Have you ever made a mistake at work that makes you cringe to this day? It’s happened to the best of us. Even if we’re all very good at our jobs, human beings are prone to making mistakes. All we need to do is step up and take responsibility for our actions.
So when user sspecZ asked fellow members of the r/AksReddit community to share how they massively messed up at work, thousands of people admitted their worst workplace errors. From accidentally deleting all of the needed files to spilling tens of liters of melted chocolate over the restaurant floor, the answers in this thread are both painful and hilarious.
While many of the mistakes are unpleasant, the overall morale of these stories is that they do happen. And even though they make us seem unprofessional, we can still let out a few laughs. So keep scrolling and upvote your favorite ones!
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I was washing a dairy cow named Laverne before showing her at a county fair. She didn’t like having her tail washed. She kicked the bucket of soapy water over onto my rubber boots and took off running. I grabbed both sides of her halter but my boots were slick and she basically ran around the washing area in circles with me hanging on to her head while my tractionless boots acted like water skiis. Of course this happened in front of crowds of people who started laughing. Finally I lost my grip and sat down in a puddle while Laverne ran toward a little boy holding a scone. He dropped the scone and ran, and Laverne ate his scone.
Lol I used to work for a company that designed online banking software in early 2000's and sold it to banks.
We had one customer - a bank president - complaining that our product didn't work on AOL. Like, the s**tty browser associated with the s**tty dial up internet. "You've Got Mail!"
Dude starts ranting that there are still millions of customers who use the product.
I thought I muted him, and said "well millions of people eat McDonald's every day, that don't make it a good f**kin idea"
Only, I forgot to mute!
Everyone stared at me in terror. After the longest pause in the world, he shouts "EXCUSE ME???!!"
Then he started asking which browsers we supported. Then he said he was going to call our VP. Then he did. And proceeded to tell the VP I was the only honest one at the entire firm. So I got stuck managing his account.
Good. Do not brown nose, do not hold back the truth. A good customer wants results, not his own opinion in a mirror.
A very important and very big customer placed an order for some chemical bulk to be delivered early Jan. Our contract with them stated that every day we were late we would be fined millions.
The bulk plant finished on time and just needed the drums to pour the bulk into.
Warehouse come up to my office (I was the purchaser responsible for buying the drums) where are the 250 litre drums!? Bulk plant need them. It's fine I thought, I placed the order before Christmas, I remember doing it. Looks at SAP why is the supplier late.....they're never late... checks my order mouth goes instantly dry and I start to sweat. I had placed the order, but I forgot that for this particular supplier I needed to email them the PO. We had just changed the system to allow SAP to auto email the supplier after we placed an order, but not for this 1 supplier. I knew this, but must have forgotten.
These drums had a 2 week lead time from the supplier so I knew I was dead. Not only would we have had millions of pounds of fines, but the production plant would have been put on hold having to store tons of bulk with no where to put it.
I went and told my boss and just told him I had funked up. Being an awesome guy and boss he thanked me for being honest and told me it's going to be ok. He called the supplier, sweet talked them, and because we were a good customer they allowed us to take another customers order. The drums were delivered next day. That was about 9 years ago and I still think about it
Now that's a good boss. Has his employee's back, solves the problem rationally.
They say that to err is human—it’s only natural for us to slip up, and our workplace is no exception. As of this day, sspecZ’s thread has amassed more than 38.6K upvotes and almost 8.7K comments. And reading through so many nightmarish work stories certainly helps many to feel a bit better about their own. After all, mistakes are learning opportunities, even the most cringy ones.
Still, depending on the error and the impact it may have on the company, you might feel that your career is at risk. Maybe you’re terrified of your manager. Perhaps you’re afraid to admit to doing something wrong and looking unprofessional. Or maybe you’re the breadwinner of your household and simply cannot afford to lose this position.
Whatever the reason, we can still recover from such unfortunate situations and take certain steps to regain trust and minimize damage. Dina Smith, an executive coach and consultant, wrote that mistakes do not have to be career-limiting and shared a few strategies on how to react after making one.
During the first week of my first job in animation after i graduated i had to move a bunch of scene files from one server to another. The files were heavy so i was told to just cut and paste them to make it faster. I accidentally put them in a wrong area and without thinking just deleted them, went back to move the files again...they werent there, i had forgotten i hadn't copied them.
I lost 5 minutes of full animation, my long time friend who recommended me for the job got in s**t because his back ups didn't catch the files and my direct supervisor worked for 21 days straight to help redo all the animation.
The studio and everyone involved were way nicer to me about it than i expected, i kept my job and i brought in donuts for the whole crew for a week after. But it was an awful start!
This was my first real job out of uni, so I was early twenties. I had been working at a pharma company for a few months and a guy, Andy, set me up on a system that the whole company (100k+) used to catalogue documents and updates on drugs we sold. My only job was to go though and find old drugs that we didn’t sell anymore and change their settings to that they were invisible to everyone, just to make everything a bit tidier.
I had been doing this for two days when, somehow, I managed to set it so that the entire database was locked out, to everyone in the company, and I was the only person with access.
Within minutes I was getting calls from people all over the world. All very polite - ‘hi there, I’m trying to add a record to Drug A and I cant make changes. I can see you’re the admin, can you give me access rights?’
I was frantically trying to add people on, one by one, whilst screening my calls and watching as emails started flooding my inbox. I was panicking so hard, and just as I realised this was not going to work I was added to a meeting about the system. It was literally me, Andy, and three senior managers.
I was FREAKING OUT.
I decided to just ignore the call. Stupid I know, but I was like 21 and terrified. About three minutes in, Andy arrives at my desk. ‘Grey, we’re in a call! Did you see my invite?’ I act dumb and tell him I’m just dialling in, but he was very chipper, which made me suspicious.
