokerage firm’s trading desk on the phone and waited on hold to hear if they could bust the trade...
They did. Phew.
lol that reminded me of my story. Client wanted to sell 2000 shares of Qualcomm last min (barely any time before market close) and was being a pushy dick on the phone ('hurry! hurry!'). I accidentally entered it as a 'buy' instead of a sell. Executed immediately. So our firm took the hit and bought 2000 shares of Qualcomm on top of the 2,000 shares we took out of the client's account.
Couldn't sleep that night. Kept checking Qualcomm prices (no after hour trading then) over and over even though market was closed. Figure I'll be fired first thing in the morning.
Got to work, Qualcomm opened up $8. My mistake made the company $32,000. I jokingly asked my supervisor if I'll get some of than as a bonus. He laughed. Other than 'be more careful' I didn't get reprimanded. Knowing the client he probably called back and claimed he actually wanted to buy instead of sell instead.
I've heard our mutual funds department entered a client social security number as 'shares to buy' once.
Happened at a company I worked for. They were supposed to list 1 share of J-com Co. for 610,000 yen, they accidentally listed 610,000 shares for 1 yen each. Initial hit was 340 million (until the exchanges clawed it back, but not all were able to be canceled).
I'm an assistant. My second week on the job I took my boss's $2000 personal computer to get repaired. When I was bringing it back to his house, I dropped it and cracked the screen.
Thank God it was a small crack and my boss is the chillest person on the planet, I genuinely thought I was going to get fired but instead he just happily started using it again and said it was no big deal since it still worked.
I was working as the IT guy at a small company which had some "associates" in other states, and a guy in Sydney had a blue screen problem on their laptop. So I said "send it to me and I'll fix it and send it back" and didn't specify what I thought was obvious, like how it should be packed. It was in a cardboard box, in it's laptop case. In the laptop case that had a few casino chips from the local casino. That had managed to get into the laptop between the screen and the keyboard.
So the chip wrecked the screen and back then a replacement screen was about $AUD1000! So now I had a dead laptop with a dead screen and an angry, not-chill boss who thankfully blamed the guy in Sydney for wrecking the laptop.
Large printer, one of those office units…. Well, it had a manual switch to go between 220 and 110 voltage. Half way around the world and coworker forgot to change the switch to the correct voltage and fried the power supply. It’s going to take a week to get a replacement unit but my coworker need to depart to go to his wedding. So a week later, I fly out to finish this guys job and install the new unit. I forget to check the voltage and fry it again. Ooops.
A lady at work replied to a promotion notice with, “this bitch don’t work at all, just takes credit for our work.” Sent it as reply all.
I had a manager write his goodbye email that went to the whole company so \~250 people, nothing spicy there but one of the other managers who he was close with wrote a quite personal reply on how lucky he was for getting out and aired some of his grievances with the leadership team - on reply all.
Somehow they worked it out and he stayed employed there, but I talked to him about it quite a while after and he said he was at home when he found out and he'd been literally rolling on the kitchen floor bawling and having a full toddler meltdown. I've done some more "professional" goofs causing extra work, but fortunately nothing like that...
Forgot to turn the sign to open. Coworker found out after he came out, asked why the place was empty and watched five people come to the door, stop, turn and walk away. I was hungover and stood at the counter like a zombie for an hour and a half having watched many people walk up and away.
Coworkers greeted me until I resigned with "Are we open?"
I had the opposite at the store I used to work at, customers come up to the door 20 minutes before opening, violently shake the door and then wonder why it's locked when the opening times were right Infront of them. It's not like they changed, they've been the same times for years.
Yeah, I have a story like this.
We close. The cashier and I go into the office to handle the deposit. So the doors are locked, and from the outside the store looks empty.
Cashier and I finish with the deposit and go to clock out. This woman, who clearly couldn't get in due to the locked doors, sees us and yanks on the doors again, as though that will somehow make them less locked.
I go and let the cashier out. I tell this woman we are closed and point to the sign on the door with the store hours.
She STILL tries to get inside and is somehow surprised when I lock the door right in front of her.
I say that those kinds of people are allergic to drawing their own conclusions.
I accidentally deleted the entire project directory for my company thinking i was deleting a folder called proposals. We lost about 2/3 of the directory before i was able to cancel the deletion. The data was gone as the folder was too big to fit in the trashcan so it was permanently deleting files as it went along.
That's why we have back ups, and if your company really cares, they have off-site backups as well.
At the end of the day it happens, I'm in I.T. and have accidentally deleted entire backups before.(In my defense, they shouldn't have the helpdesk techs handling the system backups.)
I completely agree, we had a true IT guy and me as just day to day IT stuff. For some ungodly reason the CEO thought it was a good idea to have my daily use account setup as a root admin account. Not saying it wasn't my mistake, but they deff opened themselves up the the oops.
Was filling a paint drum and left to use the bathroom then proceeded to go on break and midway through a snack realized and ran all the way back to paint everywhere.
Oh no! Something similar happened to a coworker of mine. I remembering walking through the paint department and just eggshell white all over the floor and surrounding counters. Poor lady (18 years old or so) had just started and didn’t secure something properly. She didn’t cry (I would have) she just looked so defeated.
Work in payroll so have $5-10k+ mistakes aren’t uncommon. Was testing out a new warning/deduction code on a new account and had entered $5k as a test check and forgot to delete it before processing, to a terminated employee, who promptly emptied his bank account so we couldn’t pull it back
Much worse, a coworker rerouted something like 15-20 direct deposits to her own account. It’s all super traceable with username/time stamp records of every single change so she was promptly fired and I believe arrested
I once got something like $4500 added to my pay check by accident. I was making like $12/hr so it was a huge amount of money for me to have in my account. Called my boss IMMEDIATELY and he said I should go to Vegas and see how much I can turn it into.
Payroll fixed it within a couple days, and that's how I learned that payroll direct deposits can be reversed.
I was testing some ledger changes on a live accounting system. I moved 5k out of the "general funds" account and into a test account after getting approval from finance for the test. They would then move it back and reconcile.
Except I didn't. I used the id of the user associated with that test account, not the account id.
Turns out that user ID existed as an account ID too, my personal account on that system.
I had to go to finance and explain what happened and show them the coincidence that the test user id happened to be the same as my personal account id.
This was like my third day in the job and it looked like one of my first things was quietly send myself 5k.
First day on the job working for a cleaning company, the very first thing I did was pick a mop up from the bucket directly vertical, rather than at an angle, and shattered the overhead strip light above me. While talking to the boss.
Put an adrenaline needle through my thumb. I was basically messing around with returned stock at a pharmacy whilst destroying old medication. Our old fashioned pharmacist/owner would always prime the adrenaline injectors and stab them into the wall to get rid of the liquid before disposing of it. I stupidly tried doing this myself one day but I squeezed the wrong end as I tried to prime it, and it ended up going right through my thumb and out the other side popping through my thumb nail.
Felt like such an idiot. The needle wasn’t actually used, it was just out of date stock that a patient had returned. I still think about what could have happened quite often nearly 15 years later.
So did I, but apparently you firstly need to prime the needle, then press it down again for the actual adrenaline to come out. Luckily I only primed it and pulled it out before anything came out.
I work in nuclear medicine. We have one test where we take a patient's blood, make it radioactive, and inject it back into them. When I was a student I accidentally stabbed myself with the dirty radioactive bloody needle.
Well, many years ago while in my early days of military life I was in charge of ordering supplies for my division. I was trying to order D batteries for mag lights. I wanted to order about 38 cases which was 380 batteries. I misread how they came. I thought it was ordered by each, so I ordered 380 batteries. That was the first mistake. For the second mistake I actually fat fingered it and ordered 3800. To compound the error the unit of issue was by the case…. I ended up with 3800 cases of D batteries while at sea on an aircraft carrier.
It sucked so bad.
I had a coworker do a similar thing with jars of jam. Wanted to order 36 jars, ended up ordering 36 cases of 24 jars each. The store switched to an automated inventory management system pretty soon after that lol
lol. No I didn’t.
In the end I gave a lot away to the ship, but was still left with over half of them. They ended up in a storeroom and I am sure they stayed there until the ship had to go through its midlife refueling. I always wondered what poor sucker was stuck moving them all cussing out what idiot would put around 1400 cases of batteries in that storeroom.
I knew a guy that repaired guitar effects pedals. They use particular transistors that affect the sound depending on whether they are germanium or silicon based (I think). He was struggling to find a particular type but eventually did from a former Russian military base making some cash on the side. They used the transistors in their radios.
He meant to order 10, however ordered 10 boxes. Of 100 each. The former Russian military base that didn’t take returns…
As it turned out, he cornered the market for those particular transistors and he ended up making clones of and/or custom pedals for many legendary guitarists from around the world. To this day he is friends with them. He is also the most ethical businessman I have ever known often doing special projects for charity.
Taken a new medicine at work then made me act like I was drunk as fuck , it was so embarrassing and stupid. I should’ve tried the new medicine at home first
I used to take a muscle relaxer every Thursday night on my way home from work so I could settle in and go straight to sleep for my early Friday shift. I would go most of the week without sleeping, and then make up for the whole week with the "sleepy Thursday" tradition. The pill took like an hour and a half to kick in and I lived about 45 minutes from work. So I'd pop the pill on my way out the door, get home, settle in, and usually just crash and burn for 10+ hours.
Then I got a flat tire on my way home from work. And my stupid scissors jack didn't have the crank thing, but I managed to do it with a pen somehow. It took over an hour. I got the donut on, I got back in the car, and I sunk like 10 feet down into the driver's seat. I still had like 25 minutes to get home and I made a dumb call and just went for it. I have no idea how I got home because I couldn't even keep my head up. I walked in the door, walked straight to the bed, and passed out with all my clothes still on til the next morning. That was the end of sleepy Thursdays.
