Your worst work blunders and embarrassments--Admit them here

[Severen13]

What are some of the worst blunders and embarrassments you have committed on the clock?

One of mine: I work with a man who has a severe speech impediment; just trying to say a simple sentence is a struggle for the fellow. Of course, this does not affect his ability to do his job and do it well. Anyway, one day he was talking to me, and I got impatient with him. And he noticed.

*facepalm*

Good grief, I still can't believe I did that. *hangs head in shame*

Thankfully he didn't hold it against me.

[draftermatt]

Well this one cost the company a lot of money.

I missed a dimension, and because of it I had approx 24 pieces of 8" thick concrete made 4" too long, so they hung over the side of the building.

Not a good day.

[JLRodgers]

I once had an "oops" thing happen at work.... accidently added 1 to a number that if it wasn't caught would've potenailly cost a few... let's see.... 25,000 products/day*$40/item, 1 million a day it wasn't noticed. All because of a 1. It was noticed, and the engineer got a laugh over it (well, since it didn't reach the production floor)

[Pedersen]

Okay, mine are (of course) somewhat technical. But here's my worst:

Boss at a new job had told me to fix file permissions. Seems users were able to see each other's files. I issued this command: chmod -R 0700 /

Some of you are now wincing, while the majority are saying This command removes the ability of a user on a UNIX/Linux system to see/do anything with *any* file they do not own. This meant that users couldn't even get a listing of files in their own directory, since the command to do so was not owned by them.

Oh, and it also disabled the ability to login.

That was a fun mess to clean up, let me tell you.

The only saving grace for me was that, about a week later, I get a call from said boss telling me he was doing some maintenance, and blew away the password file. Since I was able to fix the problem with a minimum of downtime, we both agreed that neither of these incidents happened, and moved on

[mcjohnwcheese]

I asked out a girl at work, and got rejected. That was pretty bad, but what made it worse was that I did it mid shift. We had to hang out for like 4 more hours.

[CaroPhoenix]

This was when I worked a men's clothing store during Christmas season.

It was my first day at work, and I would tell customers "If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask me."

Well, I was 5 minutes from clocking out, I was exhausted, my feet hurt. I looked at the last customer who walked in, smiled and said "If you have any question, please don't ask me."

Fortunately, my boss, Evelyn was cool and laughed about it when I told her.

[PuckishOne]

I think I told this before in a different thread, but I used my personal laptop in a meeting once without remembering to mute the sound. At meeting's end, I shut the computer down and Roseanne Rosannadanna came up, at full volume, saying, "If they can make a coffee I like without caffeine, how come they can't make a hamburger without any toenails?"

I was Toenails Girl for at least a month after that.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

This happened on one of my first days at my current job. It was a Sunday morning and I was assigned to pull a partial pallet of Pepsi from the front of the store to the backroom, and then bring out a full pallet of Coke and place it where the Pepsi had been.

Pallets of soda, when full, are very heavy and difficult to move with a standard pallet jack. Generally you need either an electric pallet jack or the forklift to move them easily.

There wasn't much Pepsi on the first pallet, so I was able to easily move it to the backroom. As I was struggling to move the Coke pallet to the front of the store, two big stacks of 12-packs fell off the pallet, and into and endstand of candy and on the floor.

Yeah, that was a big mess, and I was pretty much freaking out because I didn't know how the manager would respond. He was good about it though.

[crazylegs]

Here's some background.

Certain offences in the UK can be dealt with by the Police issuing a Penalty Notice For Disorder, basically an £80 on the spot fine.

You can contest said PND as long as you do so within 28 days

I'd pulled a shoplifter (in my last job) in and the Police were called. They duly arrived and issued said PND to thief.

All was right and happy in the world.

For 28 Days

On day 35 I returned the CCTV tape to the normal system.

On day 38 Police call, "yer, he wants to contest the PND, do you still have the CCTV tape?"



Lesson learned, *all* CCTV of *all* offences then kept indefinately for "training purposes".

