You can tell us. It can’t be worse than this:
So when an intern driving a forklift through the cellar bumped a tank holding thousands of litres of wine ready to bottle, the damage was irreparable.
or this:
“We were listening to the control tower instructions and timing how long the pilots took to respond,” wrote the anonymous respondent. “My colleague left for lunch … having turned his radio onto ‘broadcast’ by accident. As radio is one way, it meant that no one was able to send or receive messages on the frequency that was being used to give take off permission.”
“I started to eat my lunch to discover that all departures from the airport had been brought to a standstill by someone who sounded like they were eating their lunch,” the anonymous respondent wrote of the incident that occurred 18 years ago. “The realisation that it was the sound of MY lunch being eaten hit me about 10 minutes later. I rushed over and flicked the switch to off” and flights resumed.
or — GOOD GOD — this one:
In France last year, an intern’s photo selection for an advertisement offering a free kindergarten service caused an uproar, notes Alexandre Coninx. “The problem is that the picture used as a background [in the advertisement] is Gregory Villemin, a 4 year old child that was murdered in 1984 and made the headlines of the national media for a long time (the murder was never elucidated),” Coninx wrote.
Once, when I was an editorial assistant, I did not BUDGET ADEQUATE TIME to prepare financial reports for an important quarterly meeting that Important People came into the office for, and my boss’ boss cancelled the meeting ten minutes in because it was “obvious we don’t have the materials we need to make any decisions.” It was the first and only time I have cried at work.
I’ve done worse things at work, but they weren’t mistakes. Join me in freeing yourself of the guilt. Unburden yourselves.
Tags: mistakes, unprofessionalism, work, worst thing you’ve ever done
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Oh man, I just avoided one — I thought I had an error in one of the scripts I used to analyze my data which is now IN PRESS. This was weeks after my advisor was bragging that she had never had to rescind a paper (and by extension, giving us a very stern reminder to check our work so as not to bring shame upon the lab). It took a week to figure it out, but the error didn’t actually have an affect on the data. I got that awful swooping feeling in my stomach every time I remembered that it still wasn’t resolved.
I’m four years out of college now, and it still regularly strikes me how the stuff we do actually MATTERS to OTHER PEOPLE now. When I was a child/ in college, all of my fuckups were mine and mine alone, and just meant I would pay on my transcript. Now they have so much more power. It terrifies me on the regular.
Oh god, script errors, I empathize so hard. Last year I found a major typo in my model (grid spacing in one dimension was 2.5 times larger than I thought it was) a week after coming back from a conference where I’d given a poster presentation about my work. It changed my results *significantly* — for the substantially better, but still. I had to rerun *everything* from scratch (which took months) and it was not fun in the slightest. That gnawing pit of “oh god did I code that properly” anxiety has not gone away.
I am terrified of this happening. I just submitted a paper and have been second guessing myself on every little detail. I don’t know how other people deal with this.
It’s awful. I triple-checked everything and still didn’t catch it earlier. When I think about how many places in the research pipeline an error can be made…. it’s impressive anything ever manages to get replicated. Okay I’m going to go crawl into a corner and shake now.
*****an EFFECT on the data. and to think how many points I’ve docked from undergrads for that error.
Right? One extremely minor example: just today I was editing some a survey report and realized the placement of a semi-colon versus a comma in one spot would completely change how readers would interpret the characteristics of this forest sub-type. There’s a good chance this will be cited at some point, so all of a sudden that one tiny punctuation mark had actual consequences and just…how did that happen?!
In a class I was in today, one student shared the fact that the main library at the Unviversity of Cambridge has a section in the tower containing medical texts with mistakes.They can’t get rid of them, because it’s a legal deposit library, but if they have them available to use people could die. Consequences are scary!
Hi! I’m interning at an Australian online newspaper that runs only articles written by current academics (they only employ editorial and IT support). I am right this second going to commission an article on this because that is FASCINATING. Do you remember any other details? Name of the section/tower, or anything like that?
Not trying to spam and I apologise if posting links is Not The Done Thing, but for reference it’s called theconversation(dot)com.
No, I’m afraid that’s all the information I have. (We’ve also been advised not to share too much of what our fellow students say in class on public forums, in order to keep it a safe space, so I’d prefer not to give any more information. I am now panicking that I have broken the rules entirely by sharing this anecdote and having it picked up on by a news site.)
Whoops, didn’t mean to stress you out!
Please don’t feel bad – I did some research in the last two hours and legal deposit libraries are reasonably common in both the UK and Australia. It’s an interesting story but there are bundles of librarians and medical historians who know about this so there’s no connection to you or anything in any way.
I apologise for not realising I was being pushy. We run a lot of “esoteric and interesting” stuff* so my brain is wired to think INTERESTING FACT MUST SHAAARE.
*Did you know there are CANNIBAL HORSES in the Snowy Mountains? Cause there are!
I did not know that! Goodness.
It’s fine – sorry for panicking. I’ve only just started the course, and the instruction not to share our classmates’ contributions on public forums is sufficiently broad that I’m not sure how far it applies, and am really nervous about screwing up (but don’t want be completely silent forever on any topics that come up in class).
Speaking of errors in manuscripts…there was a paper in my field that got published with a typo in a section heading: “Problem Pormulation”. I was hesitant to type the actual error here in case you could google it and find the paper it came from, so I just googled it to check. Apparently it is a pretty common error because I got a bunch of results and none of them were the case I had seen!
Oh god oh god oh god. Just reading about this almost-error made the bottom of my stomach drop out. Suddenly I’m back in the last year of my PhD again and sweet Jesus what if I find another bug and everything’s wroooooong.
*Thinks about the faster-than-light neutrino story, which was caused by a faulty cable, and shrieks all over again.*
I don’t think I’ve made any mistakes that were too egregious (I mean, I’ve made a lot of mistakes, but nothing that can now be turned into a pithy anecdote)…which means my massive fuckup must still lie ahead of me. A comforting thought.
I got a job at Starbucks right after graduating college (thanks English degree!) and on my first Saturday working there after finishing training I got really stressed out around the end of my shift because it was crazy busy and my supervisor was being kind of an asshole. About fifteen minutes before I was supposed to leave, I started to brew a new pot of coffee but I forgot that I had the nozzle locked in the open position from when I had been emptying the old coffee out of it, so it spilled all over everything. My supervisor yelled at me a lot and I was like “WELL IT’S 3:00 NOW SO I’M LEAVING” so she had to clean it up herself which was maybe not my best moment, but I didn’t want to cry in front of all of my new coworkers. So I went home and cried in my room for a long time and then went downstairs to find that my roommates were having an Oktoberfest party so I got really drunk and lived happily ever after.
…I seriously think everyone who has ever been a Starbucks barista has brewed a pot of coffee all over everything. I did it, all my coworkers did it, your supervisor sucks for yelling about it. So there.
Yup me too! Also dropped a full bottle of wine on a patio, so there’s that.
Yep, once I brewed a 1 and a half GALLON pot of coffee on top of an already-full pot because I’d forgotten to switch them. It was the actual worst.
That is what I did! Sigh.
My at-home coffeemaker also likes to sometimes brew all over the counter. I haven’t quite figured out what the problem is, so I’m assuming it’s just karma and/or sorcery.
me too and i dont know why either. but every once in a while there is coffee everywhere.
I just started at a coffee shop and literally my second day, when they were teaching me how to brew, my trainer was like “oh yeah you’ll probably brew an entire batch with the nozzle open at some point, it’s happened to everyone”. Couple weeks later and I haven’t done it yet, but I can feel it coming.
Chuck your past supervisor in the garbage where they belong.
I’ve done that. The worst part of it was actually that our store tilted to one side, so all the coffee ran along the counter and down inside one of the cupboards.
This Starbucks job happened a year and a half after I got my MA in English; I learned to make the jokes before other people could.
As an intern I disregarded the dentist’s orders to take a week off post getting my wisdom teeth removed. The second day of my internship I went in high on vicodin, was assigned a difficult reporting job, cried to my friend over the phone, was overheard by another intern who promptly ratted me out. The intern manager then gave all of us interns (girls) a lecture on how being a writer isn’t like getting our nails manicured (or something horribly sexist like that in which he told us even when he is drunk at the bar he is writing because that’s what writers do). High on vicodin and panicking because I knew this was directed at me, I burst into tears stuttering, “I-I-I-just want do do a good job.” Everyone blankly stared at me.
This is coming from the most stoic person on the planet.
Crying at work is tantamount to the end of the world for us stoic types. Just the worst.
Also stupid sexist bosses will assume it makes you an idiot and basically write you off forever.
There’s a special place in hell for the rat intern.
I had to cry at work this week (lack of sleep/exhaustion/stress/70hr week/etc) and found myself trying to frown really hard to cover it up. Not sure how effective that was. I’m pretty sure I freaked a few people out.
oh god that sounds like such a hellish week, I’m sorry
I work in health IT and for a while, was working with the health information management area, where we had to review what the organization include in their legal medical record. I don’t have much of a clinical background, and sometimes I would stutter through/mispronounce words when we were discussing medical terms. For one of the points, I was reading off a list of pediatric vitals, and one was listed as “head circ.”–short for “head circumference”, but instead, I said “head circumcision.” I didn’t realize my mistake, however, and continued to make the slip up a 2nd time when the head physician stopped me and asked “Is that something we really expect to change from visit to visit?”. Really embarrassing, especially as this was one of my first “big” meetings that I had to run solo in that position, and it was in room full of doctors and lawyers. On the other hand, it definitely made dry material a little more interesting, so I guess there’s that.
Oh noooooooo. Head circumcision! A nightmare!
I am now going to refer to getting a haircut as a head circumcision. “BRB, getting my head circumcised!”
One time some yutz in a cloak wanted to barter a sprig of holly berries for a book and I said no, because I was in no mood. He probably took his stupid sprig down the street and tried another used bookstore clerk and another and another until someone said yes, and now some other woman is living my best life in another world.
He was definitely a wizard.
i once mistakenly sent about $30k worth of inventory to France instead of the UK. That was not pretty. I still feel bad about it.
BIggest mistake: not doing a headcount during day camp and losing a kid. Our boss had grabbed a kid to test us, and we didn’t notice that a kid had gone missing, and we failed the test horribly.
I’ve made a lot of other mistakes at my other jobs, but that was my first job, and my worst mistake.
I mean… just one kid? I think +/- 1 kid is a pretty reasonable standard deviation, but that’s probably why I don’t work with children.
I know, right? I mean, it’s pretty close!
Also why I don’t work with kids anymore.
Oh god, I wish I could thumbs-up this more than once!
Our boss had grabbed a kid to test us
Presumably this had been pre-arranged with the kid? I can see this going horribly wrong.
Well, she was the camp director, and, so, at a group activity, asked one of the kids to come with her. Not one of the counselors noticed. It was pretty bad. She came out an hour later and told us that she had the kid in her office, and why hadn’t we picked up on it?
We were all like .. 15-16.
well of course you didn’t notice, you were 15-16! I feel like you can’t expect that kind of paying attention until at least 18-19.
Well, I’m just saying that it might not have been the best idea to put four 15-year-olds in charge of 40 kids, ranging in age from 6 – 13, in a heavily frequented tourism spot.
I was being sincere! Sorry if it came across as sarcastic, my apologies. 🙁
I totally agree, I don’t think 15-16 year olds have that kind of logistical presence of mind yet, and you probably should have had someone at least a couple of years older doing general supervision.
Oh, I’m so sorry! I’m not sure why I read sarcasm … must be my state of mind today.
We did have someone older. She was the one who pulled this “test” on us, to see if we were counting kids while she sat in her office all day …
Not a great first boss.
I used to work at a historic site, and I had a school group come in. I asked one of the teachers for a head count so I could divide them up into groups appropriately, and she asked if I needed an exact number. The kids were 2nd graders at the oldest; I was pretty horrified that they had gone on a field trip without knowing EXACTLY how many kids they had with them.
i totally taught grade 2 at this privately-owned, creepy Christian school in Indonesia (i’m a Christian myself, and i have no issues calling my own religion out when it crosses the line, and the way religion was approached and dished out at this school was not at all appropriate) and whenever we went on field trips there’d be no head-counts and kids’ nannies would just show up and take them without telling anyone and their homeroom teacher would call them or their parents and find out where they were and then hop on a bus with a different class and not tell the teacher supervising the missing kid’s class what the heck is going on. Happened to me more than once. Terrible.
I accidentally endangered a child’s life as a camp counselor. (And completely repressed the memory until this reminded me.) I worked in high ropes and was very proud of keeping things very safe, and was confidently telling a terrified kid just how safe everything was while attaching a kid to one element of the ropes course and detaching him from the previous one, 30 feet up in a tree. He still didn’t want to move at the end of my spiel, so finally I asked why. “Um, I’m not attached to the tree.” AHHHHHH.
He really wasn’t. I’d somehow forgotten the most basic step of attaching the carabiner to his belt. It was one of the scariest moments of my life. Only time out of hundreds of times I ever did anything like that, but once was TOO MANY.
Oooh camp counselor stories! Once when I was leading a group of about 15 kids from the classroom to outside for dismissal, one girl’s babysitter, who was running late to take the kid to the dentist, grabbed her out of the back of the line and left with her out a different exit than we were using without thinking to, y’know, tell me or any other adult. When we got outside I realized the kid was gone, and I couldn’t figure out how she could have completely evaporated going down two flights of stairs. We searched the building and I started freaking out. The parents hadn’t given us a phone number for the babysitter, so my boss told me I needed to call the parents and have them ask the babysitter if the child was with her. Because if she wasn’t, then we had to call the cops. When she handed me the phone, I lost it at the prospect of telling these parents I didn’t know where their kid was, so she took pity on me and made the call herself. We got in touch with the bewildered babysitter and all was well! But for a solid 20 minutes, I became Jodie Foster in Flightplan.
