Support NeoGAF

[Imbarkus]

Hey guys. Just throwin' it out there for a little commiseration. I generally do excellent work but I recently made a bonehead mistake that is going to cost a lot of money in the course of a month. I'm old hat at the job but new with this company. Building database queries and reports, building ad creative, social media, all the shit that gets classified as marketing. Pressed for time, writing complex formulas into which to plug the data (SQL and Crystal Reports to replace the old-school Excel methods in place here which take forever). All this shit was fine.

But I bonehead the original data pull and run it for a range in 2010, instead of 2011. Two measly digits typed in wrong. Garbage in, garbage out, as we say when it comes to data. Pressed for time for the direct mail promotion, I skip the spot-check, and now I'm in a world of hurt. A spot-check probably would have not taken long, too. But I haven't made a mistake like this ever before, I suppose I was arrogant.

We took costly but proper steps to make things right with our affected customers. They seem placated. I have instituted "multiple sets of eyes" steps to spot-check my work from here on out. Owned up, took responsibility, made profuse apologies. Now I get to wait and watch all month as the damage comes in.

I work for decent people, so far get the feeling they will stand behind me, but of course I can't know for sure and am very worried, and frustrated with myself.

So I showed you mine. Show me your biggest fuckup at work. Maybe I'll feel better.

 

[RevDM]

Edit: ok real story

Not really sure if it's a fuck up or I just didn't care. I used to work at a high end sunglass shop and one day a couple big ass mexican dudes came in and starting browsing the merch. I totally watched them pocket over a few thousand in merch, and I totally didn't even attempt to stop them. I didn't even want them to get suspicious they were being watched. I was making like 10 bucks an hour, fuck that shit. I waited till they got good and far from me then I called mall security lol.

 

[NotTheGuyYouKill]

Plenty.

Once undercharged someone $350.00

That was bad.

 

[AbsoluteZero]

I work at an awards company, so I'll occasionally misspell something on a $300+ bottle of liquor or crystal.

Never fun.

 

[strafer]

I had sex with a coworker.

 

[SolKane]

5 dollars short at close out.

 

[Emerson]

When I was a teenager working at a grocery store I once charged somebody $180 for a $60 order. I have absolutely no fucking idea how it happened, but it suddenly tripled and before I could process the situation they had paid and left.

Sometimes I feel bad about that but then on the other hand I know 100% I'd notice something like that and go back to the store. Since I didn't get fired I know she didn't do that.

Where I am now as a manager, a cashier charged somebody $506 instead of $6. That person was not pleased when they came in the next day.

 

[U2NUMB]

Aww man this one is legend at my company.

We print labels for big companies like Pepsi, Clorox and so forth.

Back a number of years we were doing a big promotion for Pepsi that had a Finding Nemo theme. They had 2 versions of this coupon. One was buy 2 get 1 free and the other was 3 get 2 free. The only difference was the text... the image and everything else on the front of the coupon were the same.

I was the one working the graphics on this job.. somehow along the way both versions ended up the same... We printed 12 million labels.. 6 million of which were wrong.

That year our bonus which is called Gainshare was wiped out because of my error.

Thank goodness I was able to stick around and prove my worth.. still there and have moved up the ladder..

I have never felt so bad.

 

[ronito]

So many. I'll spread them throughout the thread as I think of them

At a company get together.

To my boss: "Hey So did we ever close that deal with Company x?"
Boss: "Yeah actually we did."
Me: "That's so awesome! Man we spent like a year and a half on that deal. How much did it end up being worth?"
Boss: "Oh about 75k."
Me: "BWWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!.....oh wait, you're serious. Sorry, I'll leave now."

 

[Kentpaul]

dropped a box with 200bucks of vodka in it

 

[iKeepPlaying]

Makeout with one of my female bosses.
Accept money from other one, in order to do her some "favors".
And that's it. I guess those 2 are the biggest.