Hah. I had been given an anti-nausea prescription to take the edge off the side effects of another prescription and was told to take them at the same time. I was working a morning shift in a kitchen when I took the combo for the first time and started nodding off standing up at the line.
Looked up the drug interactions and Google said *do not mix that shit.* My boss believed me that I wasn't using anything illegal but no pass to go home, so I noodled around on brain soup until I came out on the other side like four hours later.
Good thing I was on cold apps.
We were in an all-hands meeting over Zoom. Small company, ~90 employees. Had just hired 6 new people, mostly remote. CEO ended the meeting by opening it up to questions. I wanted to sound welcoming to the new employees but I didn't want to turn on my mic, so I typed in the chat, "where are all the new employees located?", immediately hit send.
Except I didn't type "new". I accidentally hit J on the keyboard instead of N. And I didn't proofread before sending.
So I asked the entire company where the Jew employees are located.
IMMEDIATELY followed up with "new* omg I'm so sorry" and my CEO played it in stride like a pro.
Best part - one of the Jewish employees Slacked me after the meeting to tell me where he was located
My original post about this on my now-banned original account: https://www.reddit.com/r/facepalm/s/gXujAFWAaz
I had a friend who worked in the PR department of a get out and vote campaign. One of their employees made the same mistake with New York on their online advertising one day. It was caught quick but he had one hell of day answering questions and apologizing.
Not me but a middle aged female in another department was unmuted while taking a massive dump and loudly taking a personal call on her cell. All 265 people on the call could hear her answer the phone and start talking about whatever while hearing the distinct sound of pee followed by farts and plops. Despite the CEO and the group directors all calmly (at first) telling her to please mute before the panic started to set in. She thought she was muted the entire time and had the volume set so low she couldn’t hear people yelling at her so she could instead be on her own call. It was almost 5 minutes into the call when we could hear the toilet paper rolling in the dispenser that she went dead quiet and left the meeting a second later. This was also not a work from home position either.
Lol, that’s a great story. Here’s one of mine that I am reminded of by your story:
I was working as a consultant for a big Tech firm in Silicon Valley. I had an early morning meeting with my primary client and a contractor who was doing some work for us. So, the client’s still at home, I am in my hotel room , as is the contractor in his.
We’re on Webex, with cameras on, and this dude (the contractor) does not realize he’s on video.
This all happens too fast for either of us (me or my client) to warn the dude, but as we are discussing things, he walks right up to his laptop in a towel, takes it off, getting ready for the day, and boom full screen dick.
It was never spoken of. To this day, that guy still doesn’t know that he did that.
I'm more wondering what company has 265 person conference calls where everyone isn't automatically muted. A call with that many unmuted people is just asking for disaster one way or another.
My boss charged me with carefully depositing our cash earnings from the week at the bank down the road.
I walked out to my car, set the bag on top of the car, and happily drove off 🤪
Option A. I got all the way to the bank and parked and went to reach for the bag in the passenger seat. Cue panic.
I drove back up the same road (MAJOR road in Nashville) just crawling in the middle turning lane the whole way, until I saw that blessed little black lump on the road a few miles back and cried tears of joy.
I renamed all customers last names to the same last name. I don't remember why I was doing an update, but forgot to include the where clause.
Thankfully i had a way to restore them, but that sucked.
*edit* It was probably to fix something weird with the name like remove a special character that was pasted into the field and messing up some other processes.
To which, I hate anyone's name who has a ' in their name, like O'Neil or something, because vendors suck at csv sanitizing.
Pretty much. My boss flipped his shit for like 20 minutes until we figured out how to restore them.
Then it became one of those things to haze me over.
I ordered 6 ASME water heaters in 3 phase configuration for a job. There was no 3 phase electrical anywhere on the jobsite.
If you're not familiar with plumbing, ASME heaters are made to order non returnable. And you can't convert them in the field to the correct electrical configuration.
$9K a piece. Boss was not happy. I thought I was about to get fired. Luckily, we were able to make it up elsewhere further down the line.
a 3d sensor we make slipped from my hands... dropped on the floor. i felt so fucking bad ...we sell those for 100k :| (nothing broke ! we just had to fix the laser and camera alignements)
we have a tradition now, i you drop a sensor, your name will be written on the floor where the hole left in the floor is (they make a nice mark in the flooring material)
I was working at a retail hardware store about 25 years ago. I had to do the cash deposit and drop it off at the bank night drop. Don’t know how, but I forgot to go to the bank and went directly home instead. I didn’t even think about anymore. The cash bag with over $10k in cash and checks was waiting for me in the car the next morning. I didn’t even lock my car doors.
I was a tank crewman in the Army (gunner). After we finished one of our gunnery tables (which you can think of as training exercises where you drive around and shoot targets, then get graded on everything from time, to accuracy, to proper fire commands), we reported in for grading.
One particular engagement I was feeling real confident about. Our commands were on point, we were quick, and my aim was spot on. It contained a moving target, which was a plywood cutout of a truck that moves on rails and is heated from behind so that we can pick it up on thermal sights.
Anyway, our "grading" went something like "Well, your time was good, fire commands were perfect, and your aim was dead on. But unfortunately, we're going to have to give you zero points for this engagement because your target was actually over here on *this* hillside. What you hit was a badger."
In the recording from the tower's FLIR camera, it was very obviously a poor badger just minding his own business, waddling along the hillside that I annihilated with a 120mm sabot round. ☹️
I felt terrible. Hell of a shot, though.
That poor animal, I feel absolutely terrible for laughing but the thought of a badger just doing its thing then getting absolutely blown to smithereens is hilarious
My second week at my current job I backed into and knocked over a light pole.
Worst part: it was on [video](https://youtu.be/pp66QH-i4cI?si=89WS67VUo1RrLsrj)
A typo in a technical report turned 101.0 into 1010.
The minimum standard was 100 so it passed with flying colours. Of course, given natural production variation, there were soon many, many expensive problems.
First job was as a cart boy at a golf course. Pulled all the carts in for the night and forgot to plug them all in. Most were dead come morning on a Sunday. Fired on Monday.
It’s really not that good - sounds way cooler/worse than it was. I’m a tattoo artist on a state where tattooing minors is not allowed with only a few tattoos exceptions. I had these two sisters come in to get cute matching tattoos and I got called in to cover one of them. I was chatting her up trying to keep her nerves calm since it was her first tattoo. I ask if she’s in school. Yes. I ask how long before she graduates. She was starting her junior year. I ask what she’s majoring in. She tells me she doesn’t have one. I ask what she wants to major in and she says psychology. I ask where she goes to school. She says Madison. I ask if she likes James Madison and if she’s enjoying her time in town for the summer. She is confused and says “Madison Highschool.”
Not sisters. Mom and daughter. I fucked up because it’s illegal to tattoo minors and I could lose my license and eat a $1400 fine. I assumed the person up front looked over the paperwork, and that’s where I made the dumb mistake. Kids these days don’t look like kids did when I was young.
I once muted myself in a teams meeting to let out a loud belch.
I was already muted.
So from everyone else's perspective I unmuted, burped loudly and then muted again.
My boss thanked me for my valuable insights.
Had my pump connected the wrong way round and put 1200 psi into my hose valve and blew the test cock right off it flooding the stair well in a huge river of water.
getting a friend hired.
I worked for a restaurant for many months and it was great, never heard a complaint.
one day they decided they wanted more help, offered my friend the job.
in less than six months, trouble was happening everywhere.
I’ll never work with a friend.
Had a buddy that was constantly asking me for a referral to my company. I wouldn’t do it because I knew he was lazy. One day he went on his own and filled out an application and wrote my name on the top. I had no idea. Next day the sales manager came up to me and said “hey I hired your friend.” I asked him why on earth he would do that without talking to me first. He said “well he wrote you name on the app so I figured you recommended him.” He lasted three months. I got shit on for many months after that with employees coming up to me and saying “your fucking friend…”and telling me whatever he fucked up that they were trying to clean up.
My school was hiring and my friend was looking for a job. I told my school I didn't know anyone for the position and told my friend we weren't hiring.
I love my friend to the ends of the earth but I also love my job and know how my friend works. It would not have ended well for anyone involved.
Ate a cookie a customer gave me.
"Oh no, those were for later..."
"Yeah, I could tell by the aftertaste. Thanks tho, I'll just go spend the rest of the day on maintenance tasks away from customers."
Luckily I'm the boss so I just put on my headphones and started fixing shit around the shop. I let my main manager know the fuckup and he kinda just didn't send anyone my way for the rest of the day. Definitely got razzed for that one every time I brought in baked goods for the team for years though.
Haha first time I got high, my coworker had given me some cookies and I had no idea what they were. I ate 3 before 10am, got a coworker to drive me home and watched movies in the basement the rest of the night lol.
Quit a job where I had to do next to nothing, watched movies all day, but was paid the bare minimum, to do a job where I'm constantly busy but paid the bare minimum.
Jesus I feel this one. Went from "managing" a grocery store kitchen, which was a little work, to working construction, which is a *fucking ton* of work. And I think I actually am making less. Haha fuck.
Worked in a mental hospital as a janitor. Been there for about a week when someone said I needed to clean a part I've never clean. It was a wing that had a security desk, and locked door. Half way though mopping the floor the empire place locks down because one of the violent patience got out since I didn't know I had to lock the door, and the security guy was out to lunch. That ward was an isolation Ward for violent people who were there on court order or sentenced there. Thankfully the guy who got out just went to the day room, and turned on the TV. When the nurses said he had to go back he did.