[Difdi]

You know those big copper staples, that are used to hold together large cardboard boxes?

Worst blunder I ever made at work was getting my left thumb in the path of one, driven by a pneumatic powered stapler. Wasn't too bad an injury, but it bled like crazy.

The nearest first aid kit was a block and a half away, through two security doors with keypad locks. I set a speed record for crossing the plant, especially considering I had one hand jammed in my mouth, applying pressure with my tongue. Managed to bandage myself pretty well one-handed, but I got the most amazing looks at the hospital, when I came in drenched in blood, chin to waist, with a ball of gauze encompassing a good portion of my left hand...

[Bandit]

Way back when.....

Doing my first phone system upgrade.

Back then, there were 3 sets of disks. One that was always in, one that was kept on-site for a backup and cycled in every month, and one that was kept at the service provider's shop off-site and updated about once every 6 months.

So, we do the upgrade, everything seems to go smooth, and as a test, we randomly pick 1/2 dozen phones just to make sure everything worked - dial out, ring other sets, etc. Everything seems to be good.

Until the next morning.

Remember what I said about the disks? Turns out we had only backed up onto two sets of the disks. I'll give you three guesses as to not only which disks were not backed up onto and which were used. Yep - the 6 month ones.
And it seems that the sets we had picked to test with were the only ones that had not moved in the last 6 months.

is an understatement for the next morning.

Almost got fired for that one.

About 24 solid hours of work later, everything was redone and working right.

B

[volatile]

I got hammered during my lunch break (drank 2 Jack and Cokes and 2 Carbombs) then went back to work and fried a customer's new motherboard. It was fine since I exchanged it out for another one. Haha...I still drink during lunch once in a while.

[DesignFox]

oh boy...

Sometimes, I get the pleasure of dealing with people who don't speak English.

I don't mind that so much, most people are nice about it and we work through it.

But this one guy on the phone just annoyed me! We had been getting these phone calls forwarded through a call center. About half the callers only spoke Spanish.

That would be fine, except only 1 staff member speaks Spanish and she has days off, too you know!

(I told the boss and he stopped the Spanish calls, but anyway....)

Some, guy calls. Asks if I speak Spanish. I said no and offered to have the Spanish speaker call him.

So he keeps talking...and asks me AGAIN if I speak Spanish.

I'd had these calls all day and just lost it...

I responded with, "No, I speak ENGLISH!"

Anyway, thankfully the guy forgave me, and he spoke enough English for me to take his information so I could have the other worker call him back.

oops.

I thought my co-worker was going to bust something he was laughing so hard... I just don't snap at people like that...

[lordlundar]

During Christmas we would get in RC toys and We would set some up "for demo purposes", yeah, that's it.

Well, two Christmases ago, we got some indoor RC copters in, and I was demoing one for a customer how with a little practice (I had 2 days myself) it was easy to control.

I tend to get a little focused on my demos, so I didn't notice I had an observer...

The District Manager and I was playing.

Thankfully, I got a sale, and he asked me to demo it for him too.


Another one on a similar vein, we had a GH2 demo on one of our 360 kiosks, and I show people how it works upon request. (swear to god it's true)

One such occurrence my supervisor came up (sneaky bastard) and let me finish my demo. When I saw him, first words out of my mouth were "I'm demoing it! I swear!" He then spent 2 minutes trying to get the customer to say I wasn't. No dice, and I won that battle of wits. I later nailed him for watching one of the movies being demoed when he was floor manager.

[Ayche]

My DM wanted to fire me for this one. I was taking a check (yuck) and didn't check to see if there was a signature on it... It didn't. I figured that this lady, who was older, would have written enough checks that signing them would be second nature. I was wrong. We almost lost the money cause of it. They called the lady who wrote it, and she came in to sign afterward, but still. My manager told me that the DM wanted me fired on the spot for that, but he convinced her that I could just write an essay on it, lol. I always check sigs from now on.