Biggest screw up you've gotten away with.

[RecoveringKinkoid]

Okay. I'll start. I've always been amazed there were no repercussins to this story.

When I was working at channel 25, I was working third shift master control, and I was sick. I could've called my boss to cover for me, but I knew he'd been pulling long hours anyway and didn't want him to have to pull a third shift on top of it (my boss was a very nice man.) Anyway, I worked alone in a dark room in an empty building. How hard is it to just sit in front of the switcher and push a few buttons, right? So I came in, wearing an oversize sweat suit and bedroom slippers.

About 3 or 4 am, I started feeling REALLY bad. I was thinking, "If I could just sleep for 15 or 20 minutes. Just a tiny little rest, that's all I need. I would feel so much better."

So I locked the control room door, and lay down on the floor behind the tape racks. I set an alarm clock (we had a bunch of them we used to set as reminders for various things) for 15 minutes and put it right next to my ear. That gave me time for a 15 minute nap, and time to wake up and collect myself in time to run the next station ID.

An hour and half later, I woke up with the clock blaring in my ear.

Fortunately, I was running a network news feed. My schedule was to run 28 minutes of network feed, then at the end of that, fill with two minutes of our local public service announcements and a 4 second station ID. If we failed to run the psa's, the network simply filled with their own. All that ran in black was the 4 second ID spot (which, incidently, was the most important part of the break.) Rinse, lather, repeat until dawn.

So nobody noticed I was cutting major z's on the floor of the control room.

[yahurd]

i once set on of these on fire

[Crosshair]

Having a customer fill out an ATF 4473 form in blue ink and completing the sale. Though had I let the customer leave without correcting it, I would have been in big trouble. Thank goodness they didn't mind filling it out again.

[OfficeSlug]

Biggest screw up you've gotten away with.

Financial publishing...

I sent out an electronic newsletter to THOUSANDS OF SUBSCRIBERS on 7/9/06 4PM - I scheduled it for 7/9/06 5AM, so the thing NEVER WENT OUT at 5PM....

I don't know how Marketing didn't catch on that NOT ONE PERSON BOUGHT THE PRODUCT from that night's promotion!!!!!!

[UncleImpy]

Re: Biggest screw-up

That would have to be...leaving the store unlocked when I left for the night. With the alarm turned on.

I never heard anything from the opening crew in the morning or the store manager (I didnt even realize I had done it until the next afternoon when it clicked that I hadnt stopped to lock the door). I dont know HOW I got away with that. I probably would have gotten fired.

[Miss Maple Leaf]

My biggest screw up happened one night when I was closing up the store.

One of the things I have to do before leaving is lock up the cigarette cabinets. The keys to the locks are on the very same key chain we keep the key for the alarm case. Without it we can't remove the case to set the alarm.

I had locked it up for the night and started to do my nightly paperwork when I noticed that the ticket count didn't match the number I had come up with, so I had to reopen the cabinet I stored the tickets in and recount them.

While I had managed to get the right number of tickets the second time I counted them, I had made the mistake of laying the key chain on one of the cabinet shelves. I then proceeded to lock the cabinet up again without even realizing what I had done.
It was only once I went to take the cover off the alarm that I realized with horror what had happened. I had to call the owners at their home (and this was after 10pm) and ask them to come open the cabinet for me.

Lucky for me they had a key to the cabinet, so I was able to get to and set the alarm before leaving without resorting to trying to break the lock off (it was just a standard lock that can be picked up in any office supply store, not one built-in to the cabinet so it would have been easy for me to replace if things had come to that).

To this day I'm glad the female boss came to my rescue. If it had been the male boss I'd probably still be hearing about it months later. (In a good-natured, joking way that is. He's a great guy who likes to kid around with his employees, and something like this would have been gold for him)

[nick1091]

My first day of working customer service at a leasing company, a gentleman called and asked to speak to Mr. Len Lastname. I'd gotten a few calls for other extensions earlier that day and was assured I can just blind transfer the call, so I found his name on our alphabetical directory and did so this time as well.

A few minutes later, I checked our other directory, which was grouped by department, and found I'd blind transferred a customer to my company's president.

Later that day, I found out that this particular caller was highly irate that the lease he'd signed was about 2 grand higher than he figured. He'd called around asking for "the president of the company" for about 45 minutes, and kept getting the runaround and shot down. I guess the guy did his homework, went online, and actually found out the prez's name, and I fell for it.