 

[Coins]

I worked the night shift as a Naval investigator at Great Lakes, IL. My chief told me I could bring in my PC and goof around on it as recruits cherish the sleep they are allowed and I wouldn't have too much to do.

So I decided to use a dial-up number for internet that ATT provided to me as a bonus for having DSL through them. I dialed out and played Everquest for hours, only to realize that the Navy is charged by the minute on the phone line. We got a HUGE phone bill.

Chief was not happy, but made it go away.

Thanks taxpayers!

 

[Imbarkus]

That year our bonus which is called Gainshare was wiped out because of my error.

Thank goodness I was able to stick around and prove my worth.. still there and have moved up the ladder..

I have never felt so bad.

Glad to hear you were retained. I'm sweating a bit about that right now.

 

[dtrack]

When I was working as a temp at a bank, I ended up cancelling a customers credit card while they were abroad instead of lifting a usage block on it. Once this is done, there is no way to revert it.

Fucking shitty GUI made most buttons look the same AND there was no confirmation popup either. Somehow I got away with a slap on the wrist though heh.

 

[Cereal KiIIer]

I broke a $16 000 fiber line.

 

[Flying_Phoenix]

Sleeping on the job.

 

[Stet]

 

[PigSpeakers]

Only thing I can remember right now is printing on the wrong side when processing a check. That can't happen with the registers at my current job though, thank goodness.

Other things like forgetting to scan a customers coupon or something like that are also mistakes I make every once in awhile. Normally any customer complaints come from something that isn't my fault, but it's my problem to deal with. Like, old sale signs. Had to give this guy a microwave for an insane discount because of a sale sticker (that I swear he probably found hidden somewhere or had been saving for a long time) that was about two or three months old.

 

[Sydle]

Spent $20K on a short-run online advertising campaign targeted at the wrong country.

Fortunately the leads from it were still good and I had plenty of surplus budget to run the right campaign, but still, I was sick to my stomach when I found out.

 

[Guts Of Thor]

Started working at FedEx as a package handler a month ago and I'm still fucking up.

When you are loading the trucks you are supposed to keep your stops together so if there 9 packages going to the same place you keep them in the same area of the truck. When you are sorting through 700 fucking packages in four hours it is easy to lose your spot so I just started putting packages in the truck only to find out that the packages that were supposed to stay together were scattered throughout the truck. The driver was not pleased as he had to repack the entire fucking truck while finding the packages that were supposed to go together. That was a couple days ago and I'm still making the same goddamn mistake.

Oh yeah, I accidently put two 50lbs boxes on top of a box that had a painting inside effectively crushing the painting and ruining it.

 

[Zyzyxxz]

When I worked at the Flying Pig Food Truck in Los Angeles I was making a batch of pork bellies and forgot I left the fire under the braising pot on high, it was hard to see the flame since the pot was ginormous.

Ended up burning most of the pork bellies which probably was something like $200 of meat and a day's worth of prep.

 

[BertramCooper]

A few months ago, I got a stupid e-mail from an idiot co-worker who constantly pisses me off.

I forwarded the e-mail to one of my work friends and bitched about said co-worker, but accidentally hit "reply" instead of "forward."

 

[ivysaur12]

http://i.imgur.com/oG5D5.jpg

Amazing. :lol

I worked at a sleepaway camp once and I told a 10 year old to go fuck himself. That was bad, but I didn't get fired. He kind of deserved it, it was the end of the season, I was tired, but it was still really bad for me.

 

[Alucrid]

I dropped a $60 fruit salad tray. Was able to piece it back together and only had to use a few berries to finish it off.

 

[U2NUMB]

Glad to hear you were retained. I'm sweating a bit about that right now. I'm talking about a mistake that's trending to 50k+ in unintentional spend this month. Cash.

Yea your situation is tough because you are new there. I was about 4 years into the job already but honestly it does not matter. You could do 100 year of perfect work and once that big mix up happens for a while that is all anyone remembers.