I researched and wrote two guest chapters for a book, and my boss’s name went on them instead of mine. I didn’t make a fuss because I was 24 and desperately needed my job, and he was in his 60s and a chauvinist. But I’ve always felt gross about it.
Here’s to NO MALE BOSSES FOREVERMORE
okay, and here’s another mistake that wasn’t more of a shitty thing that happened to me beyond my control: I was booking a flight for my boss to go to a conference and booked it for the WRONG DAY (long story short, I thought he wanted to attend the WHOLE conference; he really only wanted to go to the last couple of days). It was not a huge deal, but we had to pay some kind of small fee to change it, and of course I felt horrible and fully expected to be fired on the spot.
ABOLISH OLD MAN BOSSES. The only work “mistake” I ever cried about was when I put the “wrong” phone number on a press release (it was the right phone number and part of a template we’d been using for months, so I didn’t even type it in), and my old man boss had a little screaming hissy fit at me about the “mistake.”
My worst boss ever was a woman and would have done exactly this. Just saying.
not ALL old man bosses
Ditto. Oh man, that woman scarred me.
Back in college I was part of a research group that studied magnetism. Our major piece of equipment was awesome. It could create an 8 Tesla magnetic field. It could drop the temperature down to 4 Kelvin. It could create a near-perfect vacuum. It measured absolutely everything (we were constantly buying new hard drives for data). It cost $250,000
The inside of the machine was, well fragile isn’t exactly the right word, but maybe temperamental. You had to create a positive pressure using nitrogen gas before opening it to switch out a sample.
So one night, around 1 in the morning (we were on a deadline. Also, college), I was switching out a sample and realized that I had accidentally opened the machine in vacuum mode rather than positive pressure mode. I had been warned, many times, that doing this wold break the machine and I should make sure to never, ever, ever do it because that machine was worth more than me (well, than my education). I sat there absolutely terrified for about three minutes. Then I took a deep breath and called my professor who was grumpy but walked me through what to do.
In the end I saved the precious machine and got to keep my research gig and my head. But I have never been more scared in my life.
I don’t even science but I got stressed out reading this story. Oh my word. I’m so glad it worked out all right.
Stuff like this (and the casual mention of a hydrochloric acid incident below) is why I stick to computational work. Egads.
Oh no, I had forgotten: after several semesters snapping at the blatant protocol violations of a handful of archaeology students—who were, for example, habitually mixing up bunches of 1000-year-old bones from different sites because they were too lazy to fetch them one at a time as instructed, too disorganized to keep track of which was which, and too dimwitted to identify them properly and put them back where they belonged—I showed up in the soil sample lab to complete a task in my brief window of opportunity while Dad was being prepared for home-hospice but I wasn’t actually needed in his home.
I was so tired I don’t even really remember what I did wrong; I just know that I was staring into space and suddenly realized the shaky-thing (yeeah, soil analysis is really not my strong suit) had been going tooooooo long. I burst out crying, convinced that I had not only wasted my time but had ruined the sample, until the (protocol-following, organized, non-dim-wit) classmate haring the lab with me told me it hadn’t been long enough to ruin anything; it just felt that long because I hadn’t slept properly in a week. (It only now occurs to me that he might have been lying so I would not cry.)
Oh gosh, this reminded me that I am constantly afraid of destroying the million-dollar MRI machine and/or accidentally bringing a metal object into the room and killing someone.
Years ago Germany had this multimillion dollar particle accelerator (or was it Switzerland? somewhere in that area), and it was down for repairs and then started back up. And something went wrong. They investigated and found the cause: whoever had cleaned this one Very Important Chamber had been drinking on the job and left beer bottles in there.
When I worked at the Office of the Bronx Borough President, I was in charge of a bunch of interns. And our building, the Bronx County Courthouse overlooked Yankee Stadium. So I took them up to the roof once for lunch to watch a game, because they were into the idea, though we were all unaware of the fact that we had climbed up to a totally unauthorized area of the roof to see the game.
We wound up on the game broadcast when the YES Network’s cameras zoomed in on us up there. That’s how the court police knew we were there (they were watching the game, not guarding the roof) and one came up to scream at us about how we were in the spot where the snipers sit when the president comes to Yankee Stadium and that the NYPD had scrambled helicopters to get a look at us and we were in big trouble. And when we got taken back down to the borough president’s office, everyone started freaking out and telling us that if any reporters contacted us DON’T SAY ANYTHING, and the whole office went into crisis mode for the day and the chief judge of the building came to use our trespassing as a larger part of some pissing match the court system was having with the borough president’s office. It was suggested maybe I shouldn’t take the interns to lunch anymore.
Also one time I livetweeted an event with my job’s Twitter account and lost us like 400 followers because people didn’t think what I was doing was very funny.
“Also one time I livetweeted an event with my job’s Twitter account and lost us like 400 followers because people didn’t think what I was doing was very funny.”
Oh god, I occasionally think I’d like to do social media for a company and then I think about things like this happen and I’m just so grateful that I’m just one mostly anonymous person with practically no followers and absolutely zero responsibility to them.
The various times (not THAT many) when I worked in the mortgage industry and I ever-so-slightly miscalculated some numbers and erroneously approved a loan and then had to backtrack and be like JUST KIDDING ABOUT Y’ALL BUYING THAT HOUSE LOL. Not pretty.
I’ve done worse things at work, but they weren’t mistakes.
This is the best part of this whole post.
It is delightfully ominous.
I am really hoping there is a follow-up post themed around that comment. Maybe we could make it hypothetical to avoid criminal prosecution?
I destroyed roughly the equivalent of my tuition in lab equipment as an research assistant in college. If we ignore the equipment that melted in the autoclave, the microscope slide special ordered to hold a precise amount of liquid I knocked off the table, the very small fire, the many pieces of glassware somehow broken, the entire incident with the hydrochloric acid we would still be left with the flood. On a Friday I went into a cold lab and opened a valve to a hose on the giant holding tank of sea water. We needed a tiny small amount, it didn’t take long. I then placed the nozzle up on a shelf so it would be out of the way, closed the door, and left. When I cam back Monday afternoon everyone was talking about how one of the researchers had opened the lab door that morning and a significant amount of water had rushed out. The door it turned out was water tight. The nozzle on the shelf had created a small waterfall, directing the water down onto everyone’s else experiments and equipment. The tank was half empty. Everything in the room was damaged or destroyed.
I worked there for another two years.
oh this might be my actual nightmare.
The thing I love about science, and working in a lab, is that there is a LOT of forgiveness. I think every professor/lab manager remembers being a college kid and ruining everything. Also, sometimes mistakes turn out to be awesome discoveries: http://www.businessinsider.com/these-10-invention…
This is quite inspiring. Thank you!
I want to hear about all the OTHER stuff too! We can’t just ignore everything!
Right after graduating with an English Lit degree, I ended up working in a mail room at a law firm. I got to work the courier desk the most of anyone because my boss considered me to be pretty unflappable. I can’t remember the exact details, but the day before I had somehow neglected to get a package from the city to another town for an important case the lawyer whose name was on the firm’s was handling. Like, he was in court, waiting for these materials and not getting them would blow his case. I realized my mistake right away. I asked the courier who just delivered a parcel if he could take it. Then I told my boss what had happened and offered to pay out of my meager salary. She said it would come out of our budget, but told me to go directly to the lawyer’s assistant and confess everything. Which I did. And because I came to her with a mistake and it’s solution, the lawyer’s assistant was not angry as I had expected. She told me the greatest thing I learned while working there: “If you make a mistake and you fix it, the mistake didn’t happen.”
I think I kind of learned that at junior school. Me and my friend were messing around and broke a maximum/minimum thermometer that cost A WHOLE TWELVE POUNDS (RICHES.) We spent a couple of minutes trying to work out whether we could get away with it or cover it up, decided we couldn’t, and went and confessed – both that we’d broken it and that we were messing around and knew we shouldn’t have been. Our teacher was so flabbergasted by our honesty that he kind of forgot to do more than a very token telling-off. It made a GREAT impression on me.
Yeah you handled that awesomely!
On the first day of my first internship ever, I hit a coworker’s car while backing out of my parking space. Dents and scrapes on both his car and my mom’s, which I was driving. He was nice about it but I was too scared/embarrassed to ever talk much to him again.
My coworker and I dropped several thousand dollars worth of equipment into a lake. Protip: make sure someone is holding only the end of the rope when you throw things overboard.
one of my coworkers did this in the field! It was great, it was one of our most important pieces of research equipment and we’d packed it in our luggage to bring over specifically as it couldn’t get shipped to the field station. I…went and hid when he told the PI. But it turned out ok because our colleagues had room in their luggage and so brought another net.
It always seems to work out. Hooray for colleagues! Luckily we were in the middle of an intensive cruise so we had back ups of our backups on board. Plus since we lost 2 samplers connected by rope it should be pretty easy to get out there with an ROV and snag it.
OMG
I used to work at a magazine and sometimes our company would do copywriting on the side to make money, so my co-editor and I were enlisted to come up with all the copy for this lookbook for a big denim brand. There was a storyline — teens on a camping trip visiting a woodsy uncle. We didn’t come up with the storyline, and so we were having trouble and so we just devolved into disgusting jokes, as one does. At one point, we wrote that the uncle took a steaming dump on one of the teens chests (context would have this make more sense). The designer at the magazine needed the copy to start designing, so we sent him that as both placeholder text, and because he would think it was funny. Long story short, he designed all night, but didn’t read the copy, and sent it to a liaison, who also didn’t read it before he forwarded the design to everyone in the company including the CEO of this large denim company WITH THE FECAL JOKES INCLUDED IN THE LOOKBOOK. The worst part was that the names of the characters the models were playing were names of people in the company, including the CEO. The marketing manager at the denim brand had to make sure that the CEO’s assistant got to the office before the CEO read the email, and delete all trace of it. Everyone else in the company was instructed not to read the lookbook as it included errors (I’m not sure if anyone ever did). My co-editor and I had to write a formal apology to the marketing manager. She took it in stride, writing back by telling us that everyone needs to “blow off a little ‘steam’ sometimes.” We were in the publisher’s doghouse for a bit after that.
That made me LOL. I used to do very similar work. I thank my lucky stars every day that none of it went to print.
This error is my favourite.
I was apparently just reported to a doctor (who is, in fact, not my boss) for cursing in the hospital. Considering that a) it was not in a patient’s room and b) it was most likely because the laptop I rely on to do my job is literally held together with duct tape, I refuse to count this as a mistake.
I was reprimand by a manager for saying “ohmygod” once.
My first job just out of high school was at a small toy store where my best friend worked. He was moving away for college and recommended me as his replacement. It just so happened that EVERYONE who worked there (including the owner) was going to be out-of-town the week I was set to start, so I shadowed another employee a day or two before my official start date to see the opening/closing procedures. The employee I was shadowing was also a high school friend, and we spent the time goofing around and I didn’t take anything seriously. Cut to three days into the job when the owner’s sister dropped by to check on me. She was pretty surprised to find that I had not run the end-of-day reports, counted and deposited each day’s earnings, etc. etc. etc. I had just been ringing shit up and stacking the cash in the register for three days running like a TOTAL DIRTBAG. Needless to say, when the owner got back into town he took me to the coffee shop next door and fired me. It was mortifying.
I did exactly this at a bakery when I was 16 (who leaves a 16 year old to close up by themselves anyway?) Except my boss fired me at the beginning of an 8-hour shift and then expected me to work that shift. Which I did because I was weak-willed and humiliated.
LOL oh no! Thankfully this dude didn’t make me stay after he fired me. That sucks!
Yeah. She was not a great boss in a lot of ways
I was a 24, and a new employee at a N.C. newspaper which SHALL NOT BE NAMED. The newsroom was on the ground floor, with floor-to-ceiling windows along the whole length of the building. (The window glass was bulletproof because AMURRICUH!)
My desk was situated so that I was next to the window, but my back was turned to it. When I was working the night shift, the cleaning crew (who were ALWAYS forgetting their keycards) would sometimes come up from outside and tap on the window. I would leap 3 feet in the air, then come around to let them in.
One night, a guy tapped on the window. I didn’t immediately recognize him, but I didn’t yet know all the cleaning crew. So I shrugged, went to the front door, and let him in. Once he was in the newsroom, it became IMMEDIATELY apparent that no, he was NOT on the cleaning crew. Nope. This gentleman (who was pretty clearly homeless and mentally unwell) had come to deliver what we’ll call a verbal letter to the editor. At 10 p.m. at night.
Looking around in desperation, I caught the eye of a copy editor in his 60s, and communicated via panicked eyebrows that I did not know what to do. He came over and engaged the man in conversation. Displaying amazing courage of character, I then scurried to the employee breakroom and hid until I was sure he’d be gone.
The copy editor was…not pleased with me when I reemerged. “You didn’t know he wasn’t a member of the cleaning crew?! HOW?! For one thing, our cleaners have all their teeth.”
I salvaged the situation by writing a self-flagellating all-employee email 15 minutes later, praising the copy editor and talking about how careful we all should be with security. I actually ended up being lauded, which was dumb. And the copy editor was pleased with me.
But quite honestly, that was incredibly dangerous. That newsroom glass was bulletproof for a reason, and we received threats on the regular.
I love the way you salvaged the situation. Incredibly smooth.
Well, it has been my experience that in these situations that the absolute worst thing you can do is try to downplay your mistake. Instead, lean in. Go all out. Publicly agonize and carry on. “Oh my GOD, how could I have DONE such a thing?! Can you imagine what could have resulted from my GRIEVOUS ERROR? I should be written up, fired, and flogged in the streets! It is the WORST OF THINGS I could have done!” etc.