A memo was sent company wide the following morning about blind transfers, especially to any upper management. Luckily, the call had been so short before he was transferred they had no way of knowing who it was.

[ringflinger]

Working for a debt collection agency, I accidentally printed and mailed out duplicate payments to several of our largest customers, to the tune of $57000 .

We got the money back, and I got to keep my job.

[RecoveringKinkoid]

Oh, how could I forget this one. I've mentioned I was in charge of towing at Kinko's?

I had my boss's car towed away.

He had driven a different car to work, I didn't recognize it. He had parked it, then ridden with someone to the other Kinko's across town, so he wasn't there when I tried to find it's owner.

Thank God he's got a good sense of humor. And so did our tow truck driver, who brought it back without charging us.

[Department stores *sigh*]

with a few old managers i manage to get away with some little things with using my 'distract with actual work talk' method.

example:
P and I are tossing a football upstairs since its slow. AM comes around the corner, watches the ball fly to me, and i catch it. With the motion of my catch i swivel on one foot and say something like 'So im thinkin this banner needs to go up here for maximimized customer notice. I have two more I want to put up here and here (all this without looking at P who has scurried off)" I then just start walkin with the manager talkin about ideas for stuff. They usually ignore the fact they saw me catching a football when on shift

[AirHostess]

I do bad things every day

Forgetting to seal the bars.
Filling out Customs forms wrong.
Not securing the cabin properly.

oops.

[BookstoreEscapee]

I don't know whose screwup this actually was; it is not inconceivable that it may have been me, but there were several people who could have done it.

I went in to work at 8am, did my morning stuff (get my drawer settled, a little shelving, whatever). Just before opening we have our "5 minute meeting" and then we head off to our respective stations. So I'm heading up front and notice a woman meandering around with a basket full of stuff. She had probably been shopping for at least 15-20 minutes. Someone left the door unlocked after letting another employee in. And no one noticed that she was there, with the cashwrap unattended with 2 tills up. (Not that she could have gotten in them but still). And the change drawer which is $500 in a drawer whose lock can be turned with a paper clip. I'm not the only one who saw her but the manager didn't find out. I rang her up and didn't say anything...wasn't her fault

[Retail Associate]

This one is embarrassing.

Sometimes I have to carry 3 phones at work. I clip them to my back pockets. One night I only had one phone (thank goodness). I needed to visit the little girl's room and totally forgot about the phone...that is until it went "splash" in the toilet.

I tried to dry it off as best I could with the hand dryer but it didn't work.

(I'm not the only one who has done this. It happened again just a few weeks ago.)

[BookstoreEscapee]

This one is embarrassing.

Sometimes I have to carry 3 phones at work. I clip them to my back pockets. One night I only had one phone (thank goodness). I needed to visit the little girl's room and totally forgot about the phone...that is until it went "splash" in the toilet.

I've done that too (and I only carried one phone). I rinsed it and the carry case off real good, then took out the battery and set them both on a paper towel in the office. It took a few days to dry out completely but it was fine once it did. (This was a new phone too, that had recently replaced another that went kaput, probably from being dropped on the floor one too many times.)

[Discourtesy Clerk]

This one I felt really bad about, and I'm still shocked it didn't get me in trouble.

I was working a late shift, I was really sick and really tired, and the store was dead. A customer wanted another carton of the eggs that were on sale, and there were none in the case. So I went to the back. One of my coworkers was back there doing who knows what, and we got to talking, commiserating about the cold that was mutually kicking our asses. We ended up going back to the breakroom, because I'd offered to give her some of my cough drops, and hung out in there for another few minutes, and then I walked out...

...and there were my customers, standing by the checkstand, having waited at least ten minutes for something that should have taken one, and I still didn't have their eggs. I'd forgotten them completely.

I still don't quite know how that happened. I chalk it up to the fact that my head was clogged with mucus and reproducing viruses and thus impairing brain function. The weirdest part out of all this was that the checker at the time was the one who hates me and will usually report me to the boss or chew me out for the slightest thing, and she said nothing. I, meanwhile, was blushing a bright red and apologising profusely. I have to commend the customers, though; aside from a well-deserved dirty look, they were pretty cool about it.