If you do excellent work.. those around you know that and as long as you work for a solid boss or people above you just make sure they know its a one time thing.

Good luck man, it is very obvious how important this is to you and that will show through!

 

[Osiris]

I used to work on ICL mainframe computers, one night I was too lazy to do a complete shutdown (long ass 1 hour+ process) so just switched off the lights and left the system up for the night.

Next morning I came in and I knew I was in the shit as soon as I opened the door and midsummer like temperatures blasted out of the room into my face, I got the fear and sweats immediately as I knew pretty much without looking what had probably happened, the A/C had failed overnight.

Totally fried the CPU unit and the HDD units, I had to initiate Disaster Recovery procedures straight away and within 4 hours a new ICL system-in-a-container was in the parking lot.

Cost of damage was finally measured well into 7 figures, approaching 8 figures.

Somehow, I kept my job, still don't know how

Spoiler

Actually, I do know, but that's another story.

 

[stufte]

about 8 years ago I worked for a large format printing company (bus wraps, billboards, etc.) and used a lot of a chemical called acetate to clean the ink from the machines.

The acetate would come in the big 5 gallon drums, and we used this:

To siphon out small amounts into plastic bottles.

The problem was that one night, I was rushing to get things cleaned to start my shift and forgot to lift the siphon out of the container after I was finished. I walked away and an hour later my supervisor comes running into the front office area and yells "THERE'S ACETATE ALL OVER THE FLOOR!!" We both go running back into the printer room to find the siphon had emptied most of the acetate onto the floor and the ENTIRE room was covered in this chemical, and proceeding to eat away at the painted floor.

Long story short: We were able to clean it up, but thousands of dollars in vinyl and supplies were ruined, and the floor had to be completely repainted. I amazingly still had a job after that....

 

[FairyD]

I work for a company that does automated appointment reminders for doctors offices and hospitals. Chances are that my system has probably called a couple gaffers up to remind them of an appointment.

In December of 2009, the day before my 2 week winter vacation, I mistakenly send out a reminder to every patient in a one year span telling them that their appointment has been cancelled. What was worse was when I sent out a correction call and that was incorrect as well. Finally got it right the third time.

Another funny mistake, which was not ours, was when we were doing reminders for a pet hospital. We were suppose to send out a notice informing people that their pet was due for a check up. Well the hospital sends us a csv file containing the people to contact. Only that they fucked up and gave us a list of people whose pets they out down. So basically we called telling people to bring their pet in, when it was that hospital that put down the pet.

 

[JackEtc]

Makeout with one of my female bosses.
Accept money from other one, in order to do her some "favors".

Go on...

 

[Korey]

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=285117

Originated from: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?p=10809651#post10809651

Poor guy.

 

[bill0527]

I was an assistant manager at a bookstore and was told by my store manager that if I ever locked my store keys in the office to not call her because she lived 45 minutes from the store and would not drive in to unlock anything. She said to call a locksmith and pay for it out of our own pocket if it happened.

So I locked my keys in the office. It was one of those doors that automatically locks behind you so it was easy to do. I didn't call her, instead decided to crawl up into the ceiling and remove some of the ceiling tiles and drop down into the office like some James Bond shit. While crawling through the ceiling, I hit a weak ceiling support right over the men's bathroom and crashed through. I damn near ripped 2 fingers off my left hand and busted my ankle because I landed directly in a sink in the men's bathroom and the force of me falling knocked the sink off the wall and then the bathroom flooded.

Cost the company about 8k to fix the ceiling and bathroom plus my workman's comp for a month. It took 20 stitches and then a months worth of rehab to get my fingers working again, plus my ankle, plus having to pay my salary for a month while I was off work.

 

[sixteen-bit]

This was you?

 

[Imbarkus]

If you do excellent work.. those around you know that and as long as you work for a solid boss or people above you just make sure they know its a one time thing.

Good luck man, it is very obvious how important this is to you and that will show through!