I mean, it doesn’t work if it’s clearly fake, but if you tap into your honest chagrin and give it FULL FREAKING REIN, then people who were originally inclined to be totally furious with you will usually cut you a break. In fact, they’ll start casting around for ways to reassure you, and think of the other, worse scenarios themselves, instead of YOU being the one to say, “Come on guys, it could have been worse. What if X had happened?” Because if you commit THAT faux pas, your coworkers will hate you.
Oooh, I’ve got one!
In spring of 2013, I was team teaching a (college) sophomore seminar. We had my laptop hooked up to the overheard projector to demonstrate digital research strategies to the students. My co-instructor was leading it, but she wasn’t super familiar with Macs. So she accidentally opened iPhoto. Which opened up to giant pictures of my naked, hive-covered torso.*
I’ll just let that sink in for a second.
Yeah. Naked pics + skin condition. (At least my boobs were covered…) Projected for an entire class of college sophomores to see. Not one of my finer moments.
*I had taken them to show the allergist, since my hives came and went and I wanted proof that I wasn’t exaggerating.
ohhh, I can only imagine the noise you made when that popped up on the screen.
I’ve managed to repress most of that day, thanks be to goddess. But I do remember what felt like a dream sequence slo-mo dive to close the application that felt like it took approximately two thousand years.
Ding ding ding! We have a winner!
Noooooooo.
p.s. Also, I feel the need to clarify that my boobs were covered because my hands were over them, not because I was clothed.
Ooh, one of my favorite English professors did something similar while troubleshooting a digital projector–except for it was a porn video from a male student’s laptop! He kept saying, “It’s not mine!” but she was so technologically unsavvy that she thought it was playing from her laptop and said it must be her husband’s. Unfortunately for the student, she was the only confused one.
I once forgot to tell the former Secretary of Veterans Affairs that he was supposed to be paying for dinner.
For 35 expectant NATO delegates.
In Budapest, Hungary.
I’m pretty sure this one wins.
You and I remember Budapest very differently.
I bet those delegates went Hungary that night.
I once sent my boss (an expert witness) to a trial several counties away that was not, in fact, happening. The case had settled a month before. I had not checked with anyone at the law firm that booked him before sending him on his way.
That sounds like the law firm’s mistake!
The most frequent mistake I make is mixing up East and West. I am a transportation/land use planner. It kinda cuts your credibility when you issue a document full of recommendations about what a community should do with a certain property/road/neighborhood, but yet you say it’s on the opposite side of town from the actual location. (“She doesn’t even know where the road is! Why should we listen to her? Warm up the tar and feathers!” etc. etc.) I’ve done this dozens of times. I’ve gotten better, but only if I remember to double and triple check.
I also have to look at my hands to tell right from left.
I do the hand thing too. I never used to have a problem with right and left – knew them intuitively – until my family went to the UK for a summer and drove around in a car on the wrong side of the road. Ever since then I’ve been mixed up and it’s never gotten straight…
When panicked, I still have trouble differentiating left from right. I feel you.
Yes! I once had to call someone back like 4 times (really) because I kept giving her backwards directions to the office.
I was a tour guide for years, which meant pointing with my left hand and saying “to your right”, so now when I am walking forwards I get confused about which direction is which.
I had a freckle on my left thumb in preschool, so I cheated by checking that. It faded probably before I was 12, but by then I kind of knew if I was checking that thumb, it was my left hand. (or, in the split second I spend checking for a freckle that was gone, my brain comes on line and confirms that yes, that’s left)
i do financial services for a university and constantly mix up thousands vs tens of thousands (as in I say thirty five thousand when i mean three thousand five hundred). It doesn’t come up so much in my new position but in my old one I was constantly giving PIs updates on their budget that where wildly in accurate. It was/is the worst.
ME TOO, it’s horrible and folks who don’t make this type of error think you are so dumb.
Oh man, I also mix up left and right on the regular – I have often resorted to pointing vigorously when giving directions to a driver (“that way!”), because I’ve basically said “turn left. No, left here – left! OH MY GOD I MEANT RIGHT SORRY” more than one time, which is too many times.
The thing is, I actually have a really good sense of direction and am ace at reading maps and such. Just, I can’t always remember which word goes with what direction.
this exactly me.
OH MY GOD yes I have used exactly that sentence! Great sense of direction, crap at calling the right word to mind.
I’ve started saying “driver” and “passenger” — “take a passenger here” or even “take a Lauren here” if I’m in the passenger seat.
One of my friends notoriously does that — “Make a Max at the light!” and we tease him but it actually works great.
I am in the middle of taking my architectural registration exams. On every. single. exam. I draw a compass rose, label it with all four directions, and then think to myself “is the W on the California side?” This is what it takes for me to not mess up east and west. I pretend that growing up where the mountains were always to the west is what ruined me, but I’m pretty sure I’m just wired this way. I can also flip p, b, and d all day long.
My first job was in a t-shirt printing company which also did embroidery. I worked in the embroidery room but sometimes I got called out to the printing to help out. I was given the job of putting some aprons we were printing on the drier, which was a big conveyor belt thing. Every once in a while I would have to run around and pull the dry aprons out of the way so the next batch could come out. I got talking with the printing dudes and we all forgot about pulling the aprons out of the way. They backed up into the dryer and about 20 of them got burned. Luckily the dryer did not catch on fire. My punishment was that we washed the aprons and got the burn marks off most of them but I had to iron them out before we shipped them. Ironing thick cotton canvas is really hard.
In high school I worked at a mini golf/ice cream place. I had worked the evening shift and closed everything up. The next day I arrived for my afternoon shift, and found that overnight the lever of the soft ice cream machine had been pulled down and thus the floor was covered in soft ice cream. I maintain that I did not pull the lever down, but rather the lever connection was too loose and it could gradually fall down due to gravity and its own weight. I mean, I think I would have noticed if ice cream was pouring out of the machine when I left! I still think the owners blamed me though.
oh nooooooooooo
I worked at Cici’s Pizza the summer I was 17, and somebody asked me to clean out the walk-in cooler, and I tried to move a 32 gallon garbage can full of pizza sauce by myself, and it fell over and all 32 gallons of sauce dumped on the floor. I think my boss planned to fire me that week, but the next day Jerry Garcia died and I was the only person who came in for my shift that day, so I was spared. But nobody ever wanted me to go into the walk-in after that. Which was fine.
Haha can I ask what region of the country this was in that Jerry Garcia’s passing constituted an emergency holiday? I’m gonna guess northeastern…
Athens, Georgia! It’s a college town, so…
I did this once when I worked at Panera, but it was a bucket of pickles and I was forgiven pretty easily (they didn’t even make me clean it up, because I was 17 and the middle-aged guys that worked the sandwich line were far too nice to the teenage girls that worked the registers). I did smell like pickles for about a week.
that has to be the best job-saving coincidence story ever
I don’t know if this counts, but when I worked in a bakery throughout high school and college, I was known for being a klutz. The day the owner brought her son home from the hospital, she stopped by the bakery first to show him off. I promptly knocked over four birthday cakes waiting to be picked up that evening. This woman went upstairs to the decorating room, 3 days postpartum, and redid all four cakes. The fact that she kept me on for another 12 years after that is a testament to either the mind-erasing power of Oxy or her inherent generosity. It’s probably both.
This should be the Slapstick Award Winner for this thread.
Did you knock them all over at once, or one at a time?
Oh, it was all at once. They were stacked in their cake boxes, ready for the customers!
I once put a book up for for free on the website of the publisher I worked for!! I mistook it for another title that was about open source stuff, and whose author had wanted it to be free. Well, once the problem was discovered, the publisher had to quickly put out on Twitter that the book was free in “celebration of Digital Rights day” or something like that. It was all my fault and I felt terrible!!
In my long and storied retail career, I honed in on a golden retriever accompanied by two women. This was a candy/food gift store so NO AMNIMALS. The store was super busy but people were just browsing, no
Ooof. I, like most people, do not wash my denim after every wear. On one casual Friday, I slipped on a pair of previously-worn jeans and skipped off to work. I dropped off my gear at my cube and went straight to the break room to drop off my lunch in the fridge. On the way back to my cube, I found two of my coworkers–laughing and pointing at the ground. They were pointing at a pair of my panties. USED panties. Panties that must’ve gotten lost in my pant leg and decided to jump right out and set up camp in the middle of a cubicle farm. I think I said something like, “Siiiiiiiiiiick. Must be a souvenir or something?” and then wandered off.
Once a department wide email went out (only to the women) that a black bra of size whatever had been found in the middle of the hallway and it had been placed into a discreet place for retrieval. I laughed and closed the email and it didn’t dawn on me until days later that it must have been my bra since a) I have a pretty unusual bra size and b) I never saw my one black bra again. I didn’t claim it.
Assuming it was mine, I have literally no idea how it got into work with me. Hooked onto my sweater maybe? Horrifying to even consider.
SO THAT’S HOW THIS HAPPENS.
There was a mysterious pair of used panties in the hallway at my work last year. Everyone was speculating on how it happened. This explanation is oddly reassuring.
Oh yes, THIS HAPPENS! This happened to me when I worked a job that requires a uniform. And hell no, I’m not washing my uniform pants every night after working 10 hour days. So, um, yeah, I’m not sure how this happens exactly, but it happens to the best of us. 🙂
Oh that reminds me! One time I biked to work in the heat and had to change my sweaty underwear. I hung up the old pair on my desk drawer handle and forgot to take them with me when I left a few hours later for an off-site meeting. It was an open-concept office for a non-profit who had many volunteers who would use whatever workstation was free, so of course my underwear was on display all day while different people were using my computer. (It was an arts organization and no one was really uptight about that kind of thing, but still. Still.)
How about when–surely I’m not the only one this has happened to–your pantyliner makes a break for it? Out of your underwear, down the trouser leg, and if you’re VERY unlucky, STUCK TO THE BOTTOM OF YOUR SHOE.
That has never happened to me, but I did once have an unused one fly out of my purse in front of my (male) boss. He started to bend down to pick it up for me, realized what it was, recoiled, and pretended he totally wasn’t even reaching for it while I scooped it up.
I couldn’t even delight in embarrassing A Man with my unseemly lady business because my boss is actually great.
I spent all day yesterday wearing tights that were falling down, taking my knickers with them. At one point they were a few inches above my knees. As my dress was knee-length, this was an issue. While on my own in a lift, I took the opportunity to yank them up, only for my watch to get caught in the waistband of the tights. I was stuck with my hand on my arse, skirt hitched up around it. It was horrifying. I managed to yank my watch free with a superhuman effort a few seconds before the doors opened.
This wasn’t my own mistake but it’s my favorite work mistake I’ve ever been adjacent to so I’m going to tell it anyway. My boss at my last job, a very flamboyantly gay man, accidentally wrote “We need all hands on dick” at the end of an email to various high-up executives in our company as part of an email chain about a crisis with our software.
oh my god i am trying to stifle my laughter at work.
I once concluded a work email with “Please don’t contact me again if you have any further questions” – I had forgotten the very important words “hesitate to” between “don’t” and “contact”…
Today I emailed a high-up academic using the phrase “I am right in assuming” not “Am I right in assuming”. It’s only my second day on the course.
Also in the realm of my favorite mistakes that other people made: I have always been terrified that I’ll switch from writing a personal email to a work email and sign it “Love.” A few years ago, our division’s head spouse did exactly that. In an email cc’d to all ninety of us. He kept his head better than I would have and followed it up immediately with an embarrassed “Well, clearly that was not meant for everyone. With warmest professional regards, etc.”
Something like that happened to me once. I accidentally sent an email saying “Hey baby, want to go out for dinner tonight?” to a guy in my org I’d never met because he has the same first name as my husband. I only typed the first letter in the To field and trusted that Outlook would autocomplete with my husband’s email, since I wrote to him all the time, as opposed to the total random. NOPE.
I’ve always been terrified that I would end a work phone conversation with “Love you, bye!” although that has never happened.
Hah! Did the random write back?
I have ended a work call to a co-worker with “Love you, bye!” because I was thinking at the time about the next call I was going to make – to my wife. My co-worker, a 53-year-old man, immediately rang me back and, deadpan, said, “Hey, man, I love you too.” After that, we’d just say it to each other in meetings, and it was awesome.
Oh, a guy at my work did that. TO A CLIENT.
Oh god, me too. I sign all emails/Facebook messages to my partner “V xx” and it’s almost automatic. I live in fear of signing off an email to a colleague or teacher like that.
You know how Blackberry was owned by a company called Research in Motion?
Once at a previous job, the ED’s assistant sent out a company wide email saying “___ cannot be RIMed today. If you need to get in touch with her, let me know, as ___ will not be able to be RIMed at all today.”
My worst work mistake was an email. I got an email from a guy who was like, “well what if I just get rid of this [ unspecified legally protected thing] ahead of time, so that you don’t regulate it?” and it was copied to my coworker. I read it like it was my coworker forwarding it to me, so I replied, “Tell him if he gets rid of the [unspecified legally protected thing] we’re regulating I will personally report him to the [reponsible agency] MYSELF.”
Ooooops. I had to send an immediate retraction like, “Sir, I apologize, that was not polite. But if you do try and get rid of [unspecified legally protected thing], it will be my obligation to report you.” I felt really unprofessional. He stopped calling though.
I worked at a company that did EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) for a bunch of big shipping companies. One day I reset a machine that had a bunch of stuck messages in its queue without moving those messages to another queue first.
One of those messages was a customs clearance order for a container ship that had already been in a long dispute with the port authority. Because they didn’t get that order, they ended up turning around and steaming home, burning god knows how much bunker fuel.