The janitor that did that ward was off sick, and I've never even been to that side of the hospital before. Wasn't told of any special rules or anything.
Forwarded an email to a coworker, which included a link to a viral video that everyone in the world was talking about that month — a very naughty video.
BUUUUUUUT I forgot to use my personal email instead of my work email. Boss intercepted the message. I was fired the next morning. This was a week before Christmas.
In the grand scheme… it all worked out for the best. I ended up at a much better job making twice as much money. But I still feel dumb about it.
Connecting duct to a new heat pump and drilled a screw through the copper refrigerant piping. Pffffffffffffffffffffffffffffft! In the basement of a very, VERY wealthy and influential family’s vacation home.
Working on an automatic failover in a Cisco ASA for our main outside interface and accidentally setup a NAT loop that brought the whole org down for any external communication for 2 days while we tried to find the needle in the haystack of ACLs that caused it.
In my defense, it took 4 layers of TAC escalation and 6 Cisco engineers to stumble upon it.
150 employees just suddenly didn't have anything to do. No email, no internet, no connection to any cloud services... Nothing.
My boss was like "you ain't a cowboy if you ain't been bucked off..." or, in other words, "sometimes when you're working hard, stuff goes wrong. Learn from it, move forward."
Not me per se, but an attorney at a large NY law firm where I was a paralegal knew I was taking a trip to Amsterdam.
So I sent my out of office email to the litigation team, and he replied all with “Pothead slacker.”
He was gone the next day. Poor guy.
I delivered funeral flowers to a hospital room where the person was very much alive. Didn't realize it until I was about to deliver the get well soon flowers to the wake.
I send emails with attachments almost everyday for work, if you write the word attached in the email Gmail will tell you that you didn't attach anything before sending. If it wasn't for this function, no one would receive the report I "sent" off. The few times I don't type attached in the email, it gets forgotten 10 times outta 10 lol.
I spilt a Bloody Mary on the lap of a very rich American who had just told me he was on his way to Heathrow. He was wearing a cream linen suit. He had told me his baggage had gone ahead, that he was having brunch then heading to the airport. I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone look at me with such anger in their eyes, before or since.
I practice criminal law. During a drink drive trial I was, for some reason, using the word “circumscribed” during a question to a witness. However, without realizing it, what I actually said was “circumcised”. Twice. On break, the court reporter asked me why I said what I’d said. I didn’t believe her. She played it back for me. I’d said it. 🤦🏻♀️
Why filter for laser chiller $100? Me find same filter on McMaster Carr for $50. Me save lab $50 every six months.
Except the McMaster one, while having the same filter specs, also contained cellulose. I caused some $15k pump diodes to die about 10k hours prematurely. Of course, we only figured out the issue when the second set of diodes died prematurely as well...
it was not really an error, but I worked at a Midwest bank HQ and the lady that normally pays off the banks borrowed money when the bonds mature had to be at a conference in North Carolina for a week so she left me instructions to pay off a $103 million dollar loan that was going to come due while she was gone.
She left me a deposit/withdrawal slip from the bank's own account and the wiring instructions. I was to fill the slip out and at exactly 3 p.m. go to the 5th floor wire room and ask for so and so lady and hand her the slip and the wiring instructions to the DTC in New York.
Well the withdrawal slip did not have enough amount boxes for that much money, you could only go up to 99 million 999 thousand, 999 and 99 cents. So I had to get another one and break it up into two sums, one for $50 million and one for $53 million.
Well that lady in the wire office didn't know who I was and for all she knew I was a crooked employee wiring $103 million of the banks money to my own offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands. And the thing was that it is such a large amount of money that the interest on it was more than my day's wages just dealing with her for an hour.
Finally I had to go back up to Corporate Trust and get a bank VP to countersign it or she was not sending the wire. Had she not the bank would have missed it's repayment and their credit rating lowered. Not to mention the banks shares falling because of a missed payment.
None of those fucking VPs would countersign because they didn't know or trust me either. They thought I well could be stealing from the bank and refused. I had to go to the bank president and explain the situation and he was clearly not happy. But he called the wire office and said they were to accept my slips and send them as soon as they got them before the goddamned DTC closed, because if they didn't I would have to fly to New York and be in the DTC when they opened with the money.
I hated that job, but that is my fun story of the time I had to write a check for $103 million.
During a conference call, I forgot to mute my mic and made an offhand comment about the meeting being boring. Everyone heard it, and it was so embarrassing.
Delivered the wrong furniture at a house and they wouldn’t give it back. The company I worked at didn’t care, told me to get over it even though THEY gave me the wrong address to deliver to. Tried to take it out of my paycheck so I put in my 2 weeks.
I am personally responsible for a US Navy warship losing all power and going completely dark in the middle of the night, in the middle of the pacific ocean, for almost a half hour.
Edit: I also am responsible for flipping a switch that resulted in a mass murder of fish large enough that the local media covered the event and postulated on the possible causes.
Edit 2 because I keep getting notifications: If I wanted to I could post a link to the article and video of the fish murder.....but I won't....💪
Between you and the guy who evaporated a badger w/a 120mm sabot tank round, I don't know who would be the bigger celebrity in the group chat. I mean, there's entire counties whose special operations forces could not do on purpose what you did on accident lmao. Was the ship's Captain impressed you managed to fuck up so badly? Or am I talking to you from the afterlife?
The power loss incident was essentially explained away as an overall plant loss, however if I had been as responsive as I would later become, it would not have happened. The fish murder thing is just my own hypothesis after sitting on the mess deck, eating breakfast the day after we did a "thing", and seeing a local news channel report about mass fish death in the exact area we were operating.
I used to make soup in a factory for a living and you’re supposed to use specific ingredients for each one because of different allergens. Anyways, I accidentally mixed two different totes of noodles together, which was over 1000 pounds altogether. I was absolutely mortified by my mistake, but my boss just waved it off and calmly said not to do it again. It probably helped my case that I was one of their best workers and it was around 140 degrees in the factory that day.
Worked at a graduate school in online education. Was trying to delete a class site and somehow deleted THE ENTIRE SEMESTER WORTH OF CLASS SITES.
Luckily we had backups and my boss was very chill.
I panicked, Reported the error and left to cry at my then boyfriend's house. Was sure I was fired. I wasnt🙃
I was working remotely (think dial up modem; 4800 baud) on an environmental data monitoring system. I had rebooted it a few times.
Little did I know that I had shutdown a refinery line that took several days to recover. It cost them a few hundred thousand dollars
Ooops!!!
They should have said something before they allowed me to connect.
I was running chips in a casino.
I had a cart of big chips that was set to a certain amount and I was coloring tables up(taking small denominations and giving back $100 chips). The balance of my cart should never change, if I buy $5000 worth of $25 chips, I give $5000 worth of $100 chips.
To one table I took $500 more than I gave putting my cart over by $500, I reported the mistake to my bosses so they could check cameras and see where the mistake happened.
Between reporting that mistake and the next time I balanced my cart I had organized my cart stupidly and I buried big chips with small chips which set my count off even further, the chips were there but i was counting it wrong because of bad organizing.
I had to report the second(non-existent) mistake to my bosses.
10 minutes later the surveillance supervisor comes to me to take the $500 and show me where the mistake was in my cart.
Nothing here was major but I felt like a complete fucking dumbass for days.
Back in the day of floppy disks... the big boss was working for a week on a job for a presentation for a client, lots of spreadsheets, etc. On the day of the presentation, he gave the floppy and a blank to the new 18 year old fresh out of a tech high school with high grades in "data processing" IT guy to make a backup. You would put the original in the drive, run the backup program, put the blank in the drive, it would go back and forth and copy the original to the blank.... if you didn't screw up the process.
My immediate boss told me he had to go to bat for me big-time to keep my job.
Ran a customers credit card and accidentally added an extra zero. Took a $2,300 order to a $23,000 order and the charge went through. Our accounting person caught it at the end of the day when they mentioned the really great day we had to my boss.
one of my first jobs in 1989, I was doing typesetting and artwork and did a menu for a restaurant round the corner. I did the Wine List on the back page and accidentally typed 'Whine List', the spell checker didnae pick it up and no one else picked up on it until two weeks later when the owner brought them back saying: "Oi, look what you did!"
"This time I'm going to be more personable, likable, make more of an effort on the human side"
What a mistake. Now I have an incredibly boring guy who acts like he has a crush on me and won't stop telling me about Futurama episodes he's seen
Lets seeeee, lost a kid as a ski instructor. That sucked, he was a little shit and hard to keep track of (non english speaker and didnt want to listen to my shitty spanish) This was on a HUGE mountain also (heavenly valley) luckily a lifty nabbed him and handed off to a ski patroller.
Then there's the cabinet shop I was working in a couple years ago. Trying to make a rabbet cut on althe table saw, I was lining up my mark with the saw blade at the back of blade. Decided to turn the saw on and move my piece into the blade, FROM THE BACK. That piece of wood left my hands like a bat out of hell. Table saws are insanely powerful and I gave that thing a nice chunk of wood to throw at its absolute hardest, fastest speed. I put a hole in the metal garage door that faced the saw. I'm lucky I was standing to the side.
first thing was not so stupid, the saw thing was definitely stupid AF
Sent the wrong door sizes to the framing company, every since door was 1 inch too short. It was on a 212 unit apartment building. I think each unit had between 7-10 doors. It’s amazing how expensive 1 inch can be
I used to be a realtor. I listed a house, helped the sellers arrange staging, hired a professional photographer. Listing looked great, lots of interest, multiple strong offers, everything went unusually smoothly. Driving home from the closing, I was thinking how good it felt that the clients were so happy. So happy with the price they got, how smoothly it went, the photos, the staging... FUCK. THE STAGING. I'd forgotten to notify the stager that the house had sold. All the rented furniture was still in it. If the buyers wanted to be sticklers, they could keep it all. I immediately called the buyers' agent, but she didn't respond for *hours* and I was shitting bricks. I called the stager and admitted to my giant screw-up. She pulled guys from other tasks and got the furniture out once I finally got ahold of the buyers. Ended up buying gifts for the stager, the buyers, and the buyers' agent. That day is one of the reasons I decided to no longer be a realtor.
