What's the worst you have ever @!*$ed up at work?

[Locut0s]

No not about me this time. :awe: Just curious what's the worst you have ever fucked up at work and what was the result? Did you just get yelled at, or maybe fired, or did no one find out about it? Did it cost the company a lot of money?

Also what's the worst you ever saw, in person, anyone else fuck up at work?

 

[Ika]

Back in high school I worked as a server at this event center (basically we had banquets for parties and weddings and stuff). I was serving mimosas in tall champagne glasses, I think this was for Easter or something. I had the tray of maybe five or six mimosas in my left hand, and was passing them out to the people at the table. One woman was kind of... large, so I had to kind of bend over to place the glass on the table. Well... as I was placing it I lost track of where the tray was in my hand, and the next thing I know the whole damn thing comes crashing down on this poor woman's back. I freak out, apologize a bunch of times and run to get my manager. She comes out, thoroughly apologizes, comps the woman free dry cleaning and some other stuff. Fortunately I kept my job, just got a pretty bad scolding in the back and lots and lots of shame.

 

[GodlessAstronomer]

Edit - LOL, Aflac and I have similar stories.

I was working as a waiter for a cafe and we were doing some out-catering for the city council who were moving into a new building. It was a fairly fancy affair and my job just involved walking around the floor offering fancy food and champaign to guests. The room was filled with high-powered people like the mayor and deputy mayor, council officials, police officials, high-level real estate guys, etc.

I had two large trays with champaign flutes which I was filling up. Each tray holds maybe 16-18 flutes. I filled every glass on one tray, pushed it towards the middle of the table and started on the second tray in front of the full one. One of my co-workers asked me to pass the full tray so she could start handing them out. I stupidly tried to pick the full tray up awkwardly and lift it over the half-full one.

The tray tipped in my hands, some of the flutes fell which caused the whole thing to lose balanced and I basically dumped the entire tray of champaign flutes directly onto the other tray. 30+ broken champaign flutes, a couple of bottles of champaign on the floor and me looking like a complete dick in front of all of these people.

My bosses there were really great (one of them was right there when it happened) and they didn't chew me out for it or anything. Later that afternoon we were already laughing about it. But man, that sucked ass at the time.

 

[Locut0s]

Lol first 2 replies are identical.

 

[zerocool84]

Dropped a whole pallet of expensive front entry door that I was pulling down from the very top of the racks with a forklift. Got drug tested but was clean so only got a slap on the wrist.

 

[Freshgeardude]

lol not at work, but I do community service at my school cause everyone uses computers ( classes on comp too, its great no notebooks, no note taking needed, but i digress)

so a laptop was in and it needed vista pro installed. it had vista home and we needed domain usage.

So i really wasnt paying attention. the key was an UPGRADE, not a regular copy.

I booted up the installer and deleted the hard drive of all its data.

Oh i was laughing already haha and to tell the guy in charge. he is a pretty relaxed guy, so when i told him he was like "wtf? ok lol"


luckily he installed a copy of another windows OS and then upgraded, since it wouldnt let me install vista without a key like they do on windows 7 nowadays.

AND the girl didnt need anything that i accidentally deleted

 

[zerocool84]

lol not at work, but I do community service at my school cause everyone uses computers ( classes on comp too, its great no notebooks, no note taking needed, but i digress)

so a laptop was in and it needed vista pro installed. it had vista home and we needed domain usage.

So i really wasnt paying attention. the key was an UPGRADE, not a regular copy.

I booted up the installer and deleted the hard drive of all its data.

Oh i was laughing already haha and to tell the guy in charge. he is a pretty relaxed guy, so when i told him he was like "wtf? ok lol"


luckily he installed a copy of another windows OS and then upgraded, since it wouldnt let me install vista without a key like they do on windows 7 nowadays.

AND the girl didnt need anything that i accidentally deleted

Aww you could have gotten away with it if you checked on the net. There's certain registry hacks you can do so you can clean install an upgrade key. Well now you know for next time.

 

[Acanthus]

dp

 

[Acanthus]

Crashed a palette(sp?) of liquid cascade through the bakery wall at a sams club.

My boss was found to be at fault, however. (he stacked the palettes wrong and they had him on camera ordering me to take them out like that, 2300lbs of liquid detergent on top of 800lbs of powdered in light cardboard boxes)

 

[Leros]

I was working at a plant that manufactured industrial construction equipment, so we had a lot of 440V arc welders. I was driving through the factory with an empty forklift. I always kept the forks low to the ground, but this time they were only about 1" off the ground.

