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Have you ever made a mistake at work that was totally your fault? I mean, just a 100 percent God-awful mistake that left a pit in your stomach?
It’s happened to the best of us. Even though I’m sure we are all very good at our jobs, we are still human. And as humans, we are inherently prone to making colossal mistakes. A few folks were kind enough to admit the worst fuck-ups they’ve made while on the job, and some of them are absolutely hysterical.
From Reddit:
recently at work driving an 86k lb forklift, i bent a trim tab on a boat
my coworker saw it and said “you fucking idiot, get the fuck off” and hopped on the forklift to finish placing the boat in the building
then he bent the shit out of the other one
Oops.
I cremated a lady too soon (I’m a funeral director). Here’s how it went down:
You can’t cremate a person unless you have received a permit for that person to be cremated from the coroner/medical examiner office. Takes a few days to get one usually, and a licensed funeral director (me) has to sign the permit along with the coroner to make it valid.
So I met with the “Smith” family, the husband and two daughters of the deceased. The daughter wanted to see her mother again before cremation took place, so I set that up for 2 days later.
The next day was an extremely busy day, I was dealing with a very difficult family, among a million other things. I was on the phone getting yelled at by a guy over something that had nothing to do with us (the church he wanted to have his mother’s funeral at already had one scheduled for the day/time he wanted, so he was yelling at….ME, of all people) when the office secretary walks up and hand me a stack of permits to sign.
So, I am glancing though the files to make sure we have everything we need for me to sign these permits, with the phone to my ear, being called every name in the book. I sign the permits, the secretary takes them and faxes them to the crematory, the crematory cremates the bodies.
I literally sat straight up in bed at 1am the next morning because I realized my lady whose daughter was supposed to see her again was in that stack of permits.
So….not good.
At least she wasn’t still alive.
I entered an incorrect trade that resulted in our firm having to correct an error and incur a $6M loss.
I work in a different field now
I assume you didn’t leave work by choice.
I knocked a dry chem fire extinguisher off its hook in the receiving area at a Lowe’s store. Coated everything in a fine white powder. The worst part was that it was the end of my shift on a Friday and Lowe’s was strict with overtime so they had someone else clean it up. Amazingly, I came back the following Monday and not only could you not tell anything had ever happened, no one said a word about it.
I bet the bastard who cleaned it up had some words he wanted to say.
Tore a front bumper off a mini van I was towing right in front of the whole family watching me unload their van. I felt awful, but they were understanding and we fixed it for them, plus fixed the reason it was broken down as well since it was a cheap/easy fix.
All mini vans deserve to be destroyed.
I worked at a best buy, and had just signed out a set of keys to retrieve a high-value product from a cage. Lost the fucking keys. I paced like a mad man trying to retrace my steps and find them, but ultimately, I went up to my boss and told him I just fucked up.
He said, “The keys you signed out had keys to 7 other cages, and the warehouse. The value therein is over 400,000$, not to mention the cost of re-keying and re-locking is about 1500 considering parts and labor, PER lock. Do you know how long it would take you to work that off? Did you know that this is an offense that results in immediate termination?”
I went pale as a ghost and almost shat my pants.
“Lucky for you, I saw you set them down where you weren’t supposed to, then walk away, so I grabbed them myself and let you worry. This is a cheap lesson, sign the keys back in”
Dude should have quit right then.
I came in my boss at Hardee’s, the night manager. She got an abortion and because I didn’t have enough money to pay for it she took it out of my pay check.
This is my favorite one yet. The trials and tribulations of the fast food employee.
I worked the money desk at a Wal Mart Neighborhood, as a Customer Service Manager. They had me working the returns counter and money center while also supervising the rest of the store. Check cashing was a regular occurrence, and I did it flawlessly for a year, then fucked up two in the same day.
Overworked, dead tired, ended up giving not one but two different tax return checks back to the customer (Two different transactions, about 20 minutes apart) and cost the company $1600.
I didn’t lose my job but quit anyway a month later. Fuck that place.
I think Wal-Mart can survive a $1600 loss.
I’m a teacher. I had a particularly difficult student who gave me a very hard time on an unusually hard day, early in my career.
After class let out another colleague stopped by and without thinking I said “Nobody wants (“that difficult kid”) in their class! It’s hopeless.”