Not me... I worked at a gas station pumping gas. There were two of us, one for each island, and it was a slow day so we were talking while one of the cars on his side was filling up. After a while we noticed gas leaking from the bottom of the car. My partner shut it off quickly and to inform this elderly lady about a problem with her gas tank. The lady looked in her side mirror than turned and quickly looked over her left shoulder seeing the pump stinking out of filler. She then looked up and said, "You didn't you asshole!" Not knowing what was going on her backed up and she got out screaming at him while opening up her truck. There was 3 or four inches of gas poured directly into her trunk full of shopping bags. She berated him called him an idiot for using the wrong tank while the real one was hidden under her license plate. He then calls her a bitch right as the owner comes over. Basically the woman's deceased husband had some sort of auxiliary tank installed in the trunk at one time. The filler was on the driver side with a shiny chrome cap that you couldn't miss. Co-worker got scolded for the foul language, but the owner knew it was an honest mistake. No real disalpline action and the owner took care of the client.
Tell me you live in NJ without telling me you live in NJ. My first job was working the pumps at a small gas station/auto repair. 4 pumps. I then expressed interest in working on the cars, and the boss taught me all kinds of things over the next 2 years.
He was also a solid, good decent person and also a very influential male figure in my life.
Found out later that he used to be some bad ass biker gang type dude, selling drugs and doing bad shit. Eventually turned his life around and started a successful business. I'd been a juvenile menace, then an 18yo degenerate who was quickly heading down the wrong path.
He told me much later that he could see himself in the angry, sad, and scared young man that was applying for a job very much below my skill and intelligence level. (Not shitting on gas attendants but you know what I mean)
Wherever you are, Mr Brian Quinn... thank you for being compassionate while also giving me a little kick in the ass when I needed it. I'll never forget you.
My boss said in a meeting that he would never make us do something that he had me do a few weeks earlier. I called him out on it and he said "that only happened one time."
I proceeded to say " well, you suck one dick then you are a cocksucker."
Didn't go over well.
Thinking that the people I hired weren't dumb enough to take a $10,000 check that was printed on an inkjet printer. Employee: "In fairness, he said he didn't have his ID."
At 17, mistaking HR for a reasonable ear for my Manager being a total asshat and bully. HR is not there to protect you it's there to protect the company
Drove a semi truck full of mail from Providence to Boston with the trailer door open.
So how's your new life in Boston going? Because if I made that big of mistake I'm just leaving the truck and completely starting my life over in Boston.
North Dakota, actually.
Wow. Bold of you to just get back in the truck and keep driving.
It was already warmed up and he would've had to find a spot for his Big gulp in the shittiest Uber ride ever.
Are you the reason I never get my mail?
Did you make it all the way without spilling any?
Everything was properly secured.
Im surprised noone honked at you lol
I worked at a trucking company and we had an idiot of a driver do this once but it was V6 engines they had picked up from a Chrysler plant. They were dumping massive car engines all along the freeway for the better part of an hour paying ZERO attention. Even after that they couldn’t keep this lady fired. It wasn’t until a year later that they drove into traffic and almost killed several people that they were finally let go. Sometimes a union is *too* protective of its employees.
Was giving a presentation to 300+ people and rested my arm on top of the podium in a spot where there was a button that turned the entire system off, taking ~10 minutes to reboot and get my presentation back up. 2 minutes into talking again, I did it again.
That's not in you. That's on whoever put that together. Okay, second time is on you.
Seriously. Terrible, terrible presenter design. Presenters should have two buttons. One to progress the slide show, and one to go back. I understand that a live demo might be different. But the big red shutdown button should be nowhere near the presenter's hands. But also, there's no lesson to be learned from the second kick from a mule...
> Presenters should have two buttons. One to progress the slide show, and one to go back. And having worked as IT, put a guard on the second one.
As an IT person for a college that frequently has to deal with av issues. That is an insanely dumb design.
Fool me once shame on you, fool me can’t get fooled again
Now watch this drive
Should have done it a third time to show them who's in charge.
I gasped. I would’ve ran out arms in the air sobbing.
This one makes me laugh when I think about it: I was sixteen pushing grocery carts outside a grocery store. “Lot attendant” was my title, and my job was to make sure chaos didn’t break out in the parking lot. But I also had some other duties, like taking out trash, emptying ashtrays, and doing a few other little odd jobs around the store. One day a woman taps me on the shoulder in the store and says “I’m sorry, but my kid just threw up over that display.” She points at this display of Entenmann’s snack cake that was freestanding in between some aisles. And I can seethat this toddler had clearly projectile vomited all over it. There was some on most of the boxes. And I think “I’ll handle this.” So I scoop up all the boxes, take them out to the dumpster, and throw them all away. And as I’m dusting my hands off and congratulating myself on being so helpful, a manager was like “what did you just do?” And I said “I cleaned up a big mess, a kid threw up on everything.” And he said “yea but you can’t just throw a whole display away. There’s a process. Inventory. We have to report these losses.” I said “I push shopping carts man. I don’t know anything about any of that.” And he let out a long sigh and said, “this isn’t going to be fun for either of us.” Then he lowered me by my ankles back into the dumpster and I had to fish out all the snack cake boxes covered in child vomit and then learn how to scan them through some kind of computer. And in case you’re wondering, I haven’t eaten an Entenmanns snack cake since. Edit: fixed a typo
Ha lol. He’s right you do have to count that stuff before throwing it out. Also I’ve been down the garbage chute several times to get stuff lol
My manager accidentally left a box of fake knockoff cologne bottles in with some boxes with spoiled produce. I threw everything down the chute into the compactor. He wanted me to go in there and get them. I said, "Huh. Wonder what OSHA would think of that?" He got super pissed and went in there himself. Crazy stupid thing to do
I’m sure he complied with the Lock-Out/Tag-Out requirements…
Lol he had me watch the start button. Right after he ripped me a new one. That guy was not the sharpest knife in the drawer. I wonder what ever happened to him. Might be dead by now it was many moons ago
> I wonder what ever happened to him. Probably asked an employee who *really* hated him to watch the start button, right after he ripped him a new one, then climbed into the garbage compactor.
I remember when I was a cart boy at Target and someone smeared shit all over the bathroom. They tried telling me to clean it up, I ended up quitting that day.
I worked for a guy who previously had a high end restaurant. He told me a customer once brought to the attention of the wait staff that some had “made a mess“ in the women’s toilet. He sent someone to clean it up. They came back and said nope. He said clean it or you’re fired. They took off their apron and walked. He told another worker to go clean it up. They came back and said nope. He said clean it or you’re fired. They took off their apron and walked… He thought he better have a look. He said you could smell it before opening the stall. He opens the stall. He said everything from halfway back was sprayed with shit. Like just floor to ceiling wall to wall. The only explanation he could give was that someone had bent over to take their pants/underwear off and just exploded shit while touching their toes. He realised he had to clean it. He went full hazardous water suit, rubber gloves, boots, mask, the whole deal. It took 30 minutes. He called the two staff who walked and apologised, offered their jobs back. He said the worst thing was walking through the restaurant and knowing that whoever had done it was still there as no one had left for some time after they were aware of it…
“Not a cart, not my problem”
When I was a teenager I worked in a a movie theater. I was doing concessions that day. I went to the bathroom and, I'm not fucking around - there was the biggest explosion of shit I have *ever* seen in my life. and it took up TWO STALLS. One of those stalls was empty, but still had the door locked. So this individual managed to crawl underneath the stall, into the next stall, and while simultaneously spewing shit in every direction. I was told I had to clean it up, but I honestly didn't know where to start. And ultimately I wasn't the one to handle it - as I shouldn't have! I was handling food! I didn't have the training to clean up a mess like that.
A friend of mine was a manager of a restaurant and he told me that when this happens “shit explosions” hell walking up to the dishwashers and ask “who wants to make $200 extra bucks tonight” and gets a volunteer. I think this is a great way of doing it
The thing about barcodes and stock is that they are all the same and all you need is one of them and the number of boxes you tossed. He probably didn't know this but you could have just taken a look into the dumpster, counted the boxes and then went back into the store and scanned one of the clean ones enough times.
For something like a case of food, sure. In my time in retail, I've come across products that were otherwise identical, but had different SKU numbers because they were different colors. A bit of a pain.
Long ago, was in IT and was moving data volumes on and offline. Misread and 8 for a 0 and took the Airline’s reservation system down for 30 minutes. At 2 million per hour, oops. Immediately reported what I did, it was fixed, mgr said you know what you did and I know it won’t ever happen again. Yup. Sorry. Okay, carry on. I Went on to a long career in IT. Clearly never forgetting that lesson and response
I have a superior like that... They are heaven sent and definitely not the norm. Said the same thing yours did, after the database debacle I mentioned in my own comment here
Cut grass on a zturn for like an hour before I realized I forgot to turn the blades on
I used to be a groundskeeper at a country club; one of my coworkers did this with the fairway mower. Did the whole fairway before someone stopped him and told his he was going to have to redo all of it.