I figure that’s several lifetime’s worth of ecological damage on my head, so I don’t even bother recycling. After that, anything I do to try and make up for it is just laughable.
I think I told this one at a meetup but I once left the gate down on a pickup truck I was driving to a farmers’ market and spilled hundreds of ears of corn into traffic. Corn EVERYWHERE. The police stopped me but since it was my boss’ truck or something I didn’t get ticketed.
That’s not the worst mistake that I’ve ever made at work but it’s the only one that I see as more of an anecdote than a panic attack.
Can you get a ticket for corn?
I worked part-time as a telemarketer for a few months while I was in college. One time, I turned in two hundred sets of completed questionnaires in a two-hour shift (which is super quick) and was surprised and elated by MY OWN AWESOMENESS.
My boss called me in later and I was told that I missed the questions on the back pages. Had to call ALL two hundred people AGAIN, which if you didn’t know, it was quite a miracle to get people to talk to me the FIRST TIME.
Oh man, almost forgot about this one! I worked in a bakery on the weekends in college. I tended to go out Friday night, then just straight-through-crew it and show up all bleary at the bakery at 4:30 a.m. on Saturday morning. One Saturday after my shift, I left out an ENTIRE BOX of raw croissant dough triangles overnight. Naturally, they rose. And rose. And rose. It was the croissant version of Little Shop of Horrors when I came in the next morning. It was like 300 croissants, totally unusable. And given that we sold those suckers for like $3.50 a pop…
Bless them, though, they did not take it out of my wages.
I am now picturing enormous croissants, big enough to stick your entire face in, with golden flakes that could take your eye out. And now I am sad that such a thing cannot be.
Alas! That does sound glorious. But no. These were vaguely triangular, oozing, beige slug monsters. Nothing gorgeous and golden and flaky about them.
My high school biology teacher told us about a man who worked at a poinsettia greenhouse and forgot his lunch one night. He went back, turned the lights on to find it, and then left. Apparently this tiny of bit of light was enough to prevent any of the poinsettias from ever blooming and he got fired. : (
I worked at a greenhouse where we covered the poinsettias with heavy black fabric at night to prevent this very thing from happening.
I used to work for a popular blog with a loyal readership and though it never happened, I had a recurring nightmare about accidentally publishing a draft and pushing it out to everyone’s RSS feed and then having to delete it.
Most of my real-life work mistakes are just tiny things that I obsess over until they crush me. Putting the wrong numbers in a spreadsheet one time. Not remembering to get someone’s name. That sort of thing.
I substituted for someone out on leave, and one of the many new-to-me complicated projects was to book a massive weekend conference/retreat. I managed to arrange for everything: hotel reservations, catering, presentations, transportation, etc. I came back on Monday and was told that the guest speaker did not have a room reserved. I didn’t even think to reserve it. I chalked it up to stress (also dealing with some family medical stuff at the time) more so than plain stupidity.
A pretty dumb thing that I didn’t realize was dumb until I was corrected happened when I used to teach karate. While the kids’ class was being taught by the chief instructor, I was tasked with teaching an introductory lesson for a girl, probably about 5 years old. We were in the upper room, about five steps above the main mat, where she could look down to her parents. She could not focus, even with my rearranging us so her back was to them, so I closed the shoji-style door halfway so she could pay attention. The chief instructor IMMEDIATELY opened it and I realized my mistake right then and was mortified that I hadn’t considered what that would look like.
I once did an internship at a prosecutor’s office. Two decades prior to my time there, they had a case against a defendant charged with sexually assaulting and bludgeoning an elderly woman. But the defendant was declared mentally incompetent to stand trial, and was placed in a mental institution run by the state. However, the defendant wanted out of the mental institution by the time I got involved, so our office was preparing to prosecute, or at least threaten prosecution. I was tasked with going through the extensive case file and compiling all the instances of sanity we could show the judge to make him stand trial. The office was a bit away from my school, so I took the case file home with me, wrote the report, sent in my work, and finished my time with the prosecutor. Except I apparently put the case, full of crucial information, file under my bed, and didn’t find it until I was moving a few years later, well after they would have needed it to prosecute the defendant.
I don’t know what happened with the case. I don’t want to find out.
Well, they definitely would have followed up on that. I can’t imagine anyone in my office (although we are a private firm) being like *shrug* oh well guess we’ll just have to put this one in the losses category early!
Yeah, me either. The most likely scenario is that dude (or his lawyers) realized what awaited him on the other side of the mental institution’s doors and started flinging his poo and calling himself Napolean so as to stay safely ensconced there.
I mopped the floor of the walk in freezer.
This is the most succinct horror story I’ve ever read.
It’s like Hemingway for work mistakes.
I just had a vivid flashback to my days working at a popular seafood chain when I was a teenager. I was supposed to put a large vat of strawberry sauce in the freezer, and I dropped it while trying to set it on a high shelf. It spilled EVERYWHERE. I was not fired, somehow.
Magnificent.
I’m a Healthcare Navigator – I help people get insurance through that new commie socialist dictator Obamacare thing, known to sensible people as the Affordable Care Act. As you know or can imagine, there were a lot of issues with the rollout this year, as well as a lot of false information flying around even among those of us who are supposed to be “experts” (spoiler alert: none of us are experts). Basically what this means is that I accidentally gave consumers a lot of wrong information/filled out their applications incorrectly because I had misunderstood something or not gotten the latest policy update. I corrected the mistakes whenever I could but sometimes it was too late. I’m honestly still a little afraid I’ll get a phone call from the feds telling me I’m an accessory to perjury or something.
Before I had this job I worked as a cashier at Best Buy. One night my drawer was $100 short when we closed up. Thank G-d I’m a hopeless goody-two-shoes, so my supervisors didn’t think I stole it or anything. I was actually so hilariously distraught that for a few months after that, one of my bosses would say things like “your drawer was short again tonight….by like a lot…like, a whole nickel” just to watch me panic. Great guy.
A friend of mine had the same job, and it sounded like an absolute horror show. She told me that the only people who did have the proper training were completely unreachable and you sometimes had to do nonsensical things to keep the applications from getting kicked out by the system.
I’m actually 95% convinced that the “people with the proper training” don’t exist and that’s why we can’t reach them. I think they’re a myth invented to give us hope of figuring out what’s happening.
And, yeah, explaining to a consumer that putting in their permanent resident card number will crash the entire application , but NOT putting it in will give us an angry red error message, but that’s actually okay because it’s better than crashing the site….always a challenge. Almost all my clients look at me in awe and say “I would have gotten stuck on the first screen without you, how did you figure this out?” A year of trial and error, my friends.
Thank you for doing what you’re doing!!
When I worked retail I also misplaced $100 and I and the shift manager stayed late to count and recount the drawers and the safe but didn’t find it. Two days later I showed up back at work and the store manager told me he had found it… in the pocket of my apron.
Heads up – this one is actually sad and terrible.
When I was 19 I worked as a live-in nanny for a summer. Two kids, 4 and 6. They also had a lovable black lab, who was of course much lower-maintenance than the children and loved to go on car rides. On one of the last weekends of the summer, the parents decided to go on a weekend getaway, leaving me alone with the kids and the dog. I remember something was different about the day camp schedule, but I don’t remember exactly what. I do remember that the younger kid was definitely late for both his nap and lunch, and was pretty upset about it. I didn’t remember the dog in the back of the car. Daisy died, and it was my fault, and I still feel incredibly shitty about it. Definitely the worst thing I’ve ever done.
My Mum managed to kill the classroom pet, if that makes you feel better. This was before I was born, but Mum tells the story often, in a you-can-never-fuck-up-as-bad-as-this way.
She was the teacher, and so over school holidays she took the bird (I think it was a parakeet?) home to look after it. I can’t remember how exactly it died, I remember something about it being put near a window and the curtains pulled so the bird was not visible in the room. I think maybe it was a cold night and it froze to death? Anyway, after the school holidays Mum had to break it to her class that their school pet wasn’t going to be coming back that year. Ooops.
As the new owner of an adorable black lab puppy, I definitely should not have read this one.
Oh I’m sorry, that must have been horrible for you. (For everyone)
Oh god. How traumatic for everyone.
I can’t bring myself to upvote this one, so I’ll just say I’m sorry. It’s good you can tell that story because this is actually more common than people think.
I work for a company that uses other people’s money to produce things – as in, other people give us money, we spend it on things and then account for it to the owners of the money. Well, I managed to fail to bill back about $200K of production expenses in a single month last year. And then I discovered it four months later and had to write a horrified, contrite email to both of my bosses because no one had noticed. I spent about a week thinking I was going to get fired, but then no one actually cared at all and we fixed it and it was fine. Yay???
I have another one too! The first time I was scheduled to open at a new retail job in college, the manager gave me the keys but didn’t tell me the security code. When I unlocked the door, the alarm went off, the police came, my manager and my manager’s boss were both unreachable, there was a line of customers down the block and I was just standing in front of the store crying for about half an hour until my coworker showed up to rescue me.
Oh no! I had something similar, although there was no alarm. Early on at a retail job, I would come in at 10 on Saturdays for the early shift; the store owner would be there too to open up, and another employee + the manager came in at noon and worked until closing (when the manager would lock up). My boss was moving one Saturday, but he FORGOT that he hadn’t given me keys to the store. I assumed he was going to open up and then start moving, but he did not – so I had to sit outside the store for nearly TWO hours hoping for a miracle, while a parade of customers came by and were disappointed.
Most people were pretty understanding, but this super-rich guy Gordon (so rich he had one of those titanium AmEx black cards) was SO pissed and kept saying “this is NO WAY to run a business” at me. Thanks dude, but I had nothing to do with my boss being a flake.
This was before I had a cell phone, and while a few other people offered to let me use their phones to call my boss, I hadn’t been working there long enough to have memorized his number. Finally a former employee (who had left w/a lot of bad feelings towards my boss) happened to come by and she knew his number, so I was able to call and tell him to get his ass over to open it up. He kind of freaked out, but at least he realized that it had been his fault.
The upside was that he said “you’re doing such a good job here I just assumed I’d given you keys already” and this was my first step towards becoming a manager and being hella competent there, but it was a pretty terrible morning.
I once worked in a chain shop that sold bed linen and one Saturday they sent me to work at their other store. At my regular job, there was a button under the till that you could press if it was getting busy and you wanted a co worker to come and help you. I was very emabrrassed to discover that this same button in the other store called the police. I realised what had happened but pretended to know nothing about it.
Once I acquired a virus and crashed a computer my second day at a job, but it was an Americorps job, and it took 30 seconds to load a webpage, so I feel like I was not the only problem.
More recently, I was working at one of those gentrifying artisanal ice cream shop and was banned from closing shift because I apparently am incapable of counting money correctly. So now I work the opening shift, which I will do until next week, when I start my hospital social work job. So, good with dying people, bad at counting.
I used to work for the Department of Public Safety. On my first day, while writing out my email signature in Outlook, I missed the L in Public.
I wrote “pubic” on the board in front of a class of college students when I meant public just last week. It was hard to recover from.
When I was 9 my mom gave me a book, The Care and Keeping of You, and we were reading it together, and I was completely baffled by the term “public hair” until she corrected me. Not that “pubic hair” is in itself necessarily a much clearer concept to a 9-year-old.
Thankfully, I didn’t make this mistake, but I saw in a county-government publication that somebody forgot the ‘o’ in the word ‘county.’
Oh God, I type the word “account” all the time for my job and it frequently comes out “acocunt.” I’ve never actually sent an e-mail without catching it, though…at least, I don’t think I have.
I work at a department whose acronym spells CLIT if you type things in the wrong order…
I recently had to email a gentleman by the name of “Mr. Cockfield” for work-related reasons, and MERE MOMENTS before hitting send, I noticed that I had accidentally typed “Mr. Cockfiend” instead.
My current job requires me to type the word “public” all the time, on documents that are for public (checks– phew!) release, and this is my greatest fear.
I worked at a newspaper for a while and this was probably the most common typo. Also, I live in Alaska on the Kenai Peninsula, which was always typed “Penisula.”
That does not seem like an erroneous description of the Kenai.
Yeah, it’s pretty penisy.
In grad school, one of the more common resume typos was leaving out the first “n” in “finance,” as in “Global Fiance Manager.” Way to manage those engaged dudes, people.
A one-time professor of mine (who had just earned his doctorate) gave me his newly bound dissertation on the public perception of risk in [blah blah blah] to read. On the first page, I noticed the typo.
It recurred at least once every two pages for the entire thesis.
I made the measured decision not to be the person who broke it to him.
This happened on the inside front cover of a book my company once printed for the Harvard School of Public Health!
We had to take all the covers off, reprint them, and stick them back on again.
That’s GENIUS!
Years ago I read an anecdote by some scientist about a report he sent to the New Zealand Information Service. He didn’t notice that throughout the whole report Microsoft Word’s autocorrect changed NZIS to NAZIS. He said they didn’t take it well.
I was working as a cops reporter at a newspaper in NW Alabama when I got a report of young boy hit by a car. He went to the hospital, but that’s SOP whenever a kid could be injured so I had no idea whether he was hurt. The police department wouldn’t release any information and the hospital can’t due to privacy laws. What I SHOULD have done was follow-up the next day. What I did was write up a brief saying the kid was treated and released. Apparently the boy was seriously injured. He was supposed to play in some t-ball game the next day and they made an announcement over the PA that he was still in the hospital. And that the paper got it wrong. While the publisher was in the crowd.