Thanks man. My wife has reminded me that there are surgeons and doctors that fuck up, and lives are at stake. Or firefighters, police, anything that's life or death. There is some comfort in using the phrase "it's only money," but very little.

I did the right thing owning up. These might be people who mean what they say that integrity is the most important factor in an employee.

But not making huge fuckups has got to be pretty high on the list too. Boss has been very clear, nothing like this can ever happen again.

it won't!

 

[Stet]

This was you?

No, it was some poor girl named Gloria Huang. It is, however, my worst nightmare. As far as I know, though, she kept her job.

 

[Grinchy]

I worked in a hospital pharmacy, mixed drugs for IVs in a clean room. I used the wrong concentration of sodium chloride for a baby syringe one day. I knew I needed to use a different concentration prior to making the syringe, but somehow I fucked it up that day. Luckily that's why a pharmacist checks the stuff you used and how much you use of it. If that syringe had gone out, the baby probably would have died. In fact, the mistake is somewhat common and it got past a pharmacist somewhere. It killed a baby and resulted in Emily's Law.

Nothing bad happened, but I still can't forgive myself for the mistake. There's no excuse when it comes to baby stuff. I should have been more careful.

 

[alphaNoid]

I'm a systems engineer, I manage lots of things but one mainly is Citrix with over 4,000 users. At midnight a few years ago I re-upped our farm licenses but it seems the license file was corrupted. I broke Citrix, 4,000 users and over 30 hosted applications, 5 of which are in scope (SOX compliance) and host financial information. 1 of those 5 processes over 5 billion dollars a year in transactions. Communication was sent to the CTO and CIO immediately the next morning and guess who they called next?

Yea, I didn't find out until 5am when my phone woke me up. Big big fucked and nothing can prepare you for that kind of a feeling that washes over you. My saving grace was that Citrix had provided me with a corrupted license file, being as I installed it properly.

I shut down a billion dollar company for several hours. Yikes indeed.

 

[-x.Red.x-]

Doing part time work study school office work. I was told to call students to come on the 28 of sept. But classes started the 27th. So I made that mistake and student came in the day after. My dept grant is based on attendance of students. So my boss was pretty mad but not directly at me because I was new and it was my second day of work. But still I felt bad. Everyone treats me good now(mistake free)but I feel this might hurt me if I want a permanent part time position.

 

[GashPrex]

I was an assistant manager at a bookstore and was told by my store manager that if I ever locked my store keys in the office to not call her because she lived 45 minutes from the store and would not drive in to unlock anything. She said to call a locksmith and pay for it out of our own pocket if it happened.

So I locked my keys in the office. It was one of those doors that automatically locks behind you so it was easy to do. I didn't call her, instead decided to crawl up into the ceiling and remove some of the ceiling tiles and drop down into the office like some James Bond shit. While crawling through the ceiling, I hit a weak ceiling support right over the men's bathroom and crashed through. I damn near ripped 2 fingers off my left hand and busted my ankle because I landed directly in a sink in the men's bathroom and the force of me falling knocked the sink off the wall and then the bathroom flooded.

Cost the company about 8k to fix the ceiling and bathroom plus my workman's comp for a month. It took 20 stitches and then a months worth of rehab to get my fingers working again, plus my ankle, plus having to pay my salary for a month while I was off work.

:lol You win

 

[SpecX]

Did an upgrade to one of our servers without any guidance or instructions because it had to be done and management was barking at me to have it done. Didn't realize the server was shared with another facility in a different country and shutdown their shipping for 3 days. The hour difference sucked since I had to be up at midnight to help them and the ass reaming was the worse I'll never forget.

 

[Imbarkus]

Edit: ok real story

Not really sure if it's a fuck up or I just didn't care. I used to work at a high end sunglass shop and one day a couple big ass mexican dudes came in and starting browsing the merch. I totally watched them pocket over a few thousand in merch, and I totally didn't even attempt to stop them. I didn't even want them to get suspicious they were being watched. I was making like 10 bucks an hour, fuck that shit. I waited till they got good and far from me then I called mall security lol.