Anyway, I dial in, and the head of tech is monologuing about how he has been saying for months that this software is overloaded, and how any minute it’s going to implode on itself etc, and Andy is agreeing with them; that this is the very reason he asked me to remove the listings in the first place. I listen quietly, and it turns out that they are all convinced the software did this to itself, and the only people who still have access rights are the people who were logged in at the time it ‘freaked out.’ (As opposed to it being just me and the people I had manually added in.)
As time goes on, it becomes apparent that they all think I’m some kind of specialist on the system. Andy keeps mentioning that I was working on a project for him, and they keep saying ‘grey can take care of this bit’ ‘we’ll flag this for grey’. Fortunately for me, I knew what they meant each time; it was like I was listening to a foreign language, and then just when they spoke English they assigned that ‘bit’ to me.
Three days later, they had fixed the system, and in that time I had removed old users and finished removing the unused drugs, which they were still convinced was the reason it shut down to begin with. As a result, I got a BONUS, I got a mention on the CEO email for assisting on the crisis, and at my end of year meeting they added the fact that I was an ‘expert’ in this system to my job description.
Not bad for a 21 year old who was too dumb to process that clicking ‘yes’ on a box marked ‘do you want to remove all access rights for 100+ users?’ was a terrible idea.
The real question is how insecure is your system that a rookie can accidentally do that
Not me but my dad. He used to be a microbiologist, and was working in a hospital with a tray of test tubes containing some kind of pseudorabies.
He went arse over tit and spilt rabies everywhere.
He's an accountant now.
First, take charge of the circumstances. The moment you understand you made an error—try to get in front of the situation before it spirals out of control. "Being proactive about addressing whatever took place demonstrates your awareness of the problem and relieves others from the potential discomfort of bringing it to your attention," the coach explained.
Next, acknowledge your mistake and offer an honest and humble apology to your colleague, manager, or the whole team. Smith advised not to be defensive: "For instance, suppose a colleague tells you that they were offended by a comment you made. Don’t respond by saying, 'Well, I would never offend anyone on purpose!' or 'I am sorry if you feel that way.'"
She continued: "Using the word 'if' in your apology implies the other person is being irrational or overly sensitive. It does not show any ownership of your wrongdoing." So it’s best to fully own your mistake.
I was a bartender. I knocked down the entire top shelf. Thousands of dollars in liquor.
I didn't get in trouble- the boss just built a stronger shelf. He found it HILARIOUS that the only thing I saved was a $6 bottle of Sloe Gin that happened to be on the wrong shelf.
Mistakingly believed HR when they said an anonymous employee satisfaction survey was anonymous. Especially since my feedback was about HR.
I was a nanny. A little 2 year old I was watching fell down and hit the back of her head on the concrete. I rushed over to her but she didn't move or blink, just laid on her back motionless. I tried to check for breathing and pulse and pretty much blanked on everything I'd ever learned in CPR/first aid training in my panic.
She seriously looked dead. I screamed for help, the neighbors came running, I told them to call an ambulance. The police, fire department, ambulance showed up within minutes. She was rushed to the hospital and a million tests were run.
Turns out she barely even had a bruise, no concussion, no seizure, no injury, nothing. The doctor said she probably just got scared and froze, for just long enough for me to lose my s**t. Her parents were charged 5,000 dollars to tell them their child got surprised.
"Instead say, 'I appreciate you telling me that. I am sorry that what I said was offensive and hurtful to you. I’ll be more mindful.'" Then, work hard to rebuild your trust because your apology will seem worthless if your behavior won’t change.
Sadly, people tend to remember the negative things better than the positive, so "it’s essential to take action and not shrink back after making a mistake" and remind people of your strengths. "Find ways to position yourself in front of people and demonstrate progress on the issue to rebuild trust and shift perceptions," Smith suggested.
Years ago I worked in an office and had a very cool boss who was the general manager. He and I were quite close and used to joke around all the time.
I had been corresponding with a fairly important customer overseas about an issue they were having and I needed information from her to move forward. I asked for info a few times but she kept coming back with different details than what we needed.
I sent an email to my boss saying something like, “I can’t believe I ask the same simple question three times and this is what I get in reply.”
Except I didn’t send that email to my boss. I sent it to the customer!
I was in a panic when I realized what I had done. Went to my boss to let him know what happened and he thought it was hilarious but that I should write a brief apology to her for an “outburst”.
Was dreading the reply the next morning but to my astonishment our customer actually apologized to me for not paying attention. Felt like I got away easy.
I dropped a screw inside the engine (edit:motor) of a TGV train. Oh god. We spent half an hour trying to catch it by moving a magnetic stick inside the crankshaft, with oil spilling everywhere.
The engine was new and about to be mounted on a train that was supposed to run later in the day, I was so terrified I would possibly cause quite a lot of trouble since no other train or engine was available. Shoutout to my manager who finally got that screw and definitely deserved his half a dozen of croissants the next morning.
I worked in a pizza place and they caught me eating olives on camera. It wasn't 2-3 olives, I could eat like a thousands in a shift, I really don't know why and it's a time in my life I want to forget
Needless to say, don’t be too self-critical. Always remembering and blaming yourself for your past mistakes isn’t helpful and can damage your confidence. "When you unintentionally err, treat yourself as you would a friend in a similar situation," the coach wrote. "Among its many proven benefits, practicing self-compassion will support you in regaining clarity and confidence, and moving forward productively from a setback."
Worked for a politician who was terrible with names so I had them saved in his phone as the nicknames he gave them. One of them was “That crazy, hot b**ch” so I had her saved as “Melissa - crazy hot b**ch.”