This is why it’s important to have a mental checklist
Yep learned that the hard way xD They just recently let me start using it after a year-ish (first timer, for a grounds/landscaping gig) so most of my brainpower is dedicated towards "GO STRAIGHT" right now
Oh yeah buddy I have been that high.
Sadly I was stone cold sober xD Since I was unfamiliar with all the equipment, etc and I have to drive a work truck, I've made it a point to not smoke on the job
Was on vacation and my boss told me to push a script another employee wrote before he quit. I was at Disneyland and didn't bother looking at it and just pushed it. Needless to say the former employee locked all our computers, 25000 of them. They tried to pin it on me but in the end my boss got in trouble for forcing me to work while I was on vacation and without anytime to prepare.
Was it a virus?
No it was an MDM command with a custom activation code.
I needed to cut a 2 inch rubber hose. There wasn't a table nearby so I put the hose on my knee and pushed the box cutter through the hose, directly into my knee. Sometimes the brain just doesn't work.
My brother's neighbor worked with a guy who did that with a board and a circular saw. They called him "21 stitch" after that.
Jfc with a circular saw he’s very lucky he wasn’t called “Stumpy”
If it makes you feel better, my dad knew a guy who was using a nail gun with the wood on his lap. So at least it was your leg and not your sack lmao.
Brand new manager trainee. Had to sit through death by 90’s OSHA videos. All stuff I had seen before and I was incredibly bored of it. At the end of the video there was a random guy in our office I assumed was a customer and I sarcastically said “well that was an hour I’ll never get back”. He goes “did you not enjoy it?” I said “yeah I didn’t at all but like, I get it, safety comes first so it’s necessary but the videos are so common sense it hurts. Anyway can I help you real quick? I have a meeting to get to, big guy from corporate merchandising team several states away is gonna be here in an hour or two”. He goes “I’m filling in for big guy from corporate, I’m the North American safety director. Let’s have a chat about your vision of safety at our workplace since you have that all figured out”
Safety director should be glad he got honest feedback for once, even if unintentionally...
I am a safety specialist for my company. I often get real and honest feedback(from the retail people I previously worked with), which I appreciate. I always laugh when people act like the safety standards are their most important topic when it's clear they're not
My mate used to work for a huge US computing multinational in Scotland. They were told that one of the top VPs was flying over from the US for meetings, so everyone had to look busy, no slacking off or sitting around. Andy wandered through reception and saw a guy sitting waiting. Thinking he was doing the guy a favour, he said, hey bud you better move your arse, there's a bigwig coming in from the states and anyone slacking is going to get their arse kicked.
Everyone hates watching those videos, let's be real. Especially if it's not your first time watching them. I've had to watch them about 5 times now, and it gets worse each time.
What should he care what you thought of the videos if you still watched them?
If we assume the safety director is doing his job, then the feedback from OP could be quite useful in better figuring out ways to make the content engaging. Far too often the process of those videos is sort of self-affirming where they make the video and then ask if it ticked the boxes for content but not if anyone actually was interested in watching.
Working for an investment manager, he gave me an order to sell 80,000 dollars of Microsoft in a client account. Wasn’t thinking and entered a sell of 80,000 shares. MSFT was selling at $100+ per share at the time. Crapping bricks as I got the brokerage firm’s trading desk on the phone and waited on hold to hear if they could bust the trade... They did. Phew.
lol that reminded me of my story. Client wanted to sell 2000 shares of Qualcomm last min (barely any time before market close) and was being a pushy dick on the phone ('hurry! hurry!'). I accidentally entered it as a 'buy' instead of a sell. Executed immediately. So our firm took the hit and bought 2000 shares of Qualcomm on top of the 2,000 shares we took out of the client's account. Couldn't sleep that night. Kept checking Qualcomm prices (no after hour trading then) over and over even though market was closed. Figure I'll be fired first thing in the morning. Got to work, Qualcomm opened up $8. My mistake made the company $32,000. I jokingly asked my supervisor if I'll get some of than as a bonus. He laughed. Other than 'be more careful' I didn't get reprimanded. Knowing the client he probably called back and claimed he actually wanted to buy instead of sell instead. I've heard our mutual funds department entered a client social security number as 'shares to buy' once.
> My mistake made the company $32,000 “Task Failed Successfully”
Happened at a company I worked for. They were supposed to list 1 share of J-com Co. for 610,000 yen, they accidentally listed 610,000 shares for 1 yen each. Initial hit was 340 million (until the exchanges clawed it back, but not all were able to be canceled).
Why couldn’t some be cancelled?
I'm an assistant. My second week on the job I took my boss's $2000 personal computer to get repaired. When I was bringing it back to his house, I dropped it and cracked the screen. Thank God it was a small crack and my boss is the chillest person on the planet, I genuinely thought I was going to get fired but instead he just happily started using it again and said it was no big deal since it still worked.
So glad you had a great boss. I had two similar ones; what a blessing.
I'm extremely grateful for him. His entire family is super super chill.
I was working as the IT guy at a small company which had some "associates" in other states, and a guy in Sydney had a blue screen problem on their laptop. So I said "send it to me and I'll fix it and send it back" and didn't specify what I thought was obvious, like how it should be packed. It was in a cardboard box, in it's laptop case. In the laptop case that had a few casino chips from the local casino. That had managed to get into the laptop between the screen and the keyboard. So the chip wrecked the screen and back then a replacement screen was about $AUD1000! So now I had a dead laptop with a dead screen and an angry, not-chill boss who thankfully blamed the guy in Sydney for wrecking the laptop.
Large printer, one of those office units…. Well, it had a manual switch to go between 220 and 110 voltage. Half way around the world and coworker forgot to change the switch to the correct voltage and fried the power supply. It’s going to take a week to get a replacement unit but my coworker need to depart to go to his wedding. So a week later, I fly out to finish this guys job and install the new unit. I forget to check the voltage and fry it again. Ooops. A lady at work replied to a promotion notice with, “this bitch don’t work at all, just takes credit for our work.” Sent it as reply all.
I had a manager write his goodbye email that went to the whole company so \~250 people, nothing spicy there but one of the other managers who he was close with wrote a quite personal reply on how lucky he was for getting out and aired some of his grievances with the leadership team - on reply all. Somehow they worked it out and he stayed employed there, but I talked to him about it quite a while after and he said he was at home when he found out and he'd been literally rolling on the kitchen floor bawling and having a full toddler meltdown. I've done some more "professional" goofs causing extra work, but fortunately nothing like that...
Holy shit!
This is stuff of nightmares 🤣
The reply all thing is just idiotic you never send shit in your work email that you wouldn’t want the ceo reading
Forgot to turn the sign to open. Coworker found out after he came out, asked why the place was empty and watched five people come to the door, stop, turn and walk away. I was hungover and stood at the counter like a zombie for an hour and a half having watched many people walk up and away. Coworkers greeted me until I resigned with "Are we open?"
I had the opposite at the store I used to work at, customers come up to the door 20 minutes before opening, violently shake the door and then wonder why it's locked when the opening times were right Infront of them. It's not like they changed, they've been the same times for years.
Customers don't care about rules, they care about getting their way. Had one pry open the doors to come in because he got there before we opened.
Yeah, I have a story like this. We close. The cashier and I go into the office to handle the deposit. So the doors are locked, and from the outside the store looks empty. Cashier and I finish with the deposit and go to clock out. This woman, who clearly couldn't get in due to the locked doors, sees us and yanks on the doors again, as though that will somehow make them less locked. I go and let the cashier out. I tell this woman we are closed and point to the sign on the door with the store hours. She STILL tries to get inside and is somehow surprised when I lock the door right in front of her. I say that those kinds of people are allergic to drawing their own conclusions.
I accidentally deleted the entire project directory for my company thinking i was deleting a folder called proposals. We lost about 2/3 of the directory before i was able to cancel the deletion. The data was gone as the folder was too big to fit in the trashcan so it was permanently deleting files as it went along.
That's why we have back ups, and if your company really cares, they have off-site backups as well. At the end of the day it happens, I'm in I.T. and have accidentally deleted entire backups before.(In my defense, they shouldn't have the helpdesk techs handling the system backups.)
I completely agree, we had a true IT guy and me as just day to day IT stuff. For some ungodly reason the CEO thought it was a good idea to have my daily use account setup as a root admin account. Not saying it wasn't my mistake, but they deff opened themselves up the the oops.
Was filling a paint drum and left to use the bathroom then proceeded to go on break and midway through a snack realized and ran all the way back to paint everywhere.
Oh no! Something similar happened to a coworker of mine. I remembering walking through the paint department and just eggshell white all over the floor and surrounding counters. Poor lady (18 years old or so) had just started and didn’t secure something properly. She didn’t cry (I would have) she just looked so defeated.
Work in payroll so have $5-10k+ mistakes aren’t uncommon. Was testing out a new warning/deduction code on a new account and had entered $5k as a test check and forgot to delete it before processing, to a terminated employee, who promptly emptied his bank account so we couldn’t pull it back Much worse, a coworker rerouted something like 15-20 direct deposits to her own account. It’s all super traceable with username/time stamp records of every single change so she was promptly fired and I believe arrested
I once got something like $4500 added to my pay check by accident. I was making like $12/hr so it was a huge amount of money for me to have in my account. Called my boss IMMEDIATELY and he said I should go to Vegas and see how much I can turn it into. Payroll fixed it within a couple days, and that's how I learned that payroll direct deposits can be reversed.