I ended up snagging a 440v line with the low fork, ripping the outlet off the wall. I felt pretty bad because a welder had to go home for the rest of the day (and lose pay) while the outlet got fixed.

Luckily it was my second to last day so no point in yelling at me too much.

 

[marvdmartian]

Damn near took off the tip of my left hand little finger with a conveyor chain once, on the fifth day of a new job. Got lucky, only had a compression laceration that took 5 stitches to close up (and a really gnarly looking scar to show off for the rest of my life). No ass chewing required, especially as when it happened, I went up to the break room and rinsed it out, then put a dressing on it and went back out and worked for another hour, before the boss sent everyone home. THEN I took a trip to the emergency room to get it looked at.

Had a co-worker (my best friend in high school), when I worked as a stock boy at the local grocery store in high school, who spilled ~25 gallons of milk one time. We were told that under no circumstances were we to stack more than 5 crates of milk on a hand truck. Each crate held 6 gallons, and 30 gallons on a hand truck was already a pretty hefty load to handle. He got in a hurry, put a 6th crate on the stack, and headed out the door......only to have some fat lady with a grocery cart in his way. When he tried to stop fast, that stack of milk crates split in the middle, and all 6 crashed to the floor. Out of 36 gallons, about 11 survived. He got a pretty good butt chewing for that, AFTER he mopped it all up!

 

[Wheezer]

Worked for Pepsi and the week before the 4th of July one year ran about 3,000 cases of Mt. Dew with the wrong end code date. Had to re-sticker them all by hand.

When I first started, I was inside a trailer on a forklift, and raised the mast to get a pallet (don't do that) and I ended up ripping a hole in the roof of the trailer.....peeled back like a tin can...never told anyone just quietly closed the dock doors told the driver he was good to go and let him go on his way.

 

[shortylickens]

Hynix. And I cant even tell you what the worst was. On multiple occasions I caused a machine so much grief it couldnt produce wafers for a day. The bean counter upstairs know exactly how much money each machine is worth. If, for example, a Tel Track Mark 7 goes down for an hour it costs the company about 1 million dollars.

 

[Rage187]

Ran a SQL Update statement without a Where clause and jacked up a database.

When I used to do install hardwood floors. We were laying a massive kitchen and there was to be an island, so they had cut a hole in the middle of the kitchen subfloor to run pipes for a sink.

I meant to cut some boards around the hole, but forgot and laid 15*12 feet of flooring covering the hole. We were getting ready to leave for the day and I realized my mistake. We tried for 2 solid hours to find the hole but couldn't. We ended up tearing up all the flooring the next day and then had to buy new flooring and put it back in.

That little mistake pushed the occupancy date back a couple days and cost the company a couple thousand dollars in materials and time.

 

[mfenn]

Hynix. And I cant even tell you what the worst was. On multiple occasions I caused a machine so much grief it couldnt produce wafers for a day. The bean counter upstairs know exactly how much money each machine is worth. If, for example, a Tel Track Mark 7 goes down for an hour it costs the company about 1 million dollars.

And now we know why you can't get another job in the semiconductor industry! :awe:

 

[Engineer]

The crew (at previous job) just finished wiring a $300,000 press and without testing and proofing the wiring, I (with full confidence that it was going to work) told the guys to stand out of the way and watch the sparks fly.

I flipped the disconnect switch and by hell the sparks (and smoke) did fly. They wired the transformer for 480 to 240 instead of 480 to 120. Took out about $10,000 worth of components on the press.

oops.

 

[Rockinacoustic]

Recently we just found out that I typed an script for the wrong patient back in April, so he had been on it for 2 months before anyone caught the error. Luckily it was just Vitamin D...

 

[Crusty]

Involved our broker to try and track our orders and find out why they weren't going live. A few days of troubleshooting on both ends of the networks and it turns out I had our systems configuration pointing to the 'QA' session and not the 'production' session.

Wasted a solid days worth of work trying to troubleshoot a single line in a text file.

 

[SaDiZTiKStyLeZ]

Maybe my unintentional social interactions on my last job, where I didn't think thoroughly about what I was supposed to be saying, as it usually required a quick response.
I was ordered to run raceway for cables across rooms, but the guy wanted each room to be ran differently, for the most part. So after I finished the first classroom, I forgot how he wanted the other rooms, and ended up botching all of them, and only got first one correct. I was the only one around at the time to hear instructions so there wasn't anyone else to know what was going on. I was running on minimal to no sleep. I don't even know if I got sleep the night before.
Came back next day and had to redo every room. Had the whole team out for this, so I focused my duties elsewhere all day.
When I began doing asset tags for computers to be installed in schools, nobody told me the difference between IM & PM. IM-Desktops. PM-Portable. So for about 5 months, there was possible thousands that were shipped out and installed with wrong asset tag. While all present agreed that I couldn't entirely be at fault because I wasn't told the difference when I started, it was also one of the last days I was scheduled.