Once I was an intern for an embassy overseas and we had some fancy people visiting from DC and I was asked to escort them from HostCountry Ministry of Defense to HostCountry Ministry of Finance and so on and I was 19 and very poor and it just didn’t occur to me that Adults took Taxis For God’s Sake and so I took them to the MoD via subway which involved two transfers and when we got there my boss had to apologize profusely to them and then pull me aside to talk about the aforementioned “taxis, for god’s sake, are you kidding me, do you know who these people are” 🙁
This is the kind of thing that I need spelled out for me too, even though I’m sure it seems obvious to most people. 🙁
Oh this was amazing.
The flipside of that to me, is that any boss should have realized that the 19-year-old intern probably took public transit and should have made sure that a) they knew to take a cab and b) knew who should pay for it and how to make that happen.
One of my very first projects at my first grown-up job – I either mis-measured, or entirely neglected to measure, the height of a room, leading to a very expensive piece of leisure equipment being ordered 10″ too tall, for our very best and most demanding client. It cost $10,000 and 10 days delay to have it fixed. Somehow I was not fired, but have not worked on any further projects for said client in the ten years since.
What does “leisure equipment” mean? Is it a euphemism?
I hesitate to say, for fear I’d identify myself. It was a specialized system, only for the very rich to have at home.
Ok, I will continue to assume some kind of fancy sex swing device.
I don’t work as a writer or an editor, but I’m always trying to get my boss to give me more writing and editing work, because I enjoy it and think I’m good at it. That being said, this summer I put something in the mail to ~60,000 people that specifically invited them to call my direct line. Thing is, there was a typo in the phone number…
Also, in college I interned for my congressman for half a semester, but I decided to drop the internship in favor of a paying job. Buttt on my last day of work my alarm didn’t go off and I slept through the entire day. Networking.
I cracked a carbon-fibre fork on a $6,000 custom ordered road bike, which was shipped in specially from Italy. It’s a miracle I wasn’t fired on the spot.
Woah! How did you manage to do that? I thought the point of the carbon fibre was to be strong…
I was supposed to be doing a live demo of a web interface. I had double and triple-checked it, but I had neglected to confirm that it was available outside our work network. In the morning, when I checked, I was VPN’d in. In the afternoon, before a room full of 200 people, I was not, and the site did not load (we moved on, but I got chewed out by my boss).
I was working in the IT department of a call centre that took incoming calls, catalogue orders. I made a small change to the form the agents used to input the information from the callers and didn’t realise for several hours that the callers’ addresses were no longer being stored in the database. Fortunately all the calls were recorded but I spent a whole weekend listening to them all on crappy headphones and matching addresses up with the information we did have.
This thread is particularly well-timed because I recently made a mistake that was not actually a big deal, but was treated as A Very Big Deal and proved to be the source of much frustration.
(I emailed out an incorrect survey link; was able to send the correct one before anyone took the survey)
OMG you guys, I have one.
I had just been broken up with this dude and took a job at a shitty but fancy-pants immersion program for wealthy high-school students who weren’t quite accomplished enough to get into more prestigious summer exchange programmes. Anyways, we were understaffed by one (as in, we had no director) and they put me in charge of excursions for one weekend. One of the teachers was supposed to come with me as a chaperone, but he didn’t show up/call me, and I FORGOT him. The bus had to turn around to pick him up (because my judgment call was that we needed an extra person. I was dumb!) and we were late to our excursion.
This wouldn’t have been the end of the world, but the students complained to their parents that I ruined their weekend. It was a huge fiasco for the program head but in the end they decided to blame the teacher, not me. (Even though it was my fault, obvi.) I still feel kind of badly about it.
Wait, how was that your fault?! HE was the one who didn’t show up or call! I think the program apportioned the blame correctly.
Ahaha….I once accidentally threw away thousands of dollars worth of medication when I worked at a pharmacy. I’d been innocently chucking out expired medication without removing it through the system first….so it all just appeared to be missing.
Whoops.
I once ordered three thousand boxes of crayons when I was supposed to order three. I didn’t even realize it until the next day when the Staples guy kept wheeling in box after box of fucking crayons. Fortunately, by the time he sat the last one down, my boss was laughing so hard she couldn’t be mad at me.
I love this one!
Well, crayons keep!
And I bet they never had to order crayons again!
SECRET SUCCESS
Literally LOLing omg that is seriously the best,
I once interned at a theater that was producing a new Tony Kushner play. I was on book, which was exhilarating. For the non-theatergeeks, on book means that when the actors are just getting “off-book”, i.e. learning their lines, they need someone to whom they can call out “Line?” in case they forget what they’re supposed to say. So I was sitting the audience, mere rows behind Tony Kushner himself and the big-name director and actors I had seen in many other things – with a huge script in front of me that was a living document – he would remove and add entire scenes overnight during rehearsals – on what I soon found out was a very rickety music stand. It gets to be a particularly poignant moment in the play, and the lead actor pauses, then calls out “Line?” My moment to shine! But I had been lost in the scene before me and was now lost on the page. I couldn’t find the line, holding up these famous people all around me, I turn the page to see if it’s on the next one and somehow tip the entire script off of the very rickety music stand and into the seats in front of me. I nearly died. Someone else called out the line, the actors were very nice about it and moved on, the director gave me a Miranda Priestly look, Tony Kushner did not respond at all. My moment to shine.
In my experience, all music stands are rickety, especially the ones you need not to be.
One day I was scheduled to come into work earlier than my supervisor. My workplace at the time was a museum, and it had a time-sensitive alarm system- if you unlocked the door and didn’t punch in the alarm code in five minutes, the alarm went off. I let myself in . . . and realized I’d forgotten the code.
The alarm went off. I was unable to turn it off. When the alarm goes off, it send an automatic alert to the security company, so about ten minutes later, three security guys were at the door. They were also unable to turn the alarm off, so they shrugged and left. Then the security company called my poor supervisor and dragged her out of bed so that she’d come in and turn the alarm off. The whole mess is not one of my fondest work memories.
Then again, I also fell down the stairs on my first day at that job, so maybe it was just doomed from the start.
My office has a similar alarm system, except when you set it off it starts shouting “INTRUDER! INTRUDER! LEAVE IMMEDIATELY!” over and over again and then the police come. The police are very sick of us.
I did this last week! And I entered the wrong code so many times that I locked the keypad, so when my supervisor came in he couldn’t turn off the shrieking alarm. The only good thing is that I called the alarm company and let them know I was just a fuckhead, there was no breakin, so they didn’t send anyone over. Fun times.
Mine is not that fascinating or dramatic, but I once let someone walk out with a few hundred bucks’ worth of groceries for free. Extremely busy day at a small-town grocery store, me a senior in high school hellishly confused and flustered by my first day at the register, them a parent with several loud and screaming and upset children. That was pretty awful.
My biggest work mistake was not filing a sexual harassment complaint against that boss I had once who used to come in to the tiny room I worked in alone at night and try to rub my shoulders.
I think it’s more that his biggest work mistake was being a creepy, shitty person.
he even had a creepy moustache.
These comments are making me feel so much better about my past workplace incompetencies. Does anybody else ever feel like they’re probably the only person on earth who screws up at work and the rest of the world just goes about their day, gracefully and perfectly? I’m going to print them off and carry them with me when I start my new job next week!
YES. I constantly am worrying about whether something is a “normal mistake” or if I am somehow fundamentally incompetent (for like, making a mental arithmetic error or sending out an email with a typo. I think these are normal?)
LOLLLLLL we have filed material in the Court of Appeal with date typos. Like, the COURT OF APPEAL. And a self-represented person made a HUGE deal of it and one of the judges was like “well this is just a typographical error, let’s move on”.
Yes it’s normal.
Oh my god, I haven’t read all of these, but YOU GUYS NEED TO SCREW UP MORE BADLY. This thread is making me feel bad about myself.
I think the worst thing that comes to mind (not the only thing, mind you), is when I was working in a residence office and was sending email notifications to those students whose GPAs turned out to be too low to qualify for re-entry into res (so, VERY VERY LOW). And I decided to cut a corner and send a mass email, bcc’ed of course. Except I didn’t bcc it. I just cc’ed it. I violated privacy legislation and tons of university policies.
And I did it late late on a Friday afternoon. The Dean had gone home. I had to call her and then go over to her place. She had to call the president of the university (the university of like 60,000 students), the lawyers, the privacy officer, like everyone. On a Friday night. So.
YOU GUYS NEED TO SCREW UP MORE BADLY
I would like to direct your attention to the one in which I PROJECTED PHOTOS OF MY NAKED, HIVE-RIDDEN BODY to a roomful of college students.
Do keep in mind that we might not all be revealing our most haunting screw-ups … I picked one I’m fairly at peace with (i.e. long ago it no longer keeps me up at night)
And that is a horrific story. And I could total see myself doing that.
THIS IS WHY THE E-MAIL RECALL FUNCTION NEEDS TO BE BETTER.
At my school a couple years ago there was some email sent out about submitting your health forms online, or something banal like that, and one guy went to forward it to his mom with the message “should I do this?” But he hit “reply all” instead and ended up starting a reply-all chain that included every. single. student. at a university of some 50k people. The email chain went on literally for weeks and I think the guy who started it was asked to do a segment on the Jimmy Kimmel show.
But really the fault lay with the system admins, who had let a secret “reply to all 50 thousand students” feature exist for god knows how long.
I’ve got a bad one.
I got some animals from another study in my lab to use in my own. We decided to drop four of them, since they were performing badly and they were sham animals anyway.
Except one of them wasn’t. I had switched two animals by accident during training. We didn’t find that out until our lab manager was looking at the brain she had just gotten from the animal and went “…this is definitely a lesioned animal.”
I still want to cry just thinking about it
I’m sorry.
Accidentally resent hundreds of order confirmations for old orders to actual people because I thought I was in the test system and I was working on a new version of the email script and nope, I was in the Live system. People were calling us all confused and angry, thinking that they had been charged again for these old orders.
I took my current employer’s website down for 45 minutes once. Happily, no one visits our website, and we have since started using version control for it, which probably reduces the likelihood of a repeat.
That felt like the worst mistake, but accidentally leaving the plastic thingies on two pizzas when I put them in the oven at a previous job might have been objectively worse. It definitely was smellier.
My spreadsheet had a couple of errors, and I discovered that my boss had $130,000 more in funding than we’d thought. Yay – except this was 30 days before the end of the grant, and it’s very much “use it or lose it.” And my boss would NOT have been happy to lose $130k in free money. Because of me. And my stupid spreadsheet.
So thus was born the most creative accounting I have ever done. In the end, I had to tell my boss that we still had an extra $30k to deal with, but I could happily pin it on other circumstances – thus saving my job. $30k is way, way better than $130k.
A FOAF told me that in a similar situation, he ordered a number of extremely expensive platinum crucibles to use up the surplus, and then returned them the next fiscal year for the purchase price – 10%.
Wouldn’t work if you weren’t in a chemistry lab, of course, and it’s probably a go-directly-to-jail move these days.
Would be a lot funnier if not in a chemistry lab though.
I posted before but I keep thinking of other things I screwed up.
When I was a teeny tiny teenager, a very nice man took a chance on me and gave me a job at his candy store. (Wow, that sounds creepy when I write it out.) It was my first job and I messed up all sorts of things. One time someone bought $65 worth of candy and paid with a credit card. Keep in mind, this is a tiny independent store and most of our purchases were kids buying $5 or less, so $65 was a big purchase for us. Naturally, when I entered the amount on the credit card machine, I missed a decimal point and charged them about $6. For, I don’t know, 8 pounds of candy? I tried to refuse my pay that week (it amounted to just about the $60 I’d undercharged them by, so it made sense to me to make it up this way). The owner insisted I take it.
Another time, I forgot to plug our freezer back in. We sold water ice in addition to candy, but our freezer was old and crotchety and would freeze the water ice rock solid. So we left it unplugged during the day to soften the water ice up, and plugged it back in overnight so it wouldn’t melt completely. One night I closed up (there was only ever one employee in the store at the time; too much responsibility for a teenager), shut everything down, locked up, put the key through the mail slot (I wasn’t allowed my own key yet) and….realized I’d left the freezer unplugged. The meltdown (no pun intended) I had was epic. I tried to break back in, tried to reach the key through the mail slot, my dad even called the local police to ask if they could let us in. Eventually I called my boss at home and told him I’d ruined all the water ice.
Believe it or not, he not only still gives me free candy when I come in, he also lets me come back and work when I find myself unemployed and struggling to make my student loan payments. He might be an angel.
I almost prevented a woman from getting her abortion. I worked at a clinic in a state with one of those outrageous waiting period laws. It had just gone into effect. We hadn’t quite figured out the system for keeping track of who was there for an appointment and who was there to see the doctor. The system at the time involved photocopying the sheet the person had signed in on and putting it on a clipboard with the charts. Of course it was chaos. Of course I was working the front desk the very first day. Of course I managed to forget one of the copier. I didn’t realize it for like an hour or so until someone came up to the window and asked what was the damn hold-up to see the doctor for the stupid waiting period thing. It was the person whose sheet I had forgotten. And the doctor had already left for the day. She threw a pen at me. I know I deserved it. I still feel bad about that. (We managed to get the doctor to come back, thank fuck.)
Just a few weeks ago I signed some contracts without proofreading them. Our assistant had accidentally pasted in a paragraph that meant we (a nonprofit, not a giant corporation with money to burn) had to pay lots and lots more money than I had negotiated. Read everything you sign guys. It’s important.
I was teaching in a Southern Baptiat School and my husband surprised me with anniversary flowers in front of my 10th grade English students. I was embarrassed by the public attention and escorted him to the hall. When I returned with the flowers, a kid said, “Wow, that was rude. You didn’t even say ‘thank you’.” To which I replied, “I’ll thank him later.” Innuendo!
