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

[MarkXIX]

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.

You're fucked now. The Righteous ATOT Warriors are going to find out where you live, call the police and turn you in.

 

[DrPizza]

Over the last 30+ years of employment, the only real screw up that I can recall is burning a pizza.

 

[BoomerD]

Over the last 30+ years of employment, the only real screw up that I can recall is burning a pizza.

Now THAT'S a serious screw up...

 

[BarkingGhostar]

I took down 22,000 customers by clicking on the wrong icon and thereby restarted a switch. Took approximately 30 minutes to come back up, in which time those customers were SOL.

I was on a bridge at the time for another networking device that really was broke, and the two differed in their names by a single letter. I immediately admitted to making the mistake, and to everyone on the outage bridge (about 25-30 folks).

After the outage, and the unintentional additional outage, I expected to be sent home. I even asked for an unpaid vacation for my mistake and they refused. They kept me on the job.

Yes, I was that good, that needed, and no way were they going to let me take time off. Then again, I'm a work-aholic and last year took no time off until December. :hmm:

As long as you admit to your mistake and immediately, it shows character--something the world is short on these days.

 

[xSauronx]

When I worked at my dad's drycleaning plant (doing cleaning/spot removal) a while back I was given a piece that had some obvious rust on it. I got out the rust removed, tada, its go--wait, whats this hem doing outsite?

Fuck. when it was pressed, they mistakenly did it inside out. The metallic sequins caused a minor rust stain, and i poured hydrochloric acid solution all over it....ruined the sequins on the sleeve. The sleeve of a robe that belong to a local preacher...and the robe cost a few hundred bucks.

I had to cover half of that :-/

 

[cliftonite]

I don't have any access to production so I can't really screw anything up.

 

[Jadow]

brought a production system that about 50 million dollars worth of customers use because I left a gigantic sql query running when I fell asleep, which then messed up our replication, and other various nightly tasks.

Nothing came of it, IT guys had my back as I have had their back over the years.

 

[DrPizza]

I did have one sort of screw up, but not work related. Was at college waiting for something on a smaller campus away from the main campus. It was 8 or 9 at night. To kill time, I went to the computer lab & was just screwing around with the software. I've always been interested in astonomy, so I thought I would try out some sort of astronomy software stuff that they had. Crap - password protected to get in. Whoa, I didn't even mean to do that. Can't believe that worked. I'm in. It was sort of a jackpot of "simulated" lab exercises. The word "simulated" wasn't anywhere on the pages, it was just an assumption that would later turn out to be false. The lab allowed me to take control of some sort of large antenna or something & bounce a signal off the moon. It automatically aimed the antenna toward the moon & sent the signal. In practically no time, I was recording some sort of data. "This is boring" I thought. So, I turned my interests toward a planet. I had the program calculate where Venus (or Mercury?) was at that time and automatically aim the antenna in that direction to send out a signal. Big warnings all over the screen - Venus is currently below the horizon. Proceed? Sure! Why the hell not. After sending the signal, a countdown started with how many minutes it was going to take before the reflected signal was detected. I sat there for a minute. Then I started thinking "why the hell would a demonstration make me wait so long? OHHhhhhhhhhhhhhhh" - I had accessed and was controlling real satellite dishes and antennas and stuff off of the main campus.


The next morning, I was listening to the news. At the end of the news, where they traditionally gave the "weird" news story of the day, there was a story about all the car alarms for some particular brand (Cadillac?) going off simultaneously in some county. Guess where the county was. Yep, the county between the satellite dish/antenna stuff & Venus, right around the time I sent that signal.

 

[Fritzo]

When I was younger, I was a big comic book collector. I worked for a catering company, and I had to make a delivery of a lunch buffet to a factory 30 miles away. It was for 2nd shift, and they were to eat at 8pm.