I was testing some ledger changes on a live accounting system. I moved 5k out of the "general funds" account and into a test account after getting approval from finance for the test. They would then move it back and reconcile. Except I didn't. I used the id of the user associated with that test account, not the account id. Turns out that user ID existed as an account ID too, my personal account on that system. I had to go to finance and explain what happened and show them the coincidence that the test user id happened to be the same as my personal account id. This was like my third day in the job and it looked like one of my first things was quietly send myself 5k.
First day on the job working for a cleaning company, the very first thing I did was pick a mop up from the bucket directly vertical, rather than at an angle, and shattered the overhead strip light above me. While talking to the boss.
Put an adrenaline needle through my thumb. I was basically messing around with returned stock at a pharmacy whilst destroying old medication. Our old fashioned pharmacist/owner would always prime the adrenaline injectors and stab them into the wall to get rid of the liquid before disposing of it. I stupidly tried doing this myself one day but I squeezed the wrong end as I tried to prime it, and it ended up going right through my thumb and out the other side popping through my thumb nail. Felt like such an idiot. The needle wasn’t actually used, it was just out of date stock that a patient had returned. I still think about what could have happened quite often nearly 15 years later.
I thought you would've felt adrenaline.
So did I, but apparently you firstly need to prime the needle, then press it down again for the actual adrenaline to come out. Luckily I only primed it and pulled it out before anything came out.
I work in nuclear medicine. We have one test where we take a patient's blood, make it radioactive, and inject it back into them. When I was a student I accidentally stabbed myself with the dirty radioactive bloody needle.
Any new limbs or super powers achieved??
Stab them into the wall??
Turbo-charge the rats
Well, many years ago while in my early days of military life I was in charge of ordering supplies for my division. I was trying to order D batteries for mag lights. I wanted to order about 38 cases which was 380 batteries. I misread how they came. I thought it was ordered by each, so I ordered 380 batteries. That was the first mistake. For the second mistake I actually fat fingered it and ordered 3800. To compound the error the unit of issue was by the case…. I ended up with 3800 cases of D batteries while at sea on an aircraft carrier. It sucked so bad.
I had a coworker do a similar thing with jars of jam. Wanted to order 36 jars, ended up ordering 36 cases of 24 jars each. The store switched to an automated inventory management system pretty soon after that lol
But you never ran out of D's for that tour
lol. No I didn’t. In the end I gave a lot away to the ship, but was still left with over half of them. They ended up in a storeroom and I am sure they stayed there until the ship had to go through its midlife refueling. I always wondered what poor sucker was stuck moving them all cussing out what idiot would put around 1400 cases of batteries in that storeroom.
I knew a guy that repaired guitar effects pedals. They use particular transistors that affect the sound depending on whether they are germanium or silicon based (I think). He was struggling to find a particular type but eventually did from a former Russian military base making some cash on the side. They used the transistors in their radios. He meant to order 10, however ordered 10 boxes. Of 100 each. The former Russian military base that didn’t take returns… As it turned out, he cornered the market for those particular transistors and he ended up making clones of and/or custom pedals for many legendary guitarists from around the world. To this day he is friends with them. He is also the most ethical businessman I have ever known often doing special projects for charity.
Taken a new medicine at work then made me act like I was drunk as fuck , it was so embarrassing and stupid. I should’ve tried the new medicine at home first
I took a muscle relaxer for the first time at the beginning of the work day and stared at my computer for six hours.
I used to take a muscle relaxer every Thursday night on my way home from work so I could settle in and go straight to sleep for my early Friday shift. I would go most of the week without sleeping, and then make up for the whole week with the "sleepy Thursday" tradition. The pill took like an hour and a half to kick in and I lived about 45 minutes from work. So I'd pop the pill on my way out the door, get home, settle in, and usually just crash and burn for 10+ hours. Then I got a flat tire on my way home from work. And my stupid scissors jack didn't have the crank thing, but I managed to do it with a pen somehow. It took over an hour. I got the donut on, I got back in the car, and I sunk like 10 feet down into the driver's seat. I still had like 25 minutes to get home and I made a dumb call and just went for it. I have no idea how I got home because I couldn't even keep my head up. I walked in the door, walked straight to the bed, and passed out with all my clothes still on til the next morning. That was the end of sleepy Thursdays.
I got put on heart meds and did this. Fainted at work and woke up in a dog bed they had nicely laid me on lol (I was a vet tech)
Hah. I had been given an anti-nausea prescription to take the edge off the side effects of another prescription and was told to take them at the same time. I was working a morning shift in a kitchen when I took the combo for the first time and started nodding off standing up at the line. Looked up the drug interactions and Google said *do not mix that shit.* My boss believed me that I wasn't using anything illegal but no pass to go home, so I noodled around on brain soup until I came out on the other side like four hours later. Good thing I was on cold apps.
We were in an all-hands meeting over Zoom. Small company, ~90 employees. Had just hired 6 new people, mostly remote. CEO ended the meeting by opening it up to questions. I wanted to sound welcoming to the new employees but I didn't want to turn on my mic, so I typed in the chat, "where are all the new employees located?", immediately hit send. Except I didn't type "new". I accidentally hit J on the keyboard instead of N. And I didn't proofread before sending. So I asked the entire company where the Jew employees are located. IMMEDIATELY followed up with "new* omg I'm so sorry" and my CEO played it in stride like a pro. Best part - one of the Jewish employees Slacked me after the meeting to tell me where he was located My original post about this on my now-banned original account: https://www.reddit.com/r/facepalm/s/gXujAFWAaz
I had a friend who worked in the PR department of a get out and vote campaign. One of their employees made the same mistake with New York on their online advertising one day. It was caught quick but he had one hell of day answering questions and apologizing.
Not me but a middle aged female in another department was unmuted while taking a massive dump and loudly taking a personal call on her cell. All 265 people on the call could hear her answer the phone and start talking about whatever while hearing the distinct sound of pee followed by farts and plops. Despite the CEO and the group directors all calmly (at first) telling her to please mute before the panic started to set in. She thought she was muted the entire time and had the volume set so low she couldn’t hear people yelling at her so she could instead be on her own call. It was almost 5 minutes into the call when we could hear the toilet paper rolling in the dispenser that she went dead quiet and left the meeting a second later. This was also not a work from home position either.
The phrase “followed by farts and plops” really has me giggling lol
Lol, that’s a great story. Here’s one of mine that I am reminded of by your story: I was working as a consultant for a big Tech firm in Silicon Valley. I had an early morning meeting with my primary client and a contractor who was doing some work for us. So, the client’s still at home, I am in my hotel room , as is the contractor in his. We’re on Webex, with cameras on, and this dude (the contractor) does not realize he’s on video. This all happens too fast for either of us (me or my client) to warn the dude, but as we are discussing things, he walks right up to his laptop in a towel, takes it off, getting ready for the day, and boom full screen dick. It was never spoken of. To this day, that guy still doesn’t know that he did that.
The meeting host could have muted her
I'm more wondering what company has 265 person conference calls where everyone isn't automatically muted. A call with that many unmuted people is just asking for disaster one way or another.
My boss charged me with carefully depositing our cash earnings from the week at the bank down the road. I walked out to my car, set the bag on top of the car, and happily drove off 🤪
Was it a "fell off the top and you had to come back and get it" situation? Or a "raining money all over the street corner" situation?
Option A. I got all the way to the bank and parked and went to reach for the bag in the passenger seat. Cue panic. I drove back up the same road (MAJOR road in Nashville) just crawling in the middle turning lane the whole way, until I saw that blessed little black lump on the road a few miles back and cried tears of joy.
Thank you for answering and not leaving a cliffhanger.
I renamed all customers last names to the same last name. I don't remember why I was doing an update, but forgot to include the where clause. Thankfully i had a way to restore them, but that sucked. *edit* It was probably to fix something weird with the name like remove a special character that was pasted into the field and messing up some other processes. To which, I hate anyone's name who has a ' in their name, like O'Neil or something, because vendors suck at csv sanitizing.
"Hey Mark Johnson,\ hey Derik Johnson,\ hey Marcia Johnson,\ hey Joshua Johnson,\ hey Danielle Johnson,\ hey Johnson Johnson."
Pretty much. My boss flipped his shit for like 20 minutes until we figured out how to restore them. Then it became one of those things to haze me over.
I ordered 6 ASME water heaters in 3 phase configuration for a job. There was no 3 phase electrical anywhere on the jobsite. If you're not familiar with plumbing, ASME heaters are made to order non returnable. And you can't convert them in the field to the correct electrical configuration. $9K a piece. Boss was not happy. I thought I was about to get fired. Luckily, we were able to make it up elsewhere further down the line.
I used to work for a plumbing wholesaler and as soon as I saw ASME I knew you fucked up 🤣
Called the shredding company to ask them to shred our bin of already shredded paper.
a 3d sensor we make slipped from my hands... dropped on the floor. i felt so fucking bad ...we sell those for 100k :| (nothing broke ! we just had to fix the laser and camera alignements) we have a tradition now, i you drop a sensor, your name will be written on the floor where the hole left in the floor is (they make a nice mark in the flooring material)
I was working at a retail hardware store about 25 years ago. I had to do the cash deposit and drop it off at the bank night drop. Don’t know how, but I forgot to go to the bank and went directly home instead. I didn’t even think about anymore. The cash bag with over $10k in cash and checks was waiting for me in the car the next morning. I didn’t even lock my car doors.
That is an operational error. Every retail job I ever worked, cash drops were required to be done by two people.