One day the other staffer asked for her number so I sent it to him but accidentally sent the contact card to her instead. She kept ringing and messaging demanding to know what was going on and I spent all night dreading the scandal (we were mid election). The next day my boss dropped dead in the office and to this day I feel terrible that one off my first thoughts was “well I guess I got away with that”
put a 600$ crystal bowl through the dishwasher with the pots and pans
I almost died of hypothermia. I was a bartender and we kept a lot of drinks the guests wanted ice cold in a walk-in freezer. So I went inside the first freezer, drinks aren’t there. Then from that first freezer you walk in the second one. I forgot to put a stopper so the door won’t close. I was freaking out, getting colder by the minute. I screamed but no one could hear me. A co-worker came in to check on me, he thankfully knew where I was.
Every industrial freezer I've ever been in has a handle to exit from the inside. They're different shapes and in different places, but I can't imagine one without it. 'Seems like an unnecessarily dangerous product design.
Stabbed myself in the nose with a screwdriver.
I was 19 and it was my first day at work as a dishwasher. They gave me the grill, which was entirely encrusted in nasty burned on carbon, and told me to take it out back and clean it.
For about an hour I chiseled the carbon off it with a screwdriver and a butterknife. I was almost done, but there was one bit stuck in the corner, and because I'm an idiot I tried to get it out by chipping upwards with the screwdriver.
Screwdriver slipped, and continued upwards right into the tip of my nose.
So I run back into the kitchen, completely filthy and bleeding profusely from the face, and yell "I'M SORRY PLEASE DON'T FIRE ME!"
They were very understanding and did not fire me. And once I got cleaned up and stopped the bleeding it turned out I didn't even need stitches. I ended up working there for several summers and eventually made it up to line cook.
One of the managers where I work had the junior IT guy add a vacation auto-responder to his email and the confirmation window had a checkbox "Apply to inbox". The manager never cleans his inbox and the IT guy decided to check that box.
Something like 10,000 emails were sent that day. Important clients (who he would have been conversing more often with) were getting multiple hundreds of vacation notifications. Nothing bad came from it and most of the clients were good-hearted about it. He was getting replies like "Frank, please stop. We KNOW you're on vacation!"
Wait, are you saying that it sent an "I'm on vacation" email to every email address that had sent email to his inbox? What kind of pointless system does that? Normal auto repsonders just send an email the first time one is received when it is set, subsequent emails from the same person don't get a response. They are highly insecure things, as they will respond to mailing lists, thus telling me to come and burgle your house.
Accepted 20 fake $100 bills because I hadn't been taught how to spot fakes.
Scammer "whew that was easier than I thought! Wait! Why was it so easy? Did I give him the fake ones? Or the real ones? Should I go back and check? Am I the stupid one?"
Years ago in undergrad, I worked in a lab & had an incident. I was there at 2AM on a Saturday morning, fixing & staining cells (prepping them for viewing under a microscope). Part of the process involves utilizing sodium azide. I put the NaN3 into a buffer solution in too small of a conical & screwed-on the cap, without thinking. hydrogen gas evolved, the conical exploded, my clothes caught fire, & EHS wasn’t very happy. The PI of the lab couldn’t stop laughing. The only serious damage was to my ego.
Mixed bleach and ammonia. Had to evacuate the restaurant
We had a soaking agent for the silverware that didn't know was ammonia based, and I mixed it with bleach and water because I figured if I was bleaching the kitchen drains I might as well use something that'll foam up and take the mildew with it.
Accidentally left out the “MoveNext” method on a loop that sent out an email broadcast, which meant it mailbombed the first recipient in the loop until we realised what was happening and killed the process.
The CEO’s email was the first email address in the loop.
He was an arsehole anyway, and was absolutely incoherent with rage when his outlook crashed when downloading 15,000 emails inviting him to take a satisfaction survey.
Good thing it was only a test!
The chef was angry that day. I was advised by my coworkers to do whatever it takes to get on his good side. I thought, "eh, I'll just try to avoid him."
He was standing in the cooler taking inventory. Beside him were the 5 gallon containers of prepped food. I sneaked in and tried to quickly grab the ranch container, but in my haste, I nudged another.
It was the french onion soup. All 5 gallons of it. On his pants and shoes.
Yes, he was upset. The prep girl was upset. I had 10 minutes til lunch service started. I have no idea how I'm still alive.
My first day working at a coffee shop I left my sharpie in the oven. Finally found it while trying to warm a sandwich and had to shut the whole thing down to be cleaned. It smelled like a chemical weapon.
I overpaid my restaurant team around £33k in service charge over a period of 8 weeks because of some corrupt Excel formulas that weren't double checked before submission.
When the company discovered what happened they wanted the money back, and I had to break that news to the team in a 1 on 40 meeting early one morning before service.
I then had to have a 1 on 1 meeting with each employee to set up a repayment scheme with them based on how much they owed.
As an aside, I had only just moved in to the role and the overpayments had started a few weeks before my appointment, but I was still responsible at the time. Some of the guys owed around £1800. It was the worst 4 months in my career to date.
I'm sorry but the employer should just have to eat the loss if they make a mistake like that
Worked at an egg farm and was carrying 12 flats of eggs. Didn’t see the pallet someone left in the walkway. Tripped on the pallet and hundreds of eggs go flying and splattered all over the floor. Meanwhile, I fell and dislocated my wrist and shoulder.
I at least partially blame my employer for this but they fully blamed me so -
I briefly worked for the city zoo. We used "carts" that were basically an ATV with a dumpable bed on them for cleaning enclosures. Zoos are large so we also used them just as transport.
We had one with a known wonky parking brake. Maintenance had refused to replace it for months.
One day I had to park it on an incline. I kicked it after parking, didn't budge. I turned around at least 3 times as I walked away to make sure it was still not going anywhere.
