Worst day at work.

[thatsright]

I made (or actually, didn't make) two judgment calls that most likely caused a bit of lost faith in my abilities. We are implementing a new software program at our company that is used by the whole sales team and very high up there execs. The scheduled update date has not changed however and we are on track with the original time line. But in me delaying these calls it caused quite a bit of consternation with my boss and his (most likely) loss of faith in my ability on future projects. While I didn't get fired (not that bad) I have delayed/postponed my advancement in our department (perhaps not forever, but it sure as hell seems like it now). So much stress this week. I'm probably down to Homer Simpson hair levels.

What about you? What was your worst day/week at your job?

 

[datalink7]

Sounds like a shitty week.

If it makes you feel any better, I've had many days at work far worse than that (not to say yours isn't bad), but I don't feel like posting them.

 

[JM Aggie08]

I wiped the wrong customer's driver once. These things happen, and all you can do is keep your head up.

 

[Sphexi]

I've accidentally caused our system to go down for 30-45 minutes, preventing all of our clients from processing orders. Some process orders around every 3 seconds or so, I'm betting that was worth a solid $50k+ in failed orders. To be fair I was under orders to login to a system that nobody had told us that the front-end was removed from.

Luckily my bosses don't care too much about such things, there are people there who have caused similar events many times lol

 

[JS80]

I've had wrong numbers and financials in a powerpoint deck that didn't foot and senior management didn't even notice during the presentation.

 

[AreaCode707]

I took down prod last week by not double checking whether I was in test during a configuration refresh. 1 hour to get back up and our (Fortune 500) company couldn't produce offer letters or certain types of contracts during that time. Oops.

 

[mjrpes3]

I sent out a mass email to 200 customers containing personal info for tax purposes, unfortunately the mail merge didn't work right and they all receive the first customer's personal info. Many were effing pissed.

That's been the biggest idiot blunder I've ever made.

 

[mjrpes3]

We are implementing a new software program at our company that is used by the whole sales team and very high up there execs.

Hopefully not that piece of shit ACT!.

 

[UnatcoAgent]

Shit happens, keep your chin up

 

[mancity]

keep your head up/.

 

[alevasseur14]

Hmmm... Maybe that wasn't such a good idea.

But I've been at my current job for over 5 years now and it's still the number one reason I went back to school and will finally be graduating this May.

 

[secretanchitman]

sucks OP. hope everything turns out well for you!

if it makes you feel any better, failed a goddamn test that i studied for days for. pissed me off, but i know i have to do better and really get the material down.

 

[guyver01]

I sent out a mass email to 200 customers containing personal info for tax purposes, unfortunately the mail merge didn't work right and they all receive the first customer's personal info. Many were effing pissed.

That's been the biggest idiot blunder I've ever made.

wow.

no offense, but... hope you got fired for that.

that's a major major fuckup. hopefully your company paid for credit monitoring service and repair for customers who got fucked up over that.

i wouldn't call it a "blunder"

 

[Merithynos]

When I was young I hit the "big red button" and crashed Bank of Boston's (yes, it was in the 80's) overnight batch cycle (think...bringing down an entire datacenter). As in, the whole company's overnight batch processing. Somehow my father kept his job...whatever you did couldn't possibly be that bad.

 

[mjrpes3]

wow.

no offense, but... hope you got fired for that.

that's a major major fuckup. hopefully your company paid for credit monitoring service and repair for customers who got fucked up over that.

i wouldn't call it a "blunder"

See, I knew I could make the OP feel better

EDIT: And the personal info was their name and the total expenses made for the year... not SSN or CC or birthdates.... any of that stuff would never be transmitted by email.

 

[guyver01]

See, I knew I could make the OP feel better

EDIT: And the personal info was their name and the total expenses made for the year... not SSN or CC or birthdates.... any of that stuff would never be transmitted by email.

well ok then.. in that case.. it's not that bad.

when you said containing personal info for tax purposes the first thing that popped into my head was Name,DOB,SS#, Address ... if that got transmitted... heads should roll.

total expense purchases is no biggie.

carry on

 

[wiredspider]

rebooted a server another admin was in the middle of working on, though we weren't given notice, I should of checked if anyone else was logged into the box beforehand.