I was a tank crewman in the Army (gunner). After we finished one of our gunnery tables (which you can think of as training exercises where you drive around and shoot targets, then get graded on everything from time, to accuracy, to proper fire commands), we reported in for grading. One particular engagement I was feeling real confident about. Our commands were on point, we were quick, and my aim was spot on. It contained a moving target, which was a plywood cutout of a truck that moves on rails and is heated from behind so that we can pick it up on thermal sights. Anyway, our "grading" went something like "Well, your time was good, fire commands were perfect, and your aim was dead on. But unfortunately, we're going to have to give you zero points for this engagement because your target was actually over here on *this* hillside. What you hit was a badger." In the recording from the tower's FLIR camera, it was very obviously a poor badger just minding his own business, waddling along the hillside that I annihilated with a 120mm sabot round. ☹️ I felt terrible. Hell of a shot, though.
Were you able to paint a badger shaped kill-mark on the tank?
I envisioned you as that guy hunting the gopher in Caddyshack while reading this comment.
Were any jokes made about womp rats when you guys got back to the barracks?
That poor animal, I feel absolutely terrible for laughing but the thought of a badger just doing its thing then getting absolutely blown to smithereens is hilarious
Lmaoo that's fucking insane. At least poor dude was gone instantly
My second week at my current job I backed into and knocked over a light pole. Worst part: it was on [video](https://youtu.be/pp66QH-i4cI?si=89WS67VUo1RrLsrj)
Bro you RAN TO THAT LIGHTPOLE!
I had to show it who was boss
A typo in a technical report turned 101.0 into 1010. The minimum standard was 100 so it passed with flying colours. Of course, given natural production variation, there were soon many, many expensive problems.
First job was as a cart boy at a golf course. Pulled all the carts in for the night and forgot to plug them all in. Most were dead come morning on a Sunday. Fired on Monday.
they should have kept you because you would never do that again
I tattooed a child.
Don't be too hard on yourself gramps....those camps were pretty brutal.
I did not anticipate that.
Daaaaaamn.
Story please!
It’s really not that good - sounds way cooler/worse than it was. I’m a tattoo artist on a state where tattooing minors is not allowed with only a few tattoos exceptions. I had these two sisters come in to get cute matching tattoos and I got called in to cover one of them. I was chatting her up trying to keep her nerves calm since it was her first tattoo. I ask if she’s in school. Yes. I ask how long before she graduates. She was starting her junior year. I ask what she’s majoring in. She tells me she doesn’t have one. I ask what she wants to major in and she says psychology. I ask where she goes to school. She says Madison. I ask if she likes James Madison and if she’s enjoying her time in town for the summer. She is confused and says “Madison Highschool.” Not sisters. Mom and daughter. I fucked up because it’s illegal to tattoo minors and I could lose my license and eat a $1400 fine. I assumed the person up front looked over the paperwork, and that’s where I made the dumb mistake. Kids these days don’t look like kids did when I was young.
Teams meeting, thought I was on mute. Person I dislike shows up a couple mins late and I blurt out… “Stupid ass finally decides to show up.”
I once muted myself in a teams meeting to let out a loud belch. I was already muted. So from everyone else's perspective I unmuted, burped loudly and then muted again. My boss thanked me for my valuable insights.
Lol was there an awkward silence? Think I would have fudged and said the courier had finally shown up or something.
Had my pump connected the wrong way round and put 1200 psi into my hose valve and blew the test cock right off it flooding the stair well in a huge river of water.
getting a friend hired. I worked for a restaurant for many months and it was great, never heard a complaint. one day they decided they wanted more help, offered my friend the job. in less than six months, trouble was happening everywhere. I’ll never work with a friend.
Had a buddy that was constantly asking me for a referral to my company. I wouldn’t do it because I knew he was lazy. One day he went on his own and filled out an application and wrote my name on the top. I had no idea. Next day the sales manager came up to me and said “hey I hired your friend.” I asked him why on earth he would do that without talking to me first. He said “well he wrote you name on the app so I figured you recommended him.” He lasted three months. I got shit on for many months after that with employees coming up to me and saying “your fucking friend…”and telling me whatever he fucked up that they were trying to clean up.
My school was hiring and my friend was looking for a job. I told my school I didn't know anyone for the position and told my friend we weren't hiring. I love my friend to the ends of the earth but I also love my job and know how my friend works. It would not have ended well for anyone involved.
[удалено]
Same. I got my BFF a job and needless to say, we don't talk anymore.
Ate a cookie a customer gave me. "Oh no, those were for later..." "Yeah, I could tell by the aftertaste. Thanks tho, I'll just go spend the rest of the day on maintenance tasks away from customers." Luckily I'm the boss so I just put on my headphones and started fixing shit around the shop. I let my main manager know the fuckup and he kinda just didn't send anyone my way for the rest of the day. Definitely got razzed for that one every time I brought in baked goods for the team for years though.
did you have a good day at least
Eh, the paranoia of a customer noticing kinda sucked the fun out of it. I enjoy, but in the comfort of my own home in the evenings.
Haha first time I got high, my coworker had given me some cookies and I had no idea what they were. I ate 3 before 10am, got a coworker to drive me home and watched movies in the basement the rest of the night lol.
Quit a job where I had to do next to nothing, watched movies all day, but was paid the bare minimum, to do a job where I'm constantly busy but paid the bare minimum.
Jesus I feel this one. Went from "managing" a grocery store kitchen, which was a little work, to working construction, which is a *fucking ton* of work. And I think I actually am making less. Haha fuck.
Worked in a mental hospital as a janitor. Been there for about a week when someone said I needed to clean a part I've never clean. It was a wing that had a security desk, and locked door. Half way though mopping the floor the empire place locks down because one of the violent patience got out since I didn't know I had to lock the door, and the security guy was out to lunch. That ward was an isolation Ward for violent people who were there on court order or sentenced there. Thankfully the guy who got out just went to the day room, and turned on the TV. When the nurses said he had to go back he did. The janitor that did that ward was off sick, and I've never even been to that side of the hospital before. Wasn't told of any special rules or anything.
Forwarded an email to a coworker, which included a link to a viral video that everyone in the world was talking about that month — a very naughty video. BUUUUUUUT I forgot to use my personal email instead of my work email. Boss intercepted the message. I was fired the next morning. This was a week before Christmas. In the grand scheme… it all worked out for the best. I ended up at a much better job making twice as much money. But I still feel dumb about it.
Please don't tell me it was an Animal Crossing video.
Pretty sure it involves 2 girls and a cup
Connecting duct to a new heat pump and drilled a screw through the copper refrigerant piping. Pffffffffffffffffffffffffffffft! In the basement of a very, VERY wealthy and influential family’s vacation home.
Working on an automatic failover in a Cisco ASA for our main outside interface and accidentally setup a NAT loop that brought the whole org down for any external communication for 2 days while we tried to find the needle in the haystack of ACLs that caused it. In my defense, it took 4 layers of TAC escalation and 6 Cisco engineers to stumble upon it. 150 employees just suddenly didn't have anything to do. No email, no internet, no connection to any cloud services... Nothing. My boss was like "you ain't a cowboy if you ain't been bucked off..." or, in other words, "sometimes when you're working hard, stuff goes wrong. Learn from it, move forward."
Left the lift gate down on a truck while adjusting position. Took out someone's rear window.
Not me per se, but an attorney at a large NY law firm where I was a paralegal knew I was taking a trip to Amsterdam. So I sent my out of office email to the litigation team, and he replied all with “Pothead slacker.” He was gone the next day. Poor guy.
I delivered funeral flowers to a hospital room where the person was very much alive. Didn't realize it until I was about to deliver the get well soon flowers to the wake.
Stuck my hand in a bagel slicer while the blade was slowing down
I once sent out an important email to the entire company but forgot to attach the critical document everyone needed.
Our CEO once sent a company wide email that just said LOL.
Your CEO is a legend
I send emails with attachments almost everyday for work, if you write the word attached in the email Gmail will tell you that you didn't attach anything before sending. If it wasn't for this function, no one would receive the report I "sent" off. The few times I don't type attached in the email, it gets forgotten 10 times outta 10 lol.
I scheduled a meeting with a client and forgot to account for the time difference. They were really upset when I didn’t show up at the right time.
I spilt a Bloody Mary on the lap of a very rich American who had just told me he was on his way to Heathrow. He was wearing a cream linen suit. He had told me his baggage had gone ahead, that he was having brunch then heading to the airport. I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone look at me with such anger in their eyes, before or since.
I practice criminal law. During a drink drive trial I was, for some reason, using the word “circumscribed” during a question to a witness. However, without realizing it, what I actually said was “circumcised”. Twice. On break, the court reporter asked me why I said what I’d said. I didn’t believe her. She played it back for me. I’d said it. 🤦🏻♀️
I sent out a mass email but didn’t BCC…
Why filter for laser chiller $100? Me find same filter on McMaster Carr for $50. Me save lab $50 every six months. Except the McMaster one, while having the same filter specs, also contained cellulose. I caused some $15k pump diodes to die about 10k hours prematurely. Of course, we only figured out the issue when the second set of diodes died prematurely as well...