5 mins later, I come back to hysteria. Naturally as soon as I was gone, it had rolled down the hill and taken out half the fence to the camel ride area. Knocked some lady over (she was fine, I think she had just been knocked off balance versus full on hit by it).
My manager wasn't mad at all, maintenance finally gave us a new cart, but I still got written up because protocol.
Controls Engineer. Made a copy paste error while programming and a 2 was a 3. So one machine tagged at 3 was waiting for conditions of 2. So naturally the lift moved when it thought it should and crashed into another machine. Course I'm Having to stand there figuring out the issue while maintenance is up there replacing busted parts. But because I've made a thousand changes it didnt click fast enough and well... it happened again.
I understood the words but not sure if I got the meaning... other than the machine wasn't programmed right.
That's pretty much how all electronics fail. Someone makes a tiny little mistake that nobody notices. And after some time the mistake gets worse and worse and starts causing collateral. But the machine still continues working, while it's insides are slowly ripping itself apart. And then in a split second the point of no return is passed and everything fails spectacularly.
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I was new to SQL and accidentally mailed a list of people with deceased_date IS NOT NULL instead of IS NULL. So an entire marketing campaign was sent to dead people. That eventually led to our marketing tools being hard-coded not to mail dead people (which makes sense) but I was terrified when I found out.
Very first tech job as a youngin' and I forgot to verify of someone had backed up files before a clean OS install. Lost the guys Outlook Archive files with 10 years worth of conveniently stored and important email. Apologized and sheepishly turned the issue over to admins.
So the guy was running on a unbacked up laptop with 10 years stuff that he couldn't afford to use. The same would have happened if he had dropped it, it just wouldn't have been your fault. The real culprit here is the policy of allowing used to keep important data on their own machines without backups.
I worked in a nice steakhouse. First week, I accidentally put salt in the sugar bowls and sugar in the salt shakers. Customers started to complain about their sweet steaks and salty coffees. We had to pull all the salt and sugar from each table. My last day as a waiter.
Chemistry teacher here, on my first day of teaching I set my classroom on fire after some unfortunate incidents involving sodium, water and a glass tank. The problem was that the glass tank was too big, so the hydrogen gas got to build up to a decent amount. Then suddenly kaboom! The glass tank exploded, there was shattered glass everywhere and hit the students, who were all wearing safety glasses. A column of water grew from the glass tank to the ceiling and the ceiling started to burn.
After a few moments the fire died out and the fire alarm was loud and I had to make sure all of the students were ok. Which they were.
It ended up being one of my funniest classes to teach for many years. The students absolutely loved it, I was a bit of a nervous wreck for a few hours.
The worst thing in hindsight is all of the comments saying things like “you started your career with a bang” and stuff like that.
Not me but I worked at a place that made wiring harnesses. Dudes 4thish day he's running the wire cutting machine. Suddenly says he's sick and leaves. Never came back. He absolutely messed up everything on the cut. What's sad is he wouldn't have been fired. Or even been in trouble. He didn't have to leave.
Back in the floppy disk, pre-Internet days of computers I was tasked by my job to do a software installation onboard a coast guard ice breaker. I flew from Ottawa to Halifax. Then I caught a taxi to CFB Shearwater, from where a twin otter flew me 1000 km north to a little town on the border of Quebec and Labrador. From there I was flown by helicopter to do an at sea landing on the ice breaker. After landing I went down to the engine control room, where the computer was located, and laid out the disks: disk 1, disk 2, disk 3, disk 4, disk 6.
Disk 5 was still on my desk in Ottawa.
I used to work as an explosive ordnance clearance engineer. This card comes round the office for Tony. I write ‘happy birthday mate, from Dave’. Lady who gave me the card looks on in horror. ‘What?’ I say. ‘You can’t write that!’ ‘Why not?’ ‘He’s just had his leg blown off by a landmine.’ I had to try and change it to best wishes. But it was pretty obvious what I did. My boss comes round later, ex major royal engineers, ‘I heard what you did Burns.....he’s going to be hopping mad when he sees you.’
My coworker was trying to take down a pallet but he had the forklift to close to the racking. He accidentally pushed the support beam above the pallet he was going for so far up that the pins busted and both pallets (2L coke bottles) on that top rack tipped.
Luckily, nobody got hurt, the pallets were wrapped, and neither one fell completely. But they were hanging so far over the edge that most of the contents ending up falling anyway.
That entire end of the warehouse was flooded with Coca Cola. There were so many bottles on the floor that we couldn’t drive equipment through and we were wading through the sea of coke, squeegeeing it out the loading dock door.
Four months later, we could still feel the stickiness.
My first day as a dishwasher at a resort, I dropped a tray stacked with executive china.
Measured something on a construction site off by a foot. It wasn't discovered until it cost 150,000 to remedy the mistake. Nothing happened to me because it was a 10 million dollar job.
I worked at a retail store when two women walked by me and said “tell (coworker) that she gave us excellent service” on their way out of the store. I told my coworker about it afterward and she said “who were they?” And for some reason my dumbass said “umm I’m not sure but they were two heavy-set women” then described what they were wearing. And my coworker said “oh that was my mom and my aunt.” I have never been more embarrassed in my life.
When I was a football coach my mum happened to be passing the ground that I was going to be coaching at so she offered me a lift. I gratefully accepted so off we went. We had the right of way approaching a junction so carried on through. There was a car waiting to pull out at the junction and the driver wasn't happy that my mum had not yielded. I could read his lips as he said 'F*****g fat b***h'. So I got to the venue and this car pulls up and it's the guy from earlier, and it turns out that he is our 'star' midfielder. Since I pick the team, I decided that today was a good day to give someone else a chance in midfield. It's a shame that he wasn't bright enough to put two and two together as I reckon it would have served as a good life lesson for him. Dumbass.