He was walking in the room to apologize and heard me. However withdrawn and difficult he was before this, it multiplied tenfold, and I felt terrible.
I tried to apologize to him but he didn’t want to hear it. After that I didn’t breathe a negative word about a child on school grounds.
As an educator you have to learn sooner or later that your students are the ones who get to act like children. Not you.
My teacher told me I was a piece of shit all the time. Never affected me.
I worked at a pizza place and one night the oven guy went rushing past and mumbled something about someone taking over on oven. So I went over and started cutting pizzas without really paying attention to what I as doing. Ten minutes later the oven guy comes back with his hand all bandaged up and blood all over his arm. He had cut his hand badly on the pizza knife and bled all over everything, but because the blood looked a little like grease and I wasn’t paying attention I continued cutting pizzas with the bloody knife and cutting board. Many people had human blood all over their pizzas and I didn’t have the balls to go own up and tell them.
As a former pizza joint employee, I can confirm weird shit like this is not uncommon. Although this one is particularly fucked up.
So I ordered $10,000 of Hydraulic Materials (Connections, hoses, etc) and had them sent direct to our customer.
I forgot to specify to our supplier that NO PAPERWORK be sent with the goods. So the Customer got our order and read the Invoice seeing we paid 10K. We charged them 45K…We lost a great customer that day
Margins!
I accidently lost a tab of acid in someone’s food one time. Didn’t realize it fell out and it landed in the food. Of course the food had already gone out so I just walked out the door and went home.
“This fettuccini alfredo…is amazing.”
This was kind of depressing.
My partner and I transported a woman with severe dementia to a doctor appt via ambulance. We were told at the nursing home she couldn’t communicate anymore.
She wouldn’t respond to any verbal commands at all. She just kept looking around and grabbing at us.
Well, I got bored at the Dr’s, and gave her my clipboard and pen to draw on, and then, holy fuck, we find out she just can’t hear us! She was mentally there, just mute and deaf!
The fuck up comes here. We finished the appt, took the lady back to the nursing home, and went to our next call.
About three weeks later, my partner randomly looked at me and said:
“Hey, when we took that patient to the nursing home, did we actually tell anyone she didn’t have dementia?”
I froze. Whoops. Nope.
Probably should have passed that on to someone.
Let me die before you put me in a goddamn nursing home.
I work in retail, I have been assigned to assist people in buying big ass flat screen TV’s. The TV on display was set on mute so it would not cause a loud noise only to be unmuted when being tested. This one time my co-worker asked me to download HD videos to play for the TV. I did what I was asked and downloaded HD videos of Whales, Cars, Games etc.. Which all has random names like “RVG1023.mkv” guess what? So does my porn downloads. Needles to say I’ve got their attention
I bet he made some sales, at least.
Launched a product that made no money just cause i thought it was cool. We gloss over it during meetings.
Its still out there…. somewhere
Was it..the Zune?
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I show up to work everyday and cost my company my daily worth in terms of pay which then accrues over time and costs them even more money. It’s like a slow burning forest fire of a mistake because all I do is sip on free coffee, write profoundly beautiful and ingenious comments on here, remain humble, and use Google Analytics as I fart in my cubicle and hope no ones comes by to tell me about the weather or their kids.
Tony Romo owns a Zune! I have nothing to back that claim up, I just dislike the guy, and it seems like he would.
The Hardee’s one is just the absolute pit of sadness
Last year I had a client that was a know-it-all, jerk who interrupted constantly and always had an attitude. I had to jump through many hoops to get his sale. He then called 3 days later which was also EOM to cancel his order. I muted the phone and said to a co-worker “how do you process a blah blah blah cancellation, this guy was a total pain in the ass the whole sales process and now is cancelling and ruining my quota”. Well apparently sometimes the mute buttons at work don’t work … And it just makes you sound like you are in a box. He heard everything and chewed me out, I calmly said “okay, I’ll process your cancellation” and hung up, didn’t try and persuade him to not cancel. I prayed for a long time that he would never call in to report me in an attempt to get a better deal. I learned to never trust the mute button!!
Now that the “storm” has passed I had to comment; This was actually posted on the day that I screwed up AGAIN at work with the same client. Jumped on here to wait out the phone call from my boss and found it. Call never came, still have my job (for now), and I feel a lot better. Thank you.