Another time I was preparing to announce a quiz to that same class, and a kid asked if my “announcement” was that I was pregnant like several of the other teachers. I may have told him to “Stay out of my uterus.” You definitely don’t drop the u-word around Baptists without consequences.
I loved those kids, but they were seriously intrusive.
My first job out of college was an admin assistant/resident coordinator at my university hospital’s dermatology department, and it was miserable because there was really only a part-time job’s worth of work for most of the year. During match season it was busy, but when I started there was very little to do (and I wasn’t allowed to read at my desk for some reason). So I was happily taking on whatever projects my supervisor could give me.
She put me on updating the departmental directory, which meant I was emailing everyone in this fairly large department for weeks to remind them about sending their information in to me, then using a very clunky editing program to smoosh all the data in. It was the kind where inserting someone into the alphabetical list didn’t automatically shift all other entries smoothly down, but messed up the formatting, so there was endless cut/pasting going on.
I managed to get it all put together only a little later than desired, figure out the confusing university printer’s ordering system on their website, and submit my First Big Project, only to have my DIRECT supervisor, who was so patient with me even though I probably radiated anger at that shitty job, come into my cubicle and say “why am I not listed in the directory?”
Somehow, out of dozens of employees in the department, the only one missing was her. Sorry, Libby. 🙁
More embarrassing than terrible: I was managing a pet supply store that focused a lot on nutrition so we had close relationships with a lot of pet food manufacturers. One was sponsoring a tour of their plant for store owners to show off their dedication to quality control, high quality ingredients, etc. This was about a four-hour drive away, in South Carolina, so it would take all day and I wouldn’t be in the store at all. I drove down, blasting awesome music all the way, showed up at the plant… and when no one was there to meet me, I called into the store and the other manager and I realized that the tour was the NEXT Wednesday.
My boss was a good sport and actually paid me for half the day even though I didn’t do shit, and when I went down the next week the sales rep made a joke about someone being “so enthusiastic” they came down a week early, but happily she didn’t name names.
I dropped a boat- a brand new speedboat, from about ten feet high, to land on its side on the dock, right outside the window of the owner of the company.
Picture this, except with obvious operator error rather than machine problems… with the boat actually lying on its side. I managed to pick it back up and dust it off and resume work, and I’m not sure anyone ever noticed.
I was tasked with finding information about satellites payloads from engineering online libraries, despite not being an engineer. Since I really didn’t know what I was looking for, I downloaded a bunch of academic articles with the correct keywords.
I forgot one major thing. Each article is charged and it ain’t cheap.
Somehow I didn’t get fired. I only received a talking to by an extremely friendly guy and never did that again. It was one of the advantages of working for a corporation with a buttload of money.
Believing the customer had already hung up, I called him a cocksucker, which he most certainly was! When I realized he was still on the line, I told him that I had tourette’s syndrome. He didn’t believe me. Even though I got fired that day, it was worth it.
During university I worked in a coffee shop. Morning shifts, 6am-1pm, so I was frequently pretty exhausted. One day a lady came in with her small child and ordered a cappuccino and I *totally* zoned out whilst foaming the milk. Two things will happen if you do this. One is that the hand which is checking the warmth of the metal jug will abruptly begin to burn. The other is that boiling aerated milk will explode out of the jug and onto your exposed neck and chest. Now, I think we all learn a valuable lesson about ourselves, how we respond to crisis, etc. in such situations. Unfortunately, it turns out that I am the kind of person who will jump backwards, scream loudly and shout the words “CUNTING FUCK” at an aggressively high volume. She and her child looked at me in horror and left without a word.
I also worked in a call centre aged 17 – I once asked if someone’s husband was in (he was the client name on my database) and received the memorable response “Actually, he no longer resides at this residence because he left me last week”.
Could be worse though – I used to work with a waiter who once spilt a glass of red wine down the front of a *bride’s wedding dress* IN THE FIRST TEN MINUTES OF HER RECEPTION. The horror.
I also worked in a call centre aged 17 – I once asked if someone’s husband was in (he was the client name on my database) and received the memorable response “Actually, he no longer resides at this residence because he left me last week”.
I did a similar thing only the spouse had died. There’s no way you can really know this beforehand, though. I added a note to the file…
I once dabbled in private practice, and the night before I was due to leave for my first Adult Solo Vacation, my boss had me type up a memo concerning a case we were working on, which she wanted emailed to the client. So I stayed till about 2 o’clock in the morning (she had, of course, left at 6pm) doggedly reviewing the file and highlighting all the areas in which I thought we needed more information from the client, making a list of issues to address going forward, etc.
When I got back a week later, I discovered that I had used an email address to which the client’s soon-to-be-ex-spouse may have had access (apparently, no one had updated the client’s email address in our antiquated computer system). I usually arrived about three hours before the senior partner who was handling the case, and for those first three hours back, everyone in the office was whispering balefully and glancing at me significantly, but no one would tell me what was going on. Until Senior Partner appeared, summoned me to her office, and screamed at me for about ten minutes so loudly that everyone else in the firm overheard. I worked there for three months after The Incident, and literally every single time Senior Partner spoke to me, she reminded me how much I had fucked up.
The most awesome parts were that 1) the memo essentially contained a list of questions for both parties (questions, not answers) that would be asked of both sides anyway, and 2) we never even confirmed that the spouse ever read that email. Because of Senior Partner, I will never work in private practice again.
Damn! I mean, that’s not even your fault though, right? If you had an outdated email address…there’s nothing you could have done about it…
I love the nonprofit world. Almost everyone is so forgiving.
I have made major mistakes at every job I’ve ever had, and I’m sure I’m forgetting some, but these two were as an events rep for a major publisher.
1. Along with all of my regular responsibilities, I was responsible for compiling and writing the cover sheets for the xeroxed upcoming book samples. One one occasion, the assigned proofreader was too busy with his regular responsibilities to check over the covers, and he told me to do it myself. Everyone knows it’s tough to proofread your own work, but I was sure I could do it. In the middle of a big event, the VP of the department found a bunch of errors on the covers, including misspelled author’s names, wrong release dates, and incorrect volumes. He has to rip off about half the covers, and was furious.
2. Part of my job was traveling to events and schmoozing with bookstore owners. I had an expense account tied to a company issued Amex card. I was responsible for submitting expense reports & paying it off promptly. If it wasn’t paid off in full by the due date, the card wouldn’t work. Money was tight, and I had used it to buy something personal, planning on paying it off right away, but the payment didn’t get sent and I found myself at an event in Canada, unable to pay for my own food, let alone anyone else’s. I was graciously taken care of by the folks from the bookstore, and I paid them back every penny, but it was the most unprofessional mistake I’ve ever made. I would have been in more trouble if I hadn’t straightened out a huge shipping error on the fly that was caused by my recently fired boss.
Once I lost an entire media list and in the process of trying to cajole the company who hosted it to figure out a way to restore it (because they had done it before so I knew they could!) I dramatically and facetiously said I was going to have to kill myself because my boss was going to be so angry with me if I did not get this fixed. Turns out, they record all of their phone calls and sent that straight to HR who recommended my boss fire me (I was a temp). Thankfully (after confirming I was not, in fact, about to commit suicide about this media list), my boss just advised me to be a little more careful about what I said on the phone. Though humiliating, I thought this demonstrated a real commitment to my job!
When I was 21 I became an assistant property manager for a C rated apartment complex. I was seriously unqualified for that job, but anyway, one weekend a tenant called to report a small leak in their apartment. It was a slab leak, which happened quite a bit at that apartment complex. I made some calls to the maintenance man and my supervisor. I don’t really remember what the maintenance man said about the leak, but I remember he didn’t think it was a problem because it was such a tiny leak. Well, that night it froze. So the leak went from being insignificant to huge! I mean HUGE. Their whole apartment was flooded with hot water. So Monday rolls around and I am walking up to the office at 8:00am and guess who is waiting for me? An entire irate family. Everyone was shouting at me and blaming me. Once inside, they still continued to scream, and at one point the dad came at me behind my desk. Despite being terrified, I held my ground, and told him to back off or I was going to call the police. It was a nightmare. I know it wasn’t completely my fault, but to this day I still feel guilty about it. Ugh.
A funny story- In college I worked a retail job and had to vacuum at the end of the night. The vacuum was old, self-propelled and would spin around hilariously if you stopped holding onto it. One night I decided to amuse myself by letting it tear all over the floor. The next day I was confronted by the manager, the vacuum had left deep scars in the cheap wood floor. They didn’t fire me, but they never let me live it down, either.
A not funny story– At another job I paid the same invoice four times. I truly thought that the amount I was paying was only 1/4 of the total due, as they were always asking me to only pay portions of invoices, see what I could get away with. Totally dishonest company, that one was on their game, not me.
Maybe not my biggest mistake, but the thing I definitely got in the most annoying kind of trouble about, was getting an IUD. Seriously. I was waitressing at the time (thanks, Medicaid, for the free BC) and my boss was SUPER SUPER Catholic. My doctor had told me to eat a good meal prior to coming in, so I ordered a pizza from our kitchen (apparently this was against some rule that literally no one knew about) and oh my god, the boss tore me a new one for it and I had to bring in a doctor’s note that I was supposed to eat before the appointment. THEN, the next day I asked her for a Tylenol or aspirin or whatever kind of painkiller she had handy, because I had cramps, and her response was–snidely, and this is a direct quote–“Well, maybe it’s a *sign*.” I about punched her. Luckily I only had two weeks left at that place at the time. UGH.
The actual biggest mistake I ever made at work was getting involved with a married co-worker but that is a much longer story that ended in emigration SO.
Oh man. I’ll be glad to read this thread…not to delight in anyone’s pain or anything, but just to feel less alone and remember that these things are eventually (usually?) okay. I’ve twice now been blamed for things I don’t catch at work by this MAN who also did not catch said mistakes, but they’re somehow all my fault? He’s so gross and condescending about it, too (like to the point where he sits on my desk and lectures me. He’s not even my boss!). I do feel terrible about missing these things since they matter and I am by nature a perfectionist. But I guilt-trip myself enough. I don’t need you putting the weight of both of our mistakes on my shoulders (and being creepy to boot), dude.
End rant!
He SITS ON YOUR DESK?????????
It’s been nearly a decade since I last attempted to clean out a Unix directory with “rm -rf *”. But that is not a day one soon forgets.
(Oh god. Even typing that command makes me nervous.)
I did the same sort of dumb stuff in Unix, losing new code not yet backed up. Luckily I have a photographic memory, so it wasn’t as bad as it could have been.
I ended up aliasing the commands to something else, with a message printed out — “no, you don’t want to do that.”
During school holidays I worked in a horribly understaffed cafe, in the charge of a volatile and manipulative manager (He had raging fights with his chef brother. The first two things I learned on starting was that he had fired 10 waitresses in two weeks, and that his family relied on our success). We had indoor and outdoor seating, and a pretty complex system of table-numbering.
One busy evening it started to rain torrentially and all the outside customers came inside, squeezing themselves onto the end of various occupied tables. As a result, we had to invent an ENTIRE NEW numbering system, running along the lines of “table 8E-now-the-fictional-table-21-you-know,-one-half-of-table-3”. Needless to say, it was impossible for myself and the one (just one!!) other waitress to keep track, and we messed up everyone’s orders. Everyone was angry and wet and hungry, and it was nightmarish.
Coupled with the stressful presence of The Manager, and the whole thing was enough to prompt a minor emotional breakdown/breakthrough (and the inevitable firing). Crying in the toilets over a plate of Spanakopita is not my finest moment.
*though that said, I managed to cry so hard as to make The Manager very uncomfortable, which I feel was a small victory.
I once worked at a restaurant owned by a volatile family of (very lovely) Italian people, and I remember moving tables with my boss once while he screamed “FUCK YOU GOD” at the ceiling.
Working in a lab in a nice new building, I broke a liter flask of boiling nitric acid. I had to call the lab supervisor, so I walked down the hallway with the nice new orange carpet. Turns out that the carpet was ph-sensitive, and we now had a trail of purple footprints between the lab and the office with my desk.
Luckily, it turns out that the color change was reversible so I scrubbed each footprint with Formula 409 to neutralize the acid.
I lol’d literally
Y’all are all so conscientious. I would hire any one of you.
That’s how I get away with my occasional massive fuck-ups. I cry a lot and am generally adorable and apologize for approximately two months straight, so I don’t think anyone has the heart to suspect me of serious wrongdoing or yell at me. Of course I’ve also worked for very nice people, but still, I plan to use this survival skill as long as I possibly can.
When I was a baby editorial assistant I was in charge of proofreading a popular photography magazine our company published. Each year we had awards for new cameras and photographic equipment. As you can imagine, the two biggest companies were very well known camera manufacturers: let’s call them Banon and Mikon.
Anyway, in our special awards issue, a Banon camera won the top award and a Mikon camera won another of the big awards, and we had big logos for the two companies splashed on opposite pages of the introductory spread to the issue. Except, ah, the logos were reversed, so the Banon logo was behind the Mikon camera and vice versa. We – including I, chief proofreader – only realised this when the magazines were printed.
The solution was either to have thousands of copies reprinted at exorbitant cost or for me to spend an entire weekend covering the mistakes with custom-stickers we had printed at a much-less-than-exorbitant cost. Needless to say I was a much better proofreader after that incident, and I still regard stickers with some hatred.