Not me but a friend got a job at a fancy dessert restaurant, the kind with a big-ass chocolate fountain in the middle of the room. 1 week into the job and he's carrying a tray of glasses to be polished when he loses control, drops the tray and glasses onto the rim of the fountain and smashes it spilling 10's of litres of melted chocolate over the floor in front of everyone.
He was promptly unhired.
Working the stock room at MalWart, grabbed a pepsi pallet with the forklift and didn't realize it was a short pallet. The forks came out the other side and through to the pallet of glass coke bottles it was up against. When I lifted the pepsi, the coke came up with it and dumped the entire unwrapped pallet of glass bottles spilling all that sticky soda on the floor.
That mess was hell to clean up. However the vendor had to eat the cost because that stores posted policy is that they cannot leave unwrapped pallets unless it is being worked.
i work as an apprentice in an IT & printer repair office, we had a tech apprentice last year who finished his education and sent out an email to everyone (around 20 people including management) saying that it was his last day and thank you to everyone. we got along pretty well, were around the same age and we both HATED our jobs and how we were treated so i replied with that "god i wish that were me" deviantart comment meme.
realized an hour later i hit "reply to all" instead of "reply" and sent it out to the entire office. almost s**t my pants. luckily no one brought it up except 1-2 coworkers i'm on good terms with who found it funny, but god i wanted to die
Switched work laptops and while I was syncing our shared drive, accidentally deleted every single document from the last three years.
Thankfully someone figured out how to restore it about a week later
Concessions at a movie theater.
I was making popcorn, but I had learned that if we used a bit more seasoning and oil, the popcorn tasted insanely better. What I didn't know was the popcorn machine had broken earlier, and wasnt stirring the popcorn anymore.
So after I had made a new batch, and no popcorn coming out, I decided to check on the machine and a hot glob of oil flew into my eye. Started cussing and screaming in front of a whole bunch of customers and got rushed into the back to wash my eye out.
imagine the kids after that they be like "mommy i f*****g hate this movie" or "this tatse like s**t"
A manager at a pizza place I worked at years ago took a catering order of 50 or so pizzas for the next week. Well Monday at noon we got a call asking where the order was, turns out the manager out the order down for Tuesday instead of Monday.
They got the order for free, and surprisingly that manager didn't get fired. He did however end up in jail several weeks later.
I’m a hairdresser. I had a very wealthy woman as a client, who had a LOT of thick hair, and wanted to balayage (painted on highlights) her hair and make it a vivid color. Cool.
So, we went through the process, and I’m noticing that her hair is really dry and delicate despite it being really long and thick, so I make sure to rinse her bleach out a little earlier than planned...except the mass of hair kept the water from getting to the highlights on the very bottom.
I start blowing her out, and I notice there’s an entire section where it matters if you have long hair and like to put it up, ie the section at the very bottom, that has broken off to shoulder length (her hair was to her waist). I was sweating bullets, watching this short hair flapping in the wind, and nearly cried when I had to tell her what happened.
She got a small undercut at her request and was really nice about it, but it scarred me for a while.
As the owner of a lot of thick hair, if there's one thing we thick haired people know - the bloody stuff grows back. Usually a week after you've had a really stylish haircut.
I had an important meeting that could eventually lead me into a huge promotion. I kid you not, I zipped my zipper onto my d**k after taking a piss in the bathroom and it hurt like hell. Not as bad as that Ben Stiller movie, but trust me, it was not a good situation. I actually went to a local pharmacy to grab some Advil to hopefully ease some of the pain just to get through the meeting.
I had a temporary moment of insanity and jumped out of my Boss' work van while he was driving it. Smashed my head on the road, nearly bled out, ambulence drove me to the hospital. We're still good friends.
Basically what caused the temporary insanity is that it was really cold out, and he had the heat up insanely high in the van to the point where the air quality was s**t and hot and I basically couldn't breathe. We were both wearing heavy coats too. I wanted to open the windows to get some fresh air and he wouldn't let me. I told him I needed to get out of the van, and he didn't give a s**t, he told me we're heading to the job site. I warned him 3 times that if he didn't park the van, I was going to jump out. He continued to refuse to park. So I kept my word and I jumped.
Was promoted to terminal manager and I was a dumb 25 year old idealist. We had an essential employee--a mechanic--who kept our fleet of trucks running. At least that was his job description. Less than a month on the job, it came to my attention that he was a working alcoholic and his work on our fleet was underwhelming. My boss told me to fire him once we had a new mechanic ready to come in. I told the old mechanic that he should probably start looking for new work if he couldn't do the job. Word got back to him through the pipeline that he was going to be fired.
I went to a bar with my assistant manager after working 40 days straight and lo and behold the mechanic showed up. Long story short, the mechanic attempted to abduct me with his adult son and dump my body in a frozen lake. The whole thing became a large dramatic bull**it event that put me in the hospital for a few hours and we both lost our jobs.
Doing an impersonation of my boss, and the other employees were cracking up, because I was so good at it .Then, he was suddenly standing behind us. He never liked me after that, and 2 months later I was one of 4 people who got “laid off”
I forgot to put water in my instant macaroni and it caught on fire in the microwave. Orange smoke was everywhere and the fire alarm went off. I pretended that it wasn’t me and then secretly cleaned it up when everyone had went home.
I worked at a McDonald's and accidentally fell in the ice maker right at the beginning of my shift. They had to close the restaurant for the rest of the day to dump out and sanitize the machine
Project manager at a pharmaceuticals trader. Ticked the 15-25°c box on a form to the temperature controlled van driver... the goods were 2-8°c
€1.5 million of vaccines had to be destroyed
Hmm... how can we be sure you were not an anti-vaxxer spy who infiltrated the enemy to destroy the vaccines?
