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

[Bibble]

My story is not even on the same level as those you all have posted, but my "punishment" was pretty funny so I'll post it anyway.

When I was a lowly intern I would oftentimes be sent out to get coffee for the staff. 99% of the time I went to the Starbucks around the corner, but one time the guy told me to go to Dunkin Donuts, which was ~9 blocks away. He gave me a post-it note with the order (an iced coffee or something similar) and $20 and tells me that it is for another guy in the office. So I get the thing, come back, give the coffee to the other guy, then bring the original guy his change. He looks at me and is like "where is my coffee?" I say, "You said it was for Bill." He proceeds to chew me out, "Why would I give you 20 fucking dollars for one coffee? I swear you interns need to get some fucking brains." I offered to go back but he said to forget it.

I have no memory of him telling me he wanted a coffee, but I assume that I was too busy thinking "Fuck, I have to go all the way to Dunkin Donuts?", not paying attention to what he said, and assumed that the post-it note contained the entire order. Also, I was given $20s all the time for small orders so that didn't seem strange to me at all.

Anyway, he "crop-dusted" me every time he walked by for the rest of the day. It was a really small office so everyone could see/hear it. Once he actually put his butt on the back of my neck and farted. C'est la vie.

 

[hydroponik]

Don't wanna get into the details, but I caused my company to spend 150k on a mistake I made a few years back.....I'm still working for this company by the way lol

 

[BoomerD]

I killed the wrong person once...well, actually, I killed the original target...but also took out his daughter with the same round. There was a bit of a ruckus over that.

 

[Eli]

I've never done much damage myself, but when I worked at Intel, I knew a couple of people that were in the "million dollar club".

That is, they broke a wafer or group of wafers that was worth a million dollars or more.

That was something you kinda wanted to avoid.. lol

 

[Jeff7]

...
Anyway, he "crop-dusted" me every time he walked by for the rest of the day. It was a really small office so everyone could see/hear it. Once he actually put his butt on the back of my neck and farted. C'est la vie.

 

[Cheesetogo]

My friend's dad works at a steel mill. I'm not entirely sure what his job is, but part of it involves maintaining some of the big machines they use. One day, when he wasn't there, one of the machines stopped working. Nobody was sure what was wrong, so they ordered a brand new interface for it, costing about $30k.

The next day he comes in and takes a look at the broken machine. Upon opening it up, he found that there was BBQ sauce stuck under a couple buttons, holding them down. So the company spent $30000 because some guy spilled BBQ all over the machine.

 

[DainBramaged]

Ask me when I come back from Afghanistan.

 

[kami333]

I forgot to turn the AC back up when I left the server room and went home for the night. The next morning I got a call at 8am from one of the other admins saying that the servers were overheating. Got lucky and didn't lose anything, other than having an unproductive morning.

HVAC guy was called and he blamed it on the filters that hadn't been changed in 2 years

 

[Vette73]

Not me but still bad. When I worked at a pharmaceutical plant we worked with bio drugs, i.e. the type you have to grow then filter a lot to get. So 1 batch can be in the 10's of millions as each dose sold for 10k from us, not sure what the people outside paid. That and it took a couple months to go from the grow to final product let alone hundreds of thousdands of gallons of water to get just several dozen gallons worth of product.
But most mistakes were small enough we could explain to the FDA what happened and show the drug was fine. But 1 guy opened the wrong valve or something and the whole batch was dead. It was a different shift but I do know he was canned the next day. It has happened before I was told but even then everybody was really on top of their job when that happens. Even the small mistakes drop to almost nothing after something like that.

 

[DominionSeraph]

Inserted the wrong screw into a transmitter upon reassembly. Pretty blue lights ensued. $10,000 part.
Told my supervisor, ordered a new part, had it installed in 10 minutes since we had it in onboard stores. That was the end of it.
I think my supervisor was surprised I was so upfront about it. (I was the only IFF tech on board and the only one in the room when it happened, so I could've easily lied about it. Ain't my style, though.)

 

[MarkXIX]

I took over as network admin for a large military network. I realized within the first few weeks that the firewall had a very, very weak password applied to it and had on order of 18,000 entries in the firewall to permit traffic (no, I'm not kidding).

So, I backed up the configuration like any good admin would, and proceeded to change the password to one that meets DoD standards (two upper, two lower, two numbers, two special characters, at least 14 characters total). I changed the password and tried to login, but couldn't. I had written the password down before I typed it in, checked CAPS lock, everything, no dice. I tried typing the password in Notepad to see if maybe there was something wrong with the keyboard, etc., but everything was correct. After several attempts, I started sweating, because I had a stack of firewall rule requests in queue already, but could no longer access the firewall.

So, I called tech support, who informed me that not only did I not have a contract on the system, but they could not help me as the system was no longer in production. I hung up and searched their website to discover that the password mechanism could only accept an 8 character, alpha-numeric password ONLY. Despite this, it took the password anyway (thank you programmer who doesn't fucking understand input validation!) and effectively locked me out of the firewall.