Warning: story below is a little gross
I once worked in a shoe shop on a trial basis. I came into my first day on the job on a really heavy period – I don’t want to hold up misogynistic stereotypes, it wasn’t that it was making me moody or anything, just that I was in so much pain I could hardly stand. The shop was in an old nineteenth-century building, and the toilet was still in a little outhouse in the yard at the back, behind the storeroom. So I had to make frequent visits there to change my sanitary towel. Weirdly, despite the fact that the shop’s owner and all the managers were women, there was no little bin in the toilet. So after my first foray into the toilet, I shuffled back out with a used sanitary towel scrunched up in my hand, desperately looking around for somewhere to put it. I found a cylindrical container with a lid in the storeroom, so I assumed it was a bin and shoved the towel in there and tried to get on with my job. I kept on doing that for the rest of the morning. Finally it occurred to me to lift the lid of the bin, and that’s when I saw it was the container for the shop’s Christmas decorations. The shop owner didn’t keep me on when the trial period (ha ha) was up.
Also, I did an internship at a local news magazine over the summer, and I wrote a story on new refurbishments to the local theatre, and my editor told me to ring the theatre’s PR person and ask if he could send us some images of what the redesigned theatre would look like. So I phoned him, and he just said ‘I can’t, they’re embargoed’ very snippily, and I had to go to the editor and say I failed, feeling like it was because I have the assertiveness of a worm.
“I’ve done worse things at work, but they weren’t mistakes.” But WHAAAT, Mallory? And when are you going to tell us about them?
omgosh this one is amazing. I am snorting
Ok this is more a humiliation than a mistake. I once mixed up a batch of fertilizer for my office plants, put it in a desk, and forgot about it. One night I was working late, looked at the plants, thought they looked a bit peaky and pulled out the fertilizer. While the fertilizer was in the drawer apparently it had fermented….or something, because when I unscrewed the top, it sprayed like a shaken soda can. Across my desk. All my papers, everything, and the front of my clothing.
And it smelled. Oh my god, it smelled exactly like shit. At this precise moment, while I’m scraping up a few starbucks napkins and frantically scrubbing helplessly at my desk I hear a person go…. “hello?” and one of the oldest longtimers at the office wanders into the room. Stares at me…takes a big whiff….stares at me…..long pause. I try and explain, “I had this bottle of fertlizer it exploded across my desk….” He sort of is like, “oh my….welll” and then just kind of backs away.
I spend another hour or so scrubbing. I send an email to the other women I’d made some fertilizer mix for, letting them know to dispose of it. Then I go home, reeking of feces on the subway…I had to call into work the next morning and I was like, “um hi coworker…how…does it smell in there? Oh? Normal? Oh…good, no reason, see you soon!”
It was so embarassing. For a long time I couldn’t talk to that guy. I assume he thought I threw up and pooped my pants across my desk.
‘I assume he thought I threw up and pooped my pants across my desk.’
Amazing.
Volunteering, not work: when I was a teenager I was a leader with a local Brownie Pack. It was Shrove Tuesday, and we were making pancakes with them, a small group at a time. The person in charge had been in the kitchen, but it was a very busy evening and she had to get on with something else, so I took over. The pan looked a bit dry, so I added oil to it so the pancakes wouldn’t stick. It had been on the hob for ages and was very hot, and I added too much. It went up in flames.
(It was fine! I experienced the calm you only get with terror, told them all in a non-panicked voice to move away, took the pan off the heat, ran a tea towel under the tap and smothered the flames with it. I am still overwhelmed with horror when I think about the potential consequences.)
I once left my office unlocked overnight. By the grace of God, I was the first one to arrive the next morning — which ALMOST NEVER happened. Nothing was missing or taken and no one ever found out. But I am certain I would have been fired if I hadn’t miraculously made it in early that day.
One summer I worked as a nanny/assistant for a family that had a 6 year old and then 9 month twins. Generally, the twins were on opposite sleep schedules, which was awesome as I usually only had to deal with one who was awake at a time. But it also meant that I couldn’t ever leave the house with the kids. One day, mom leaves with the 6 year old, and amazingly, the twins were awake at the same time. I was getting cabin fever, so I decided to take them for a walk. In Texas in August. We were only out for about 20 minutes, and I had the stroller top up and a blanket hanging in front of them, so thought we were all good for no sun exposure. When I get them home, one of the twins was fairly red and fussy. And then he goes lethargic and immediately falls asleep. I figured he just got a little tired from the heat and don’t really think anything of it, but then he was asleep for about twice as long as normal. Their mom came home during that time, and just happened to tell me a story about how they were at church a few days earlier and the air conditioning had gone out. And since one of the twins has a heart condition, and getting overheated can be extremely bad for his heart, they had to strip him down and try cooling him off with wet towels. I had worked for them for two months, and she never thought to tell me one of her children had a heart condition and heat was bad. As I listened to the story, and getting more and more horrified, she realized something’s wrong. So I tell her about the walk and baby’s reaction. We checked on him, but thank God I hadn’t sent him into cardiac arrest, and he was fine and remained so for the rest of the summer.
That seems like a massive fuckup on her part. So glad it ended fine.
What laurenipsum said.
I was informally hired as a freelancer to digitize some poetry journals after I completed my internship. Unfortunately I didn’t know much about obtaining permissions and so forth, and the editor I was working for wasn’t sure how to go about the digitization process, so it was a whole lot of my shy neurotic self trying to sort things out with virtually no direction. One day I emailed to say I wouldn’t be into the office that day because I’d just shattered glass all over my floor and I needed to get to class and have time to get it cleaned up while it was still light enough to actually see the shards. The next day I was due in, the editor had to go to a big book event thing. The next, she was ill. The one after that, I was ill. After that I didn’t hear anything more about it.
It’s been three years and I still feel incredibly guilty, even though I’ve been assured that I’m remembered fondly in those offices, and the editor was dealing with the super-fun things that come with inhabiting a corporeal form, and she was already massively busy.
Oh! Also, when I was in high school I worked briefly as a supermarket cashier and a customer once yelled at me for putting a box of instant oatmeal on top of a pie. You know, the supermarket already-baked pies that come in the firm plastic, I dunno, clamshells, I guess? “YOU’RE GOING TO CRUSH THE PIE DON’T YOU KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT BAGGING GROCERIES?” Well, look here human, I am efficient and thoughtful about how I bag groceries, I keep meat and dairy separate and group refrigerated items together. I keep foods separate from non-food products such as detergents and hygiene products, and I never ever put a heavy thing on top of a light thing or a squishy thing so WHEN I PUT THE BOX OF INSTANT OATMEAL ON TOP OF THE PIE, let me ASSURE YOU that I did it BECAUSE IT WAS THE MOST RATIONAL BAGGING PROCEDURE. So, you know, don’t act like I just kicked a puppy.
When I was in fourth grade I was a “student office worker” which meant that one day a week during lunch, I sat with another kid in the office and manned the desk and phones while the secretary took lunch. One day a kid’s parent came in to pick him up and I bid them both farewell, only to get REAMED OUT by the principal later for not making sure the parent was really his parent. “HE COULD HAVE BEEN KIDNAPPED,” she scolded.
I was a really obedient kid who got really upset by getting into any kind of trouble, but I remember even then feeling like, “They never told me that rule and this is NOT my fault. I’m just a kid.”
I used to do that job sometimes too! I do remember the secretary explaining to me that if anyone came to pick up a kid I had to check their rolodex card — there were certain kids whose cards contained notes like “[One parent] is NOT allowed to take [student anywhere]”. I am from a very sheltered family and it was kind of a mind boggling moment for me, realizing that some kids had way different lives than me.
At an internship two summers ago I was in charge of a press event/candidate debate (why they decided to lay responsibility for this giant thing on an inexperienced 21-year-old is beyond me) and completely forgot to bring all the signs for the event. Not so bad in hindsight, but at the time I was panicking because the management was hideously mean, and they had been hyping this event all summer as “if we mess this up we had might as well be dead.”
And at my current job I still haven’t figured out how the new phones work, so when I try to transfer somebody I panic EVERY TIME that I have disconnected them instead. But nobody has ever called back to say “hmm I think you might have hung up on me,” so either I am doing it right or nobody cares that much.
HI THERE me too, phone systems are terrifying.
LOL I tell people who want to be transferred to call back to reception, but I can get away with it.
I have actually (within the past week) accidentally hung up on somebody who we had been trying to get in touch with for days. When my boss called back the line was already busy. My boss left a message using the ever useful “some sort of issue with the phone system” phrase, and then my boss was like “wait, did we still need to talk to him? We already made the decisions we were trying to get in touch with him about” and it was no big deal. Just remember “Oops, we’ve been having some trouble with our phone system” totally includes human error. At least in my world.
I can remember the abject terror I felt at certain moments of my working life, but thankfully they have become blurry with time. The first time I managed a project and didn’t disclose to the boss that a contractor was billing us weekly for implementing a workaround for his own error? That was probably costly. That other time I was told we were hosting a reception at work for all the members of the owner’s church and assumed it was coffee and cookies and everyone showed up ready for lunch, along with an old friend who A. told me right then that her daughter had died and 2. brought pictures of her final days? I mostly remember running away and hiding to have a good cry while my boss made a run to a restaurant.
Heads up if blood makes you queasy!
When I worked as an acute dialysis nurse (hospital based, so patients are relatively ill) we had a patient who was always cold, always came up to the unit covered in blankets. She had a fistula (the surgical fusion of a vein and an artery in one’s arm to facilitate the exchange of blood…it’s where we stick the big ass needles that remove the blood from the body and put it back in) and you always need to have your eye on the fistula because if one or both of those needles become dislodged the patient could lose a lot of blood, and fast. Well, like I said this patient was always covered in layers upon layers of blankets, and although she started treatment with her fistula-arm exposed, she eventually tucked it under the blankets. We had a busy unit that day, her machine never beeped, her vitals were stable and we had never had any issues with her access before so NBD about the covered fistula, right? Well, when the tech and I went to take her off the machine 3 hours later, we pulled the covers back and the linens were SOAKED in blood. One of the needles became dislodged ever-so-slightly and had been leaking slowly. It was a horror show, she was freaking out, we were freaking out (thankfully her blood pressure was stable throughout) I had enough sense to give her IV fluids and draw an immediate CBC (to check her hemoglobin) and alert the blood bank that we’ll most likely be needing a few units of packed red blood cells. We cleaned her up and sent her back to her floor with a full report to her unit nurse. She did end up getting the blood transfusion later that night (pretty common anyway for dialysis patients) but overall she bounced back and, after that, fistula checks Q15 minutes for evvvverrrryyyyooonnnne.
I am my roommate’s home hemo care partner. He doesn’t generally need me, I’m just an extra pair of hands on the off chance that he needs a new bag of saline or a manual rinseback or a fistful of gauze (or, on a couple of occasions, “can you check to see if the drain line is pinched in the bathroom door?”), and except for the memorable time that the connection between the patient line and saline bag wasn’t fully tightened for the rinseback–there was a little, uh, I guess you could call it foam–it’s pretty low stress. (Oh, okay, there were also a couple of times when Something Went Wrong and fixing it took too long and the lines started to clot so fixing was off the table but I can’t even remember the specific circumstances of those times, I only remember that congealing blood looks a lot like acrylic paint that’s been left out to air a couple hours.)
NEVERTHELESS I have had extremely stressful GUILT DREAMS about doing something that royally fucks up a treatment (or about having to have them myself, without a fistula? and not in a clinic or hospital or anything, once as a prerequisite to being able to VOTE. HEAVENS), including one where my coming into the room led to the arterial line being severed and a DRAMATIC DREAM DEATH SEQUENCE. In my old bedroom at my dad’s house, for some reason.
omg the voting one
As a first time TA, I overslept for the last day of section, when we were going to review for the final. I showed up with like fifteen minutes left to spare. Pobres estudiantes.
(Estudiantes pobres?)
My Spanish is very bad, but…
I used to work for a small consulting firm in Chicago and while my title was “strategist” I mostly just did coffee runs and booked flights. Once, when planning a meeting for workshop with a VERY important client in Washington(a ubiquitous non-profit based out of DC that you would be like “oooooo” if I said the name of) I accidentally listed it as 2 hours long instead of 4. Everyone responded that yes, they would attend, the conference room was reserved, and we were ready to go. On arriving to work the day of the meeting, I was met by the CEO of our company, arms crossed and a major scowl on her face. “We need four hours and you scheduled only two.” What ensued was a mad rush of phone calls and lots of important people having to cancel on other important people and lots of dirty looks thrown in my direction. Everything turned out okay but I left the position shortly thereafter. Too much of a stressful position for me, and I never did anything remotely utilizing the actual talents they supposedly hired me for.
I was working as a camp counselor with a bunch of high school kids. The story’s too complicated to get into, but let’s just say through a series of unfortunate events I managed to get a campers entire supply of ritalin soaked. It turned into ritalin mush. Fortunately my boss and the poor kid’s parents were forgiving and understanding.
Does anyone else remember that U.S. Marine pilot who was joy-flying about rural Italy? He cut the cable on a cable car packed with tourists. I’ve screwed up at work, but I always think back to that and tell myself “at least you didn’t kill 20 people”.
At my job, I often attend events to tell people about our service and add new sign-ups to our e-mail mailing list with a tag. I then send an e-mail filtered to these people, offering them a discount code for their first order if they sign up for our service. One day, in a rush to get out of the office, I sent out one of these e-mails, closed up my laptop, and called it a day.
I got home and discovered the e-mail in my inbox. I then realized with horror I had forgotten to apply the filter and sent this e-mail (thanking the recipient for attending a very specific event and offering a steep discount that other customers weren’t offered) TO OUR ENTIRE MAILING LIST OF 5000+ PEOPLE. It was gut-punching. To make matters worse, it was my birthday.
Another time, I accidentally entered a customer’s CVV code in the place where the fee for her payment should have gone and charged her over $400, over ten times what she should have paid.