Built a house too low
it was not really an error, but I worked at a Midwest bank HQ and the lady that normally pays off the banks borrowed money when the bonds mature had to be at a conference in North Carolina for a week so she left me instructions to pay off a $103 million dollar loan that was going to come due while she was gone. She left me a deposit/withdrawal slip from the bank's own account and the wiring instructions. I was to fill the slip out and at exactly 3 p.m. go to the 5th floor wire room and ask for so and so lady and hand her the slip and the wiring instructions to the DTC in New York. Well the withdrawal slip did not have enough amount boxes for that much money, you could only go up to 99 million 999 thousand, 999 and 99 cents. So I had to get another one and break it up into two sums, one for $50 million and one for $53 million. Well that lady in the wire office didn't know who I was and for all she knew I was a crooked employee wiring $103 million of the banks money to my own offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands. And the thing was that it is such a large amount of money that the interest on it was more than my day's wages just dealing with her for an hour. Finally I had to go back up to Corporate Trust and get a bank VP to countersign it or she was not sending the wire. Had she not the bank would have missed it's repayment and their credit rating lowered. Not to mention the banks shares falling because of a missed payment. None of those fucking VPs would countersign because they didn't know or trust me either. They thought I well could be stealing from the bank and refused. I had to go to the bank president and explain the situation and he was clearly not happy. But he called the wire office and said they were to accept my slips and send them as soon as they got them before the goddamned DTC closed, because if they didn't I would have to fly to New York and be in the DTC when they opened with the money. I hated that job, but that is my fun story of the time I had to write a check for $103 million.
During a conference call, I forgot to mute my mic and made an offhand comment about the meeting being boring. Everyone heard it, and it was so embarrassing.
Delivered the wrong furniture at a house and they wouldn’t give it back. The company I worked at didn’t care, told me to get over it even though THEY gave me the wrong address to deliver to. Tried to take it out of my paycheck so I put in my 2 weeks.
Got involved with a married coworker. Whom I later learned was just going through all the new male employees.
I am personally responsible for a US Navy warship losing all power and going completely dark in the middle of the night, in the middle of the pacific ocean, for almost a half hour. Edit: I also am responsible for flipping a switch that resulted in a mass murder of fish large enough that the local media covered the event and postulated on the possible causes. Edit 2 because I keep getting notifications: If I wanted to I could post a link to the article and video of the fish murder.....but I won't....💪
I feel like I would’ve taken that last one to my grave
Between you and the guy who evaporated a badger w/a 120mm sabot tank round, I don't know who would be the bigger celebrity in the group chat. I mean, there's entire counties whose special operations forces could not do on purpose what you did on accident lmao. Was the ship's Captain impressed you managed to fuck up so badly? Or am I talking to you from the afterlife?
The power loss incident was essentially explained away as an overall plant loss, however if I had been as responsive as I would later become, it would not have happened. The fish murder thing is just my own hypothesis after sitting on the mess deck, eating breakfast the day after we did a "thing", and seeing a local news channel report about mass fish death in the exact area we were operating.
I nailed a pocket door into a wall because I forgot to.switch to shorter nails when using my.brad nailer
I used to make soup in a factory for a living and you’re supposed to use specific ingredients for each one because of different allergens. Anyways, I accidentally mixed two different totes of noodles together, which was over 1000 pounds altogether. I was absolutely mortified by my mistake, but my boss just waved it off and calmly said not to do it again. It probably helped my case that I was one of their best workers and it was around 140 degrees in the factory that day.
Thought I was making a 5000 payment to ADP for payroll. Actually made a 5000 payment to ADT.
Worked at a graduate school in online education. Was trying to delete a class site and somehow deleted THE ENTIRE SEMESTER WORTH OF CLASS SITES. Luckily we had backups and my boss was very chill. I panicked, Reported the error and left to cry at my then boyfriend's house. Was sure I was fired. I wasnt🙃
I was working remotely (think dial up modem; 4800 baud) on an environmental data monitoring system. I had rebooted it a few times. Little did I know that I had shutdown a refinery line that took several days to recover. It cost them a few hundred thousand dollars Ooops!!! They should have said something before they allowed me to connect.
I was running chips in a casino. I had a cart of big chips that was set to a certain amount and I was coloring tables up(taking small denominations and giving back $100 chips). The balance of my cart should never change, if I buy $5000 worth of $25 chips, I give $5000 worth of $100 chips. To one table I took $500 more than I gave putting my cart over by $500, I reported the mistake to my bosses so they could check cameras and see where the mistake happened. Between reporting that mistake and the next time I balanced my cart I had organized my cart stupidly and I buried big chips with small chips which set my count off even further, the chips were there but i was counting it wrong because of bad organizing. I had to report the second(non-existent) mistake to my bosses. 10 minutes later the surveillance supervisor comes to me to take the $500 and show me where the mistake was in my cart. Nothing here was major but I felt like a complete fucking dumbass for days.
Back in the day of floppy disks... the big boss was working for a week on a job for a presentation for a client, lots of spreadsheets, etc. On the day of the presentation, he gave the floppy and a blank to the new 18 year old fresh out of a tech high school with high grades in "data processing" IT guy to make a backup. You would put the original in the drive, run the backup program, put the blank in the drive, it would go back and forth and copy the original to the blank.... if you didn't screw up the process. My immediate boss told me he had to go to bat for me big-time to keep my job.
Left the back door unlocked to a pool facility. Thankfully nobody wandered in and died but I'd have 100% been on the stand for negligence if they had.
Ran a customers credit card and accidentally added an extra zero. Took a $2,300 order to a $23,000 order and the charge went through. Our accounting person caught it at the end of the day when they mentioned the really great day we had to my boss.
one of my first jobs in 1989, I was doing typesetting and artwork and did a menu for a restaurant round the corner. I did the Wine List on the back page and accidentally typed 'Whine List', the spell checker didnae pick it up and no one else picked up on it until two weeks later when the owner brought them back saying: "Oi, look what you did!"
"This time I'm going to be more personable, likable, make more of an effort on the human side" What a mistake. Now I have an incredibly boring guy who acts like he has a crush on me and won't stop telling me about Futurama episodes he's seen
Lets seeeee, lost a kid as a ski instructor. That sucked, he was a little shit and hard to keep track of (non english speaker and didnt want to listen to my shitty spanish) This was on a HUGE mountain also (heavenly valley) luckily a lifty nabbed him and handed off to a ski patroller. Then there's the cabinet shop I was working in a couple years ago. Trying to make a rabbet cut on althe table saw, I was lining up my mark with the saw blade at the back of blade. Decided to turn the saw on and move my piece into the blade, FROM THE BACK. That piece of wood left my hands like a bat out of hell. Table saws are insanely powerful and I gave that thing a nice chunk of wood to throw at its absolute hardest, fastest speed. I put a hole in the metal garage door that faced the saw. I'm lucky I was standing to the side. first thing was not so stupid, the saw thing was definitely stupid AF
Sent the wrong door sizes to the framing company, every since door was 1 inch too short. It was on a 212 unit apartment building. I think each unit had between 7-10 doors. It’s amazing how expensive 1 inch can be
I used to be a realtor. I listed a house, helped the sellers arrange staging, hired a professional photographer. Listing looked great, lots of interest, multiple strong offers, everything went unusually smoothly. Driving home from the closing, I was thinking how good it felt that the clients were so happy. So happy with the price they got, how smoothly it went, the photos, the staging... FUCK. THE STAGING. I'd forgotten to notify the stager that the house had sold. All the rented furniture was still in it. If the buyers wanted to be sticklers, they could keep it all. I immediately called the buyers' agent, but she didn't respond for *hours* and I was shitting bricks. I called the stager and admitted to my giant screw-up. She pulled guys from other tasks and got the furniture out once I finally got ahold of the buyers. Ended up buying gifts for the stager, the buyers, and the buyers' agent. That day is one of the reasons I decided to no longer be a realtor.
Not me... I worked at a gas station pumping gas. There were two of us, one for each island, and it was a slow day so we were talking while one of the cars on his side was filling up. After a while we noticed gas leaking from the bottom of the car. My partner shut it off quickly and to inform this elderly lady about a problem with her gas tank. The lady looked in her side mirror than turned and quickly looked over her left shoulder seeing the pump stinking out of filler. She then looked up and said, "You didn't you asshole!" Not knowing what was going on her backed up and she got out screaming at him while opening up her truck. There was 3 or four inches of gas poured directly into her trunk full of shopping bags. She berated him called him an idiot for using the wrong tank while the real one was hidden under her license plate. He then calls her a bitch right as the owner comes over. Basically the woman's deceased husband had some sort of auxiliary tank installed in the trunk at one time. The filler was on the driver side with a shiny chrome cap that you couldn't miss. Co-worker got scolded for the foul language, but the owner knew it was an honest mistake. No real disalpline action and the owner took care of the client.
Tell me you live in NJ without telling me you live in NJ. My first job was working the pumps at a small gas station/auto repair. 4 pumps. I then expressed interest in working on the cars, and the boss taught me all kinds of things over the next 2 years. He was also a solid, good decent person and also a very influential male figure in my life. Found out later that he used to be some bad ass biker gang type dude, selling drugs and doing bad shit. Eventually turned his life around and started a successful business. I'd been a juvenile menace, then an 18yo degenerate who was quickly heading down the wrong path. He told me much later that he could see himself in the angry, sad, and scared young man that was applying for a job very much below my skill and intelligence level. (Not shitting on gas attendants but you know what I mean) Wherever you are, Mr Brian Quinn... thank you for being compassionate while also giving me a little kick in the ass when I needed it. I'll never forget you.
Quitting! It's been almost a year, but I have a second interview next week.
My boss said in a meeting that he would never make us do something that he had me do a few weeks earlier. I called him out on it and he said "that only happened one time." I proceeded to say " well, you suck one dick then you are a cocksucker." Didn't go over well.
I asked the Prince of Monaco to step out of the way because we were expecting a VIP to arrive any second. He was the VIP.
Thinking that the people I hired weren't dumb enough to take a $10,000 check that was printed on an inkjet printer. Employee: "In fairness, he said he didn't have his ID."
At 17, mistaking HR for a reasonable ear for my Manager being a total asshat and bully. HR is not there to protect you it's there to protect the company