Hey man thanks for gettin' real on it. Though frankly this month, showing up feels like a mistake every day, so I also liked your original response.

 

[SolKane]

I was an assistant manager at a bookstore and was told by my store manager that if I ever locked my store keys in the office to not call her because she lived 45 minutes from the store and would not drive in to unlock anything. She said to call a locksmith and pay for it out of our own pocket if it happened.

So I locked my keys in the office. It was one of those doors that automatically locks behind you so it was easy to do. I didn't call her, instead decided to crawl up into the ceiling and remove some of the ceiling tiles and drop down into the office like some James Bond shit. While crawling through the ceiling, I hit a weak ceiling support right over the men's bathroom and crashed through. I damn near ripped 2 fingers off my left hand and busted my ankle because I landed directly in a sink in the men's bathroom and the force of me falling knocked the sink off the wall and then the bathroom flooded.

Cost the company about 8k to fix the ceiling and bathroom plus my workman's comp for a month. It took 20 stitches and then a months worth of rehab to get my fingers working again, plus my ankle, plus having to pay my salary for a month while I was off work.

Holy shit, wow. You didn't keep that job, did you?

 

[ronito]

We had this smoking hot trainer at work and she was a bit of a feminist.

She came over to my cube and asked "I need a count of all our employees."

I turned the monitor her way and said "Sure. Here it is."

I proceeded to type in the SQL

select count (*) from EMPLOYEE

except I forgot the "o" in count.

 

[Sydle]

I was an assistant manager at a bookstore and was told by my store manager that if I ever locked my store keys in the office to not call her because she lived 45 minutes from the store and would not drive in to unlock anything. She said to call a locksmith and pay for it out of our own pocket if it happened.

So I locked my keys in the office. It was one of those doors that automatically locks behind you so it was easy to do. I didn't call her, instead decided to crawl up into the ceiling and remove some of the ceiling tiles and drop down into the office like some James Bond shit. While crawling through the ceiling, I hit a weak ceiling support right over the men's bathroom and crashed through. I damn near ripped 2 fingers off my left hand and busted my ankle because I landed directly in a sink in the men's bathroom and the force of me falling knocked the sink off the wall and then the bathroom flooded.

Cost the company about 8k to fix the ceiling and bathroom plus my workman's comp for a month. It took 20 stitches and then a months worth of rehab to get my fingers working again, plus my ankle, plus having to pay my salary for a month while I was off work.

I cringed at the thought of your fingers being ripped off.

 

[MorisUkunRasik]

I posted 80 thousand from the sell of invoices into the wrong account.

Instead company A getting thier money, they didn't and Company B did, Company B also was having financial problems and may or may not have been committing fruad at the time.


Bosses were not pleased.

 

[Imbarkus]

select count (*) from EMPLOYEE

except I forgot the "o" in count.

Ha! Aftermath. I demand detail on the aftermath!

 

[ronito]

Ha! Aftermath. I demand detail on the aftermath!

Actually she was just laughed her head off. So I got lucky.


Also there was this time I was nearly kicked out of a customer service class the teacher and I did some role playing as if she was a customer on a phone and she was like "Why didn't you ask me if there was anything else you could do for me?" I replied, "Because I didn't care."

 

[Mungular]

alright so my first job i had i was going to fart on one of my fellow co workers as a joke, but instead i sharted! true story had to have my mom bring me some extra underpants haha

 

[cbox]

overwrote an entire ftp folder structure on a major canadian corporations site....

I rewrote every single page in under 15 minutes and have never sweat that much in clothing before.

I later found out there was a backup, hey I was new...

 

[Deleted member 81567]

Hung up on an attorney since I thought it was some annoying patient calling.

 

[Kerrby]

Somehow, I kept my job, still don't know how

Spoiler

Actually, I do know, but that's another story.

Okay I'm more interested in this part of your story than the rest of it, spill the beans!