I was working at fancy hotel that did a lot of weddings, and I somehow managed to drop a miniature bottle of tonic precisely so that it would pour straight down the back of a bridesmaid’s dress. There was shrieking. It was awful. Then, a few minutes later I dropped a buttery potato into the mother of the bride’s lap, from where it rolled into her expensive handbag, which was open on the floor next to her chair. “Silver service” hahahaha
OMG. Noooo. The worst I ever did when waitressing was tip hot coffee into the lap of a man who said him and his wife were trying for a baby
During my one waitressing job, at 17, during the brunch rush, I broke a glass into the (bathtub-sized) ice machine on a hot day when everyone was ordering iced tea and lemonade. They didn’t can me because I hadn’t left the lid open; someone else had.
Take-away: who stores all the glasses right over the ice machine?
I spent one summer in college working for a nursery company that was contracted to supply plants to Home Depot stores. My job was to work at the store all day watering/ changing stock/ helping customers/ etc. It was me, another college kid, and our supervisor (who was a super nice 60-year-old plant enthusiast who bought us snow cones almost every day. Still one of my favorite bosses.)
One weekend our supervisor was scheduled off, so my coworker and I were both scheduled all weekend to provide support to each other. But that Friday my coworker asked if I could cover for him so he could take the weekend off too. I said yeah (I don’t know why! I was young and dumb!) and without consulting anyone about it I prepared to work Saturday alone.
But guys, Saturdays in the summer at plant nurseries are BUSY. It was a NIGHTMARE. I was the only one on the floor with hundreds of plants to water, and the actual Home Depot employees wouldn’t even give me the time of day. Then a full truck of new stock arrived without warning, so I didn’t have time to get rid the old stock. Carts of half-dead stock ended up all over the sales floor. Customers started hassling me about whether I was going to throw away the old plants (which, yes, was policy) and if I could give them a discount (which I could not.) And one guy would NOT leave it alone, and went to get the store manager saying I wouldn’t sell him plants.
About that time our district manager showed up unexpectedly to check up on things and was aghast that I was alone. I got firmly chewed out for agreeing to a schedule change without permission, leaving dead stock on the floor, and having nothing watered. Meanwhile the Angry Dead Plant Customer was still raging, so the manager ended up selling him enough half-priced plants that he left. I thought for certain I was going to be fired. I had a breakdown and started crying in the annuals when our watering crew arrived and their leader, we’ll call him “Frank,” whose favorite pastime seemed to be mild verbal sexual harassment. He found me crying and when he approached me I found enough grit to suck the tears back into my face, act like nothing had happened and work the rest of the day – because, no way was I crying in front of that douchenozzle.
I took the next two days off, and came in on Tuesday to my supervisor and coworker back on the job. None of us ever talked about it.
I once tore the corner of a 1500s-era manuscript I had, for some reason, been told to scan. I didn’t tell anyone. I still feel bad about it. But they really should NOT have just let our department slap that thing on the scanner, so I also blame the archivist who loaned it to us.
You make me feel better. The oldest book I’ve torn while scanning was just from the 1860s.
I felt almost offended on behalf of the book when they just handed it to me, with no gloves or stern talking-tos or anything, so when I tore it I felt a strange mixture of vindicated and mortified.
In college I worked a small clerical / office job. Once, I was supposed to take an envelope with some paychecks in it a couple blocks away to payroll. I’m pretty easily distracted and often lose things. I saw a farmer’s market on the way, and somehow (I have no idea) the envelope left my hands and I just could not find it. I was sure I was going to be fired for that, however before they reached a decision, I ended up quitting because another job I had applied to had gotten back to me and hired me.
On my very first day as an apprentice funeral director, everyone left for lunch leaving me in charge of the office. This dude comes in saying we’d called him to sign his wife’s cremation authorization, with a big long story about how they were still legally married even though they’d been separated for years and years because neither of them ever wanted to get re-married and didn’t want to go through the hassle of divorce. I got way shady vibes off of him, so I called the director in charge of that case, who said yeah, he needed to sign an authorization, the file for that was on his computer.
I got onto the program where we handle everything for everyone’s funerals, and pulled up the cremation authorization form, but it still had the daughter’s name plugged in. So I deleted that, replaced it with his name—so far, so good, that’s exactly what I should have done. But on the line for disposition of the cremated remaines, I put that he would pick them up, as he was insisting that he would do so and mail a portion to the lady’s daughter, he just wanted some to bury in the plot he’d bought next to his own years ago.
My other boss gets back in the office, sees what I’ve done, and flips her shit. Apparently the form I was supposed to print and have him sign wasn’t on our main software, it had been thrown together in Word, and the disposition line still had the daughter’s name on it—I was supposed to have the guy authorize the cremation but leave those instructions alone.
My main boss gets back the next day and just kind of shrugs. This guy was the legal next of kin, after all, he had the legal right to the cremated remains and he knew it. Problem was, the reason he and the deceased lady had never been divorced was because he was a crazy obsessive abusive stalker and refused to sign the divorce papers, convinced they’d get back together someday and also he didn’t want anyone else to be able to marry “his” wife.
We informed the daughter and she burst into tears. It had not been a happy separation, nor had her childhood with this man as her stepfather been exactly idyllic. I called the dude up and spun a very not-true line of bullshit to convince him to re-sign another authorization—he wouldn’t budge on turning over ALL of the ashes, but he did agree to only receive half, so that we could send the rest to the daughter.
I didn’t do anything illegal, and everything was resolved in the end, but. But. I put that poor woman through a whole boatload of extra distress right after she’d lost her mom, and I will always feel like shit about that.
After learning the story, I was very very VERY tempted to give him a box of floor sweepings from the crematory, but didn’t. That would have been more than a lot illegal, and pretty damn unethical as well.
But now I refuse to handle any forms for any other director’s cases without them there in the office. That kind of drama ain’t worth twelve bucks an hour, y’all.
I work as a security guard in our control station watching cameras and alarms and opening gates. We have one gate that people need opened from time to time but I can only see it through a camera that only allows me to see what is directly in front of the gate. One of our regulars called saying he needed the gate opened so I opened it. He was on the phone with my co worker and he said he was through the gate but after she told me that and I had started closing the gate he said oh, another truck is coming through as well. The gate was already closing and it doesn’t stop once started so I hit the truck coming in with the gate. The gate was broken, the truck had some damage although I don’t think the driver cared much since it was an 18 wheeler, not his car. Still I felt sooooo stupid and now myself, my co worker and the man who was on the phone with her are all really paranoid and careful about that gate.
This second one wasn’t me but I was here when it happened. In our control station we have a panel that can be used to initiate evacuations if necessary. You just flip the switch for the appropriate area or for the entire building and it sets off loud sirens and lights. People take it seriously because there are dangerous chemicals here. A man who used to work here decided that the evacuation panel looked dusty and took out a cloth to clean it but while cleaning it he flipped several of the switches and caused a large portion of the building to evacuate for no reason.
This wasn’t work, but rather school…I spent a semester in Jerusalem, and took a psychology seminar while I was there. I needed a seminar to get a Psych degree from my college, so I emailed my adviser (who is typically a very sweet, sarcastic ex-hippie and everyone loves him) and asked if this seminar I was taking in Jerusalem could count towards my degree. He wrote back and I interpreted the content of his message as “Sure, that should be fine, just check with the head of the department.”
Fast forward to when I’m back in America and trying to get my credits transferred. I meet with the head of the Psych department expecting that getting credit for this seminar won’t be an issue. Turns out it’s a nope, definitely not, no-can-do’s-ville, babydoll. I’m upset and frustrated and email my adviser. In my email, I said something like “and just so you know for the future, apparently seminars can almost never be transferred from other universities, I’m just mentioning this because you told me it wouldn’t be a problem” (more delicately worded than that. He writes back YELLING at me – no joke, large sections of this email were in all caps, which IMO is a little unprofessional but if I were tenured maybe I would be out of fucks to give too. He accused me of accusing HIM of not knowing how to do his job, “I’ve been here for 20 years, I know what the rules are, I never said you could get it transferred I just said you’d have to talk to the head of the department about it,” etc. I’ve never pissed off an educator that badly before. Maybe no one has.
I was so embarrassed I dropped his class and managed to go the rest of my college career without speaking to him or emailing him. I still cringe when I think about that email.
I’ve now commented on this post 3 times. I screw up a lot.
THIS WAS NOT YOUR FAULT. Also, we all screw up (look at all the comments!).
I was an advisor for a teaching program and had a student who emailed me twice/week to make sure she was taking all the classes she needed to. It was so obnoxious that I just sort of brushed her off (“yeah yeah, you’re fine, check your worksheet, blah blah”). Turns out I told her she didn’t need a class that was REQUIRED BY THE STATE. I felt–rightly–like total garbage and threw myself on the mercy of the state department of education. They waived the class but I was–rightly–denied a promotion at my next performance review.
I also got my husband fired from the IT department at the school where I worked because I had accidentally downloaded a host of viruses onto my work computer (did you know you can’t trust the first Google result when you search “download Firefox” ??). It was a conflict of interest for him to fix my machine (it was a religious school so they were obsessed with making sure nobody was looking at porn on their computers) so he skipped it. They fired him without realizing why he didn’t do the work but were too embarrassed to give him another chance :/
All of these comments are making me give MAJOR SIDE-EYE to the number of managers who leave new employees alone! I feel like at least half of these stories should be blamed directly on those managers. Especially those of you who were teenagers — duh, leave any 17 year old with one day of training alone and don’t be surprised when something gets fucked up!
Once I discovered that if you aren’t paying attention and press “5” instead of “7” while dialing the dealer-services number of a major North American shoe company, you actually get one of those pay-by-the-minute sex hotlines. I learned this while the customer for whom I was attempting to order shoes was standing right in front of me, and I had to play it cool as I hung up the phone and she asked, “so, are they available?” It was incredibly hard to keep a straight face, and after she left I had to excuse myself to giggle in the stockroom for a few minutes.
So I was working with a family and the mum was totally racist (I’d done a forma complaint in the last fortnight). Then her daughter comes up to me and I thought she was saying the N word. I totally shouted at her and called her mother and told her mother to shout at her before realising she was saying ‘naked’ in a funny voice she had learnt off the big bang theory. I was all, “Oops,” and felt like it totally deligitimised my formal complaint – like I really hear racism in places where it is not present or something.
My hats off to you! It’s awesome you are performing that service for your roommate. What kind of training do you receive? I mean, it took me 4 weeks of orientation before they let me touch my first patient. And does your roommate put in his own needles or does he have a catheter? I didn’t have much exposure to the home-hemo crowd, I was always so curious about it.
I actually got almost no training at all. I asked about it, but he did all the in-center training by himself, then the nurse came over and they set up the machine and I looked over the manuals and troubleshooting instructions and sat in on a session that she supervised. We did a manual rinseback so I’d be basically familiar with how to do it, and that’s more or less it.
He puts in his own needles! He had a chest catheter for a long time, but it’s been about two and a half years, I think, since he started using the fistula.
Generally my participation in a treatment is hanging out in the room with him and making netflix do the netflix thing. Sometimes I fetch a food from the refrigerator or toaster oven once he’s set up.
Oh! I have another, more recent one.
My assistant is great, but she has some qualities that make managing her a bit challenging from time to time. She is VERY detail oriented, and doesn’t trust herself to make the right decisions, and asks LOTS of questions but sometimes has a hard time understanding the answers when they are complex (I’m a lawyer, they often are). She’s also quite sensitive.
I came to work a bit late one day to a string of about 10 emails between her and another assistant who I also work with from time to time, fighting over an issue on one of my files, which ended with my assistant sniffily saying “I will await instructions from the lawyer”.
I forwarded the last email to my pal at work saying “talk about high maintenance” (we had been talking about high maintenance people in our lives as we got our coffees).
The email got filed on the file by accident, my assistant saw it, there was drama, and she refused to speak to me about it until I ambushed her in my office so I could explain, apologize, and discuss it. We worked it out, but not without some tears on her part. I felt TERRIBLE. We are now in a bit of a professional love fest, so I feel that it is forgotten and forgiven, but SERIOUSLY that is awful.
And this is why you never leave a note (on the file, where someone else can read it).
Somewhere out there are@ 6,500 copies of a book with the name of the wrong translator on the back cover. I did that. And I didn’t get fired. Probably because the actual translator was dead and couldn’t call for my head.
Guy gave me £500 worth of cash and I gave him £1000 worth of chips. I realised what I’d done and we got the money back, but Jesus.
I actually got almost no training at all. I asked about it, but he did all the in-center training by himself, then the nurse came over and they set up the machine and I looked over the manuals and troubleshooting instructions and sat in on a session that she supervised. We did a manual rinseback so I'd be basically familiar with how to do it, and that's more or less it.
He puts in his own needles! He had a chest catheter for a long time, but it's been about two and a half years, I think, since he started using the fistula.
Generally my participation in a treatment is hanging out in the room with him and making netflix do the netflix thing. Sometimes I fetch a food from the refrigerator or toaster oven once he's set up.
What does this button do?
IT’S THE SILENT ALARM, the police inform me, showing up 15 minutes after my bored cashier’s curiosity gets the better of me. YOU BLITHERING IDIOT.
For my very first corporate job ever I didn’t know about time cards, and my boss had never managed anyone who wasn’t salary before so he didn’t know either. Finally after two months, when I’d been out of food for three weeks (bless Food Not Bombs to the ends of the earth) and walking 2 miles to work and 2 miles back each day because I couldn’t afford the bus and was relying on the frat I was crashing in being too kind to kick me out even though I couldn’t pay my pitiful summer rent, I finally got over my embarrassment and anxiety and asked why I hadn’t gotten paid.
(In the end I told the frat that I wasn’t going to pay because the bathroom was covered in vomit and shit all summer and they just cashed my deposit check and we never spoke of it again. I was so glad that that job had a shower in the office.)