Well, the "Death of Superman" issue was coming out that same day, and it was a HUGE deal. It was on the news, in the newspapers...everywhere, and I had to have it! It was to be released at 4pm, so I figured I would stop at the local comic shop, rush to work, heat up the food, and speed to the delivery.

Well, I got to the comic shop, and there was a line around the corner. I waited, and waited, and waited, then FINALLY got my hands on the issue....but at 6:15.

In the meantime, the owner of the company called my parents to see where I was at. They said "We have no idea!". Both my parents and my boss happened to be watching the local news on TV at the same time, and there was a news crew out to cover the release of the comic.

My mom told be they both at the same time yelled "WHAT THE HELL- HE'S ON TV!!!!" They both saw me in line when I should have been at work 45 minutes earlier.

I was late to the factory, the workers had to screw up their shift schedules, and the owner had to tell the factory that they had fired me in order to keep their account.

I didn't get fired (the owner was friends with my parents and too much of a wuss to do that), but GOOD LORD did I get chewed out. Not "you suck you moron" chewed out...I got the morality guilt trip chewed out:

"You're going to go on to bigger and better things one day, but this is all I have, and you did a lot of damage to my business. I have a family to provide for, and you've made it very difficult for me to continue doing that..." type of lecture.

I still feel guilty to this day, and I still have the comic (unopened).

 

[Tristicus]

I like this thread...lots of good stories, sans one or two stupid posters. Keep them coming.

 

[Bibble]

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

Coffee, breakfast (sometimes 8 orders at once), lunch, snacks, energy drinks, you name it. Best part is you don't have to tip the intern who is working for you for free. Having interns perform menial labor is no joke. (Note: I did learn a bunch of stuff the other 93% of the time I wasn't running errands.)

 

[Ms. DICKINSON]

Under my watch at the company, we lost 2 PS3s (60gb), a 42" Samsung plasma TV and other things totaling to 400$.

 

[StrangeRanger]

I used to work in a boat yard in the summers. We had a very large forklift w/ 25 ft forks for moving boats around. You know where this is going...
I wasn't driving the lift my bud was. We were told to go out and get a boat from the storage racks. He raised the forks and drove them over the boat like we always do to run the lifting straps. He didn't see/notice the 33 ft Crusisers yacht parked next to the racks. Yup, speared that biotch and good, both forks went clean through the hull of a $250K boat.
He didn't wait for me to get there to help, I was driving across the yard in the tractor w/ the trailer for the boat we were supposed to be getting so I just got a good tongue lashing. That was his last day at the yard however.
j

 

[sourceninja]

I once dropped a table that had all of our check history in it. I had to call and tell everyone not to enter any data for 5 minutes while I restored from backup. Made me look like a fool.

 

[dfuze]

Over the last 30+ years of employment, the only real screw up that I can recall is burning a pizza.

As long as it wasn't mine!

 

[dfuze]

Seen quite a few whoops in manufacturing. One of the biggest I can recall is my coworker using CAD to draw a component and made a radius dimension too large. Turns out it made the part lose a lot of strength. Problem was that we already made x number of them and had to remake hundreads of them, including some that already were assembled with other components. I remember doing the math at the time, without adding labor it was around 77k in materials.

 

[troytime]

did an update without a where clause on a table of 800k users. the data lost wasn't TOO crucial and was able to be rebuilt, but still took me and the system guy all day to fix it.

when i got kicked out of college, i worked at a cheese factory for a while. the hours were horrible 4:30am - 2pmish. i was often stoned, or hungover

the factory made and packaged brie cheese. I was still pretty new and didn't really know all of the processes yet and the line manager pointed to these 3 giant carts of cheese (probably 1000 little wheels of brie) and told me to take them and put them in the washroom. The washroom was fully automatic, put the cart on the track and it goes through this giant steamer. I thought it was odd to put 3 carts of cheese into the steamer, so i asked "these carts?" and she got all pissed and snapped back at me with a "YES!". Soo... fuck it. I took the 3 carts to the washroom and loaded them onto the auto track.