I worked in a small company, ~8 employees. Not one of them had a forklift licence, and neither did I.
Anyway, I was the one that they made drive the forklift if we needed to unload a delivery etc. I hated it, but really had no choice, it was that or get fired (At least I thought at the time).
So, I get in the forklift at 4:10pm (We close at 5) and back it up, straight into the brand new shutter door that was only partially open. I sheepishly go and tell the boss, who is seething.
He said he's calling the door repair company and 'Of course you'll wait with me until they arrive'. Excellent. No ETA was even given by the repair company and we're in a relatively rural area so response time was s**tty anyway.
Anyway, it gets to 6:20pm and I've had enough. It was winter, so dark out, I had an hour's drive home and still no ETA on the arrival on the repairman.
Now, things at this place have not been great for a while, I has multiple grievances about the way the place was run. I ask if I'm done and can leave.
The boss says no. I then go on a rant, brining up everything the place does incorrectly, and even illegally, and then he bursts out with 'YOU CAN EITHER STAY, OR..' And before he finished I say 'Or I can leave? Goodbye.'
That was that.
I work in a heavily regulated, incredibly high pressure field. You can get blackballed by the industry if you slip up because at a certain level everyone knows everyone.
I reached a position where I had a lot of responsibility. I was the face of very valuable projects.
I beefed the stats on one of the most valuable...ever. I had been lied to, but one of my responsibilities was to ensure no one lied about studies. It was ugly enough that I was convinced I was done. Like, "in the industry" done. I envisioned everything collapsing around me.
I was already battling mental illness. This sent me to the hospital with suicidal ideations. I stayed for a week. I missed a month's worth of work, which was torture because I was used to having complete control over everything and never missed a day/often lost vacation.
I got back and found that news of my mistake had hardly traveled. A few engineers had rendered the project f**ked up beyond all reason. It literally could not proceed because of what they'd done.
I went back to the hospital for therapy pretty regularly for a while. I saw three other people from my company paying visits and wondered if they saw me.
Jesus. It sounds like the OP would be a lot better off without that job.
I worked at a car detailing place. We had enormous buckets with taps on the end of them for all of the chemicals we would use to clean the cars. One day before we closed up for the weekend, i decided to do an acid wash on my car to get all of the tar off of my bumper and wheels and such. Turns out when i came in on Monday I forgot to turn the tap off to the acid. Everyone had to wear a mask in the place for a couple days because of the smell. With the hole in the ground I evaporated and the cost of all of the acid I wasted took a few paychecks to replace.
I used to work prep at a fairly large chain restaurant.
One day, nearing lunch, I decided it would be funny to play a prank on the line cook who was by himself for the next thirty minutes. I set all five of our microwaves to go off at the same time. Only problem is they were empty, and i set them all for a minute each.
They all caught fire. It was first of the month Saturday.
What kind of microwaves set fire after 1 min ? Must have been really cheap
I used to work at a phone store and we dealt with a lot of contracts. A part of the process was an ID check and a collegue of mine forgot to do it; he gave the lady two brand new iphones 7's (they just came out that week) it turned out to be fraud. He got in a lot of trouble but they let him off with a disciplinary.
I crashed a hospital multimillion computer charting system after entering in the number π
Back story I was a charge nurse at my local hospital and I recently just watched the movie “Life of Pi” I remembered the scene where the kid wrote out π on the chalk board.
One night at work I copied and pasted the number π into one of the “virtual test patients” in our computer charting system. (Just to make it look like I also knew all the numbers to Pi like the movie)
I crashed the system for 4 hours, had to call in emergency IT team at 4am.
End result I got in-trouble, but not fired. I’d like to think having a good standing with the hospital and managers saved my job. I still work for this hospital (22yrs later).
I'm calling BS. Pi is an irrational number. You can't type in Pi. And if you can crash a computer system by entering more digits in a field than are allowed, then that system is so fundamentally flawed that you should be asking for compensation from the company that built it!
I work at a jail. We have things called “keep a parts” to keep people away from each other since they may have conflicts on the street or otherwise. I accidentally let these two guys go into the same room together. Guy #1 is F**KING massive. Guy #2 is small and (allegedly) killed Guy #1s friend. Guy #2 doesn’t know Guy #1 but Guy #1 knows who he is and what he (allegedly) did. So, they go into this room with about 30 other people and after about 20 minutes Guy #1 casually walks over to Guy #2 and beats the ever loving s**t out of him. Easily could’ve killed him. Luckily we stopped it before it got worse. But I still f**ked up massively.
Not related but Guy #1 was recently killed by his friend when they were drunk and his friend “accidentally” shot him in the head. Now Guy #1s friend is in jail for murder.
I gave my log in information to a phishing scam because I didn't notice the email domain was slightly different than our actual ones. I decided to worry about it the next day because I already left work, but then I got paranoid and decided to go back and change my password just in case someone tried to use my account for something. The problem was that I take the train home and have to walk about 15 minutes to get to the station, so by the time I got back to the office it was almost empty and my face was really red because of how hot it was when I was walking. Of course my supervisor still happened to be there and he was pretty surprised to see me back that late.
I was serving at a 21st for a rich woman's daughter. It was my job to clear tables and make sure the food was replenished at the self serving buffet. Once the hot food was gone I was instructed to get all the desserts out of the kitchen. I look in the fridge and see the usual black forest gateau, cheesecake, etc and what looks like creme brulee. I take it all out and position myself ready to serve. A couple come and coo over the creme brulee asking if it's home made. Turns out they are food critics for a living and are very impressed that the hostess has made creme brulee. I serve them both a scoopful of it and think nothing more of it. Then the hostess comes along and looks at the creme brulee in horror. Turns out it's beef dripping. At the end of the shift I see the 'creme brulee' I had served the couple left in the bowls. It was evident they had eaten a spoonful before realising....