 

[MrPickins]

I ran over a $40k GPS unit I when I was a land surveyor.

I was canned...

 

[nutxo]

My boss spent like 75k on a new press. I had to work alone one Saturday to get caught up and decided to run 2 presses at once. I got a jam in the old press and went to fix it and there was a massive jam in the new press that took out the delivery end. I'm talking broken steel and stuff in a BRAND NEW PRESS!!!

I shut everything down and called my wife and told her I wanted to take her out to lunch. We had a nice meal and then I told her I was going to be looking for a job on monday. I was going to drop her off and head back to the shop to clean up but she said she would wait in the car till I was done.

I got back to the shop and my bosses car was parked in his space. I went straight in and told him I'd totaled the new press and I was going to clean up and head out, apologizing profusely the whole time. He looked at it, looked at me and said to go home, he'd clean up and not to worry about it. It was only a press. He'd see me Monday.

Best fucking boss I've ever had. I miss that job.

 

[gaidensensei]

When I was young I hit the "big red button" and crashed Bank of Boston's (yes, it was in the 80's) overnight batch cycle (think...bringing down an entire datacenter). As in, the whole company's overnight batch processing. Somehow my father kept his job...whatever you did couldn't possibly be that bad.

Hey, atleast you had your share of temporary fame. People were probably nicer towards innocent kids. Nowadays people like ATOT will tear them apart, doesn't matter what age.

 

[Saga]

At one time I accidentally signed a release for an independent contractor to handle a PBX detachment for a business entity that was being sold and transferring all assets to a new company.

What I didn't know was I authorized them to do a hard password reset on the main PBX for said company consisting of all configs for 18,000 employees. Furthermore, said third party DID said password reset, which resulted in quite frantic communication from bigger ex-company entity's telco team when they were locked out of their own telco infrastructure.

I was shitting bricks and praying I didn't get sued; my boss found it hilarious.

 

[Matthiasa]

If everything stayed on schedule whats the big deal?

Oh and I don't have any epic fails at work, or really any fails at work really.

 

[DarkWarrior2]

I made some mistakes at my first professional IT job, which was to be expected. Mistakes are supposed to be learning experiences. In my case, they became a career killer, despite being relatively minor.

Things were actually going quite well at this job until this happened. I worked on an executive's Win2k PC at one of my employer's client firms. I got everything working, then noticed that it had an old service pack. So I got permission from my boss to update it to the latest SP, but he urged me to leave the site soon so the client wouldn't get upset about the billable hours.

After the service pack install started running, I thought, "Hey, to save some time, I can let this run and leave. I'll leave a note to the exec telling him to restart the PC after the update has completed. He should be happy about saving some money that way."

Big mistake.

When I got to back to the office, that exec called me telling me that his PC was all messed up. I was surprised because I had tested everything before starting the service pack update, and other PC's with the same configuration and software worked fine with the latest service pack. This exec was livid. Nothing I said would calm him down. Regardless, I was not allowed to perform any work for that client anymore.

My guess is that the exec didn't wait for the service pack install to finish before restarting, as that would cause serious issues. But then I heard from my boss later that this particular exec had some kind of personal problem with me. So then I thought that maybe he screwed up the PC himself as an excuse to get rid of me - I'm not sure.

This incident left me extremely discouraged. Things went downhill from there and I was eventually let go. I have not been able to find a decent IT position since.

It sucks, but what can you do. The only logical reason I can think of for that exec having any problem with me would have been my difficulty communicating effectively (I used to mumble and talk really fast) due to excessive anxiety/nervousness.

I doubt I'll go back to IT. :\

There are many other things I can do anyway - with more respect, less stress, and better pay.

 

[JEDI]

i was working in the main telecom room and accidently shorted out 2 wires that took down the whole phone system to the building (size of a city block). it took the telecom guys 2hrs to reboot the system.

on the bright side, i found a glaring hole in the telecom infrastructure. that excuse actually saved my ass

op,
worst case scenario: u get fired. your not going to lose a finger or qart of blood
short term fix: find another job

 

[her209]

Hopefully not that piece of shit ACT!.

If I ever saw a p.o.s. software, that'd be it.