I came back, and jumped back into what i was doing before (weighing and stacking)

Within a minute i hear her yelling, asking where the cheese went.

 

[Vonkhan]

Not sure if this counts as f*** up, since it was deliberate

At my old job (4 years ago or so), used to work for a magazine in-charge of special features & advertising supplements. Ran a special features issue with lots of ads. However, the title was changed to "advertising supplement" by editorial at the last minute - without consulting me. Huge difference and of course, my clients were pissed off. One of the clients was a well known activist and public figure who was livid since it appeared that he paid for a story about himself.

Boss wanted me to collect their dues. I was horrified - the company was lucky that no one threatened to sue. I said "no". Boss told me that he would fire me if I didn't. Stuck to my guns, he didn't fire me (he really couldn't since replace me). Few months later, the magazine went under and I found a MUCH better job and an awesome boss.

 

[VoteQuimby]

A recent f-up that I luckily caught before anything went wrong. We have and image server with several terabytes of data that replicates to another image server. I originally built both of these servers a few months after that I started at this job. Well a year later I find out that I built both servers on RAID-0 rather than RAID-5 like I thought. One of the hard drives ended up failing and all the data was gone. Had both servers lost 1 hard drive, we would have lost everything. When I told my boss what happened and that I would have to rebuild them, he was pretty cool about it. He was probably more relived that I caught the problem.

 

[Howard]

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.

Damn thing shoulda had active PFC.

Mine: mistakenly ordered something we didn't need (and couldn't return) for about $6k

 

[highland145]

Lady called my office. Thought it was another manager so I picked on her a little. She got sassy so I warned her that I'd have our supervisor(female) set her straight. Turns out the lady was my employers son's wife and the revelation of the week( that I was unaware of) was that my boss was screwing the supervisor and leaving his wife. The son's wife went to employers wife about me.....the shit rolled down hill.

 

[mrCide]

Nothing too crazy. My last job we had small IT infrastructure (3 servers), our main server which held the e-mail had a bad hard drive in the raid array (3 drives). I pulled it and popped it back in to see if the error would go away after rebuilding. Light went blue from orange and stayed that way so I assumed I was safe. A few weeks later another drive died and now they were both flagged, can't rebuild raid 5 with 1 drive . That was pretty scary for me since I wasn't too confident in rebuilding/restoring servers. Lame I guess.

My current job is basically a health care conglomerate that covers anything from nursing hospitals to rehab to head start programs and schools to cemeteries. Biggest mistake I think I made was bringing down external e-mail with a simple exchange transit mistake for about 6 hours. No one seemed to notice, though. That and letting sql servers run out of space a few times..

 

[ConstipatedVigilante]

At my first job, my supervisor and I were taking out a woman's trash/unwanted stuff as she was switching offices (we were essentially janitors/furniture assemblers). Anyway, I didn't know the boxes were labeled differently between trash and wanted things, so after we finished a load I brought the cart back up to take more stuff. Later my boss came into the break room asking me if I had done a second load, I said yes, and it turned out that I had just thrown out the woman's personal stuff. I spent a few minutes in the dumpster digging out her things for that. I think they both thought I was retarded for that one.

Luckily, I only worked that job for the summer...

 

[oddyager]

Early in my network career I made a mistake of doing a clear bgp without using soft and caused temporary loss of connectivity of phones and network to our main customer support site. Thankfully it was a slow day and nothing really bad come out of it except a slap on the wrist...

 

[Wyndru]

My first job, I was around 10 years old, and worked for a neighborhood Ice Cream Truck company. My bosses brand new pick up truck had an issue with his battery, and he needed a jump. He told me to do it, and I told him I didn't know how, and he just said go ahead and just hook them up to both vehicles. He never mentioned about red to positive, black to negative, etc. I hooked it up incorrectly, and basically fried all of the electrical components of his new truck. He was so pissed, but let me keep my job.