Hey Pandas, What Mistake Did You Make At Work That Your Client Or Boss Never Found Out About? (Closed)
We all make mistakes at work. Which ones have you made and successfully covered up?
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Put the tynes of a forklift through the side of a $500,000 rotational moulding machine. We were assembling the machine and I accidentally ran I to the side of a panel. My boss saw it later and ranted something about the company we got the machine from and sent them pictures. They sent out a replacement sheet of stainless steel lol
Omg I still feel so bad about this, but I only told my husband who was working with me and we wisely never told anyone…
Tl;dr I pushed a button that I shouldn’t have.
So I worked in Switzerland at the time (not my home country) for my uncles expensive, big jewelry shop. Stacked full with only diamond jewelry and expensive watches.
So one day I was a little bored and was just checking some things out, because this happened in like the first two weeks.
I pick up this little remote thingy and I wonder what it is. I turn it and I see a red button. So naturally (as I am apparently a penguin ;)) I push the red button to see what it does. Nothing happens. So I press it a little harder, but nothing happens and the little light bulb doesn’t light up. I shrug my shoulders, put it away and go back to my computer at the front desk.
Within minutes I hear commotion outside and I look up just in time to see an effing S.W.A.T. team complete with helmets, bulletproove-vests and machine-guns stratigically place themselves along the shopping windows. I freeze as a soldier (in my eyes, because where I’m from guns are illegal and you never see one in real life) quickly walks towards me asking how many people are in the building. My
Swiss is rubbish, so it takes me a while to understand him. Also, I was scared shitless by the machine gun.
Turns out I pushed the panic-button and we all had to be escorted out of the shop so they can do a sweep-check. Than my uncle asked everyone what happened, did a button from the panic button get pushed accidentally?
In retrospect I deserve an Oscar for my performance that day. :D
I want my last words in this world to be: "I wonder what this button does...?"
Granted, I'm not proud of this but here we go. I used to smoke weed at work. I was in a position that was completely unsupervised and was on my own for 12 hours a day, basically looking after chalets that were barely occupied. Needless to say, it got boring and I decided it'd be a good idea to get high at work for almost two months solid. Eventually we got a complaint from the company nearby about the smell......I blamed it on clients that were using our chalets. The boss somehow bought it and I'm still at the job to this day, thank God. I love my job and really regret doing this. It was stupid, reckless and I haven't touched weed since.
I had an internship at an insurance company. I had god-like power in the system and wore many hats. My manager was alwaya super happy with my work and didn't check up on me much. One of my tasks was sending money for claims. Because I was a god admin (literally what it was called) anything I did went through without additional approval.
...cut to me accidentally forgetting a decimal. Suddenly a transfer of 100.00 became 10,000.00... immediately, with no click to confirm.
...the only way to fix it was to be a manager which I was not. Luckily my manager always left her password on a postit on her monitor... I approved overrides and organised a meeting with the correct people with the right approval and fixed it within the day. She never was the wiser and in fact had me shadow her to learn management over the other interns. I was in invited to have a permanent position but at the time I didn't want a desk job (how naive I was lol)
I did not make the mistake. I went from full time to part time hourly. I did everything right on my side, filled out time sheet for only 16-20 hrs worked, HR made a mistake and for 6 months until I was finally replaced they paid me a full time salary.
(I was only working part time because they couldn't fill my roll, and I had already had another full time job. So it was to help them out and some extra cash. So it was always going to be short term.)