This kind of fits. I was working as an extra in a movie in my teens. Small town in Africa. I wasn't working till the afternoon, so I thought I would just head downtown and get a soda or something. As I'm coming along side street to the main crossroads of town, I see this guy I really, really like just leaning in a doorway. So I just make a beeline straight over to him, trying to be all cute and sexy. He's smiling at me. I'm smiling at him. I get all the way over to him and his grin is just getting bigger and bigger. He kind of does a head nod behind me. I turn around and there is an entire film crew filming a scene, including the stars of the movie, and a crowd of people watching. I just walked into the scene in the background and ruined the whole thing, and everybody just watched me in silence. Then they all laughed their heads off at me. God, I was so freaking humiliated. But apparently not enough to swear off being in movies, which I continued to do!
Gosh, so many faux pas in my past. How ''bout the time I wrote a VERY explicit erotic short story on my computer at work, then accidentally printed it out on another department's printer instead of the one by my desk? Does that qualify?
The top several items on this list actually make me feel really good. The bosses are all kind and understanding. It makes me fear failure a little less and recognize that we're all just people trying our best.
I have two particularly good IT ones from different jobs. One was a documentation tool that scanned C++ code and produced documentation from the comments (similar to javadoc or doxygen, but years earlier). I was responsible for the master copy of the distribution configs and it very nearly shipped with settings that would have overwritten the user's code, wiping it out. We delayed the release and fixed the code so that could never happen again! The second I had a little accident deleting the backup I had made of some of the startup configs for a Sun workstation. You guessed it, I deleted the original. No backups as it was only a demo system, which we were due to demonstrate the next day. Fortunately it had an ISDN connection, as did our office, and I was able to dial in and copy the configs off our sever, and no-one was any the wiser, but it was a brown-trousered moment when it happened. Worse still, the system would have run fine until it was rebooted, so good job I realised!
During a slow day I had gotten bored and decided to wipe down all the shelves in the fine dinnerware section of the store I worked in. I really wish I picked something else to do. Knocked my head against a shelf containing 5 sets of champagne flutes by Waterford. I'm still amazed I still had a job AND it wasn't taken off my paycheck.
I worked in a supermarket for three months one summer. I was assigned to cashier and shelves refurbishment. I had been given a brand new box cutter, really sharp. I open the very first box without realizing the middle finger of my other hand was right in the way! I cut the top part of my finger and had to go to hospital. I live in Italy and from such a place of work you have to wait for an ambulance because of insurance and such. I was given 3 weeks of paid leave to recover. One or two days after I was back I was out partying with some friends, was in a car and my friend slammed the car head first into a tree. I broke a part of my knee and was out for the rest of my contract. Still a paid leave here so I basically worked less than half the time I was supposed to. I wasn't so surprised when I wasn't called back but I can't really say they were wrong! I probably wouldn’t have survived another month like that!
I worked for a research company. There are laws on when we had to stop calling people. There was some sort of glitch or oversight one evening where it was already 9am CST but we were still calling AST. It is absolutely against the law to be calling people after 11pm and can result in the company getting fined or sued. I alerted the Team Leader in charge of the project. He actually said "Okay, I'll look into it. Keep dialing on it." Ummm..... what? It's illegal, I reminded him. "And I'm your manager. You'll do what I tell you." No, I will not be part of breaking the law. I went and took a loooong washroom break.
I worked as a computer tech in the 80s. A customer's Apple II had been in the shop for over a week because we were having trouble getting the right motherboard for it. Customer was getting angry and wanted his unit ASAP. The motherboard finally came in and the shop lead asked me to install and test it out. I put it in, plugged in the monitor and disk drive interface boards we used for testing customer units, booted up, and everything tested out fine. Shop lead said, "Great! Button 'er up and I'll call the guy." I reached over and jerked out one of our interface boards...before turning off the power. Killed the motherboard. Took another week to get a new one. Customer was really pissed, but the shop lead was so cool about it. Calmed the guy down and didn't get mad at me. A true professional!
These are bad but whilst working here in the lab in Wuhan I forgot to close the fridge door and our latest Covid experiment got out. Hope I don't do that again.
Well, we all make mistakes, so I hope you haven't lost any sleep over it!! 😜🤪🤣
Load More Replies...
Worked as a CNC contract programmer. The programming software had just gone through a major upgrade that allowed 5-axis-simultaneous programming that consisted of 26 different toolpath options. The procedure for 25 of them followed the exact same protocol but the 26th option used an entirely different procedure. The software improvements were all done overseas and all the documentation had to be translated into English. The document explaining the different procedure for the 26th option was buried deep into the document and I didn’t see it. So when I got around to using it I used the same process as the others which caused a huge machine crash which resulted in me getting run out of there quickly without getting the $12k I had invoiced them for previous work. I raised hell with the software company over their piss poor documentation & they blamed me for not reading the document carefully enough but released a ‘red flag’ email to every user the next day warning them about the issue.
Anyone notice most of these were computer goofs - I really don't know if we are ready for these magnificent machines that most of us don't understand! I'm damned lucky if I can retrieve my e-mail!
This kind of stuff really amps up my anxiety. I would never want any critical responsibilities because of my intense fear of f-ing up (ie surgeon with lives in my hands)...
This is far too long to read at lunch and still get to the rest of the day's posts.