Remember that backup I made? Yeah, you can't load a backup config without the admin password to allow it, so the backup was worthless as well for all but trying to figure out what ACLs were in place already (all 18,000 of them).

Fortunately for me, a new firewall was already in place in one of the new routers we received, but the last guy didn't know how to get it working. I spent days configuring VLANs, changing IP addresses and implementing dynamic routing protocols instead of his Barney and Friends static routes for a 300+ building MAN. I then started to covert the existing ACLs from the old config into the format for the new firewall, but after three days of trying to make sense of it all, I finally just put in a "deny any" statement for everything but the major systems (e-mail, web page, etc.) and waited for the phone to ring. After about two weeks, the phone stopped ringing constantly, and everything was back to normal, along with being far more secure than before.

All of this happened my second month in the job and needless to say, my peers and my boss were not happy at the changes I made and the trouble I caused, no matter how vehemently I argued in favor of the additional security we gained. It took a while, but I finally gained their respect and started to change the tide of virtually no security on the network to complying with every DoD level requirement as the years went by.

 

[Alone]

Not , but a friend of mine who was posted up in CFS Alert (about as far north you can go in Canada).

 

[Kaervak]

When I used to work at Carquest I got bitched at because two boxes of truck rotors were left in the bed of one of delivery trucks overnight. I worked there part time and came in at 1230, the previous driver left them. I never noticed them in the bed during the day.

Current job, caught the garage door frame with the rear door catch on the squad when I was pulling out at the beginning of the shift. Just tore up some plywood, nothing big. Still felt like a tard the entire shift, apologized like crazy to my bosses. Didn't seem to be an issue, but I still feel like a dumbass because of it.

 

[ultimatebob]

I accidentally rebooted the production SAP server cluster, making the tool unavailable for about 5,000 users at two dozen factory locations for about five minutes. Fortunately, it eventually successfully failed over to the backup server. Oops.

 

[herm0016]

last week i was perforating an oil well. I checked the wires in the gun. we use diode switches in-between the guns so that we can shoot multiple guns on a single run in the hole, first on positive, then negative, then positive... etc the switches have different color wires according to their polarity. we ended up with 2 positive switches in a row and i shot holes in the wrong place. probably have to buy them a cement squeeze job and a caliper or bond log. could be expensive. plus paying for non-productive time for the 20 million dollars worth of fracture equipment and the 40 or so people on location.

there are 5 separate checks of which i was the last that did not catch the mistake.

 

[Terabyte]

Someone who works at BP should post.. :hmm:

I don't think I ever really fucked up at work before or at least, not yet. *knocks on wood* My job consists of sitting at a desk helping students in a computer lab, so there isn't much to fuck up.

 

[Leros]

When I was a lowly intern I would oftentimes be sent out to get coffee for the staff.

People actually make interns get them coffee? I thought that was just a joke people talked about.

 

[Synomenon]

I browsed to the Apple website at work and got a three day suspension.

 

[BoomerD]

People actually make interns get them coffee? I thought that was just a joke people talked about.

WTF else are they good for?

 

[OILFIELDTRASH]

Nothing I'm a fucking professional son.

 

[BoomerD]

Nothing I'm a fucking professional son.

I've never met a "professional son" before. Is that like being a professional student without having to go to school to get paid?


In my experience, there's two kinds of people at work...those who've fucked up...and those who lie about it.

 

[OILFIELDTRASH]

I've never met a "professional son" before. Is that like being a professional student without having to go to school to get paid?


In my experience, there's two kinds of people at work...those who've fucked up...and those who lie about it.

You forgot the third type of person. The fucking professional that gets the job done without fucking up. I'm that guy.

 

[BoomerD]

You forgot the third type of person. The fucking professional that gets the job done without fucking up. I'm that guy.

HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA!

The only guy on the job who doesn't fuck up once in a while is the guy who doesn't do anything. You must be that guy.

 

[Twista]

I work on a truck dock.. i move freight with a 5000+ pound sit down forklift everyday . I see people screw up sh!t daily. I have my fair shares, but im careful.

 

[khon]

I was working at a gas station back when I was a teenager, and we had some trailers that we'd rent out. First time I had a customer rent one I go out and help him attach it to his car, only I didn't do it properly, so when he pulled out of the parking lot the trailer got unhitched, and continued across both lanes before hitting a parked car on the opposite side of the road.

Luckily noone got injured, though they easily could have been if a car had happened to come along at the wrong time.

As it was I ran across the road to get the trailer, and brought it back to the customer. On my second attempt I did manage to attach it properly, and he drove off.

I don't think anyone but me noticed that the trailer hit the parked car, and I never told anyone, though it had left a fairly large dent. Later in the day I saw the owner come out and look at his car, clearly wondering what the hell had happened.

Not my proudest moment.