 

[Lounatik]

Several fuck ups here: Way back when I was 17 I had a summer job delivering stuff for a local drugstore. I was in a cargo van and backed into a main pump for a golf course sprinkler system, which caused the entire golf course's sprinklers to turn on simultaneously, which pissed off a whole load of Saturday morning golfers.

I also flooded a woman's house by not checking a fitting for an icemaker on her refrigerator I had just installed. Water had crept all the way under her wood floor from her kitchen to her front door, which is where they saw the water first. Shew had to get her whole home re-floored.

Three years ago I stepped off of the back of my work truck (think as high as a semi's rear deck, about 6 feet) thinking I had my liftgate up, into thin air and fell 12 feet onto my head causing a nasty concussion which lingered with me for about a year.

Peace

Lounatik

 

[Gigantopithecus]

I've dropped a couple skeletal elements in lab, including a skull which asploded spectacularly. Fortunately you can glue them back together into more or less acceptable condition, just takes hours.

Also, dating an undergrad in another grad student's lab section of the same course was probably not the best idea...but nothing happened. Edit: nothing happened in terms of either of us getting in trouble. Edit again: in trouble with the school.

 

[velillen]

I work on navy boats and theres always quite a few fuck ups. I haven't done any but heres a few i can think of.

Some guys were lent to another trade and had to cut wood on the top of a sub to build a containment. Well the girl who was doing the cutting had a high powered saw (way more power than needed for wood lol) Well the guys spent all day cutting and building and at the end of the day cleaned up and there were probably 100 gouge marks on the hull of the sub from the saw. Well this was the pressure hull so any gouges have to be fixed as it compromises the hull. Cost about 200,000 dollars to fix. Nobody could use saws for awhile after that either lol.

This one is just one i heard about. Another shipyard was working on a carrier. Well theres big ass main steam valves that weight probably 5,000 pounds (if not more). Well some how they put the fing thing in backwards. It a 800psi steam system so if it had been fired up the valve would have failed horribly most likely killing people. Thankfully the inspectors noticed and they fixed it.

Those are the two that come to mind. Theres always smaller ones but they get fixed rather easily and arent a big deal.

 

[Cerpin Taxt]

I was working on one of our customer's immunoassay analyzers, having a helluva time trying to figure out why it wouldn't calibrate the Troponin assay. I was a good 2.5 hours away from home at midnight on a Friday night, and I just wanted to get out of there. To top it all off the lab was almost out of Troponin calibrator samples.

Finally I made a fix that I felt was going to do it, but they only had one incomplete set of calibrators left. Usually its 6 levels, S0 thru S5, but this set was out of S0. The lab tech suggested substituting DI water for the S0 calibrator, and I agreed. It calibrated like that finally, so I gave the instrument back to them and went home.

Sure enough, on Saturday they got a false Troponin result -- that means that the instrument reported a critical Troponin level on a patient sample, but it wasn't accurate. The Troponin assay is what they use to tell if someone has had a heart attack, and a true critical result usually means that the patient's chest is gonna get cracked open for open heart surgery. If they hadn't checked the result on another analyzer in the lab and found that the original result was inaccurate, I could've been responsible for some major unnecessary surgery.

I didn't sleep well for a while right after that happened.

 

[dandruff]

this has to be the biggest fuckup i have seen in my professional life ... on the drawings we specified 66"x36" special order windows for an office facade - 326 windows ... the spec writer ordered 56"x36" - even with multiple checks and balances (its like on drawings gazillion times and somehow got missed on shop dwgs by me) ... at $450 a window that $146,700.00. forget lost time .. so many sleepless nights ...

the poor guy lost his job, i kept mine. luckily being a design-build firm we were able to use most of the windows in several of our future designs ... there are others instances in architecture / construction field like ordering wrong size elevator or mismatching bricks or painting whole buildings with wrong color but nothing like the window fiasco ...

 

[D1gger]

Back when I first started in construction and was working as an estimator I screwed up an estimate by miscalculating the area of land needed to be cleared of trees and pulling the stumps. The project value was ~$250k and I left out about $80,000 of cost.

We lost our shirts on that project, but my boss, although upset, was understanding and told me to take this as a learning experience.

I now run my own construction business and have always taken this lesson to heart. No bid goes in without a complete review from a second set of eyes.