I was serving at a 21st for a rich woman's daughter. It was my job to clear tables and make sure the food was replenished at the self serving buffet. Once the hot food was gone I was instructed to get all the desserts out of the kitchen. I look in the fridge and see the usual black forest gateau, cheesecake, etc and what looks like creme brulee. I take it all out and position myself ready to serve. A couple come and coo over the creme brulee asking if it's home made. Turns out they are food critics for a living and are very impressed that the hostess has made creme brulee. I serve them both a scoopful of it and think nothing more of it. Then the hostess comes along and looks at the creme brulee in horror. Turns out it's beef dripping. At the end of the shift I see the 'creme brulee' I had served the couple left in the bowls. It was evident they had eaten a spoonful before realising....
This kind of fits. I was working as an extra in a movie in my teens. Small town in Africa. I wasn't working till the afternoon, so I thought I would just head downtown and get a soda or something. As I'm coming along side street to the main crossroads of town, I see this guy I really, really like just leaning in a doorway. So I just make a beeline straight over to him, trying to be all cute and sexy. He's smiling at me. I'm smiling at him. I get all the way over to him and his grin is just getting bigger and bigger. He kind of does a head nod behind me. I turn around and there is an entire film crew filming a scene, including the stars of the movie, and a crowd of people watching. I just walked into the scene in the background and ruined the whole thing, and everybody just watched me in silence. Then they all laughed their heads off at me. God, I was so freaking humiliated. But apparently not enough to swear off being in movies, which I continued to do!
Gosh, so many faux pas in my past. How ''bout the time I wrote a VERY explicit erotic short story on my computer at work, then accidentally printed it out on another department's printer instead of the one by my desk? Does that qualify?
The top several items on this list actually make me feel really good. The bosses are all kind and understanding. It makes me fear failure a little less and recognize that we're all just people trying our best.
I have two particularly good IT ones from different jobs. One was a documentation tool that scanned C++ code and produced documentation from the comments (similar to javadoc or doxygen, but years earlier). I was responsible for the master copy of the distribution configs and it very nearly shipped with settings that would have overwritten the user's code, wiping it out. We delayed the release and fixed the code so that could never happen again! The second I had a little accident deleting the backup I had made of some of the startup configs for a Sun workstation. You guessed it, I deleted the original. No backups as it was only a demo system, which we were due to demonstrate the next day. Fortunately it had an ISDN connection, as did our office, and I was able to dial in and copy the configs off our sever, and no-one was any the wiser, but it was a brown-trousered moment when it happened. Worse still, the system would have run fine until it was rebooted, so good job I realised!
During a slow day I had gotten bored and decided to wipe down all the shelves in the fine dinnerware section of the store I worked in. I really wish I picked something else to do. Knocked my head against a shelf containing 5 sets of champagne flutes by Waterford. I'm still amazed I still had a job AND it wasn't taken off my paycheck.
I worked in a supermarket for three months one summer. I was assigned to cashier and shelves refurbishment. I had been given a brand new box cutter, really sharp. I open the very first box without realizing the middle finger of my other hand was right in the way! I cut the top part of my finger and had to go to hospital. I live in Italy and from such a place of work you have to wait for an ambulance because of insurance and such. I was given 3 weeks of paid leave to recover. One or two days after I was back I was out partying with some friends, was in a car and my friend slammed the car head first into a tree. I broke a part of my knee and was out for the rest of my contract. Still a paid leave here so I basically worked less than half the time I was supposed to. I wasn't so surprised when I wasn't called back but I can't really say they were wrong! I probably wouldn’t have survived another month like that!
I worked for a research company. There are laws on when we had to stop calling people. There was some sort of glitch or oversight one evening where it was already 9am CST but we were still calling AST. It is absolutely against the law to be calling people after 11pm and can result in the company getting fined or sued. I alerted the Team Leader in charge of the project. He actually said "Okay, I'll look into it. Keep dialing on it." Ummm..... what? It's illegal, I reminded him. "And I'm your manager. You'll do what I tell you." No, I will not be part of breaking the law. I went and took a loooong washroom break.
I worked as a computer tech in the 80s. A customer's Apple II had been in the shop for over a week because we were having trouble getting the right motherboard for it. Customer was getting angry and wanted his unit ASAP. The motherboard finally came in and the shop lead asked me to install and test it out. I put it in, plugged in the monitor and disk drive interface boards we used for testing customer units, booted up, and everything tested out fine. Shop lead said, "Great! Button 'er up and I'll call the guy." I reached over and jerked out one of our interface boards...before turning off the power. Killed the motherboard. Took another week to get a new one. Customer was really pissed, but the shop lead was so cool about it. Calmed the guy down and didn't get mad at me. A true professional!
These are bad but whilst working here in the lab in Wuhan I forgot to close the fridge door and our latest Covid experiment got out. Hope I don't do that again.
Well, we all make mistakes, so I hope you haven't lost any sleep over it!! 😜🤪🤣
Load More Replies... Worked as a CNC contract programmer. The programming software had just gone through a major upgrade that allowed 5-axis-simultaneous programming that consisted of 26 different toolpath options. The procedure for 25 of them followed the exact same protocol but the 26th option used an entirely different procedure. The software improvements were all done overseas and all the documentation had to be translated into English. The document explaining the different procedure for the 26th option was buried deep into the document and I didn’t see it. So when I got around to using it I used the same process as the others which caused a huge machine crash which resulted in me getting run out of there quickly without getting the $12k I had invoiced them for previous work. I raised hell with the software company over their piss poor documentation & they blamed me for not reading the document carefully enough but released a ‘red flag’ email to every user the next day warning them about the issue.
Anyone notice most of these were computer goofs - I really don't know if we are ready for these magnificent machines that most of us don't understand! I'm damned lucky if I can retrieve my e-mail!
This kind of stuff really amps up my anxiety. I would never want any critical responsibilities because of my intense fear of f-ing up (ie surgeon with lives in my hands)...
This is far too long to read at lunch and still get to the rest of the day's posts.
