Inspired by the google related thread
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=504652
Lets see who can top eachother with the best mistake that had catastrophic results.
I worked for a state department in IT and once knocked an entire building off our network on accident by changing a setting on one computer. I then too went to lunch.
I’m not tellin’!
:x
C’mon, NinetyWt! 'Fess up! Or do you still work there?
I once knocked out the telephone cable for a police department. All their phone lines, data circuits, burglar alarm hookups, everything…and this was before cellular. There was an announcement on the 50,000 watt AM radio station. I was doing a cable throw. The old cable turned out to be the reverse of what it was supposed to be and its decrepit condition really caused a lot of problems in getting everything fixed. It took about five hours to rework all the wiring. The police chief and my division manager were not happy with me. The people on our testboard who gave us permission to open cables up for work gave me crap about it daily for a couple of months.
I blew up a 5 gallon bucket of paint in the mixer when I was working at a paint shop.
It was my first day too.
Oh and when I was employed at a convenience store I forgot to flip the switch that controlled all of our outdoor signage. Couldn’t figure out why I was so slow that day until I went to lock up at the end of the night. (thats what they get for making the night guy come in to open and then work a double)
Dropped the camera in the river.:rolleyes:
I accidentally stored fresh frozen blood plasma at the wrong temperature (just a few degrees off) and over 500 units had to be destroyed. They let me off easy and fired me.
Also, at my first part time job, I accidentally spilled a bucket of chili on the floor.
One time when I was running immunohistochemistry on some mouse livers, I used up nearly the entire contents of an expensive bottle of mouse hepatitis virus antibody instead of a very small aliquot. I didn’t notice that the bottle said it was already diluted to 1/20. I probably set the taxpayers of Washington state back a few hundred dollars with that error.
One of the good things about translation is that it’s difficult to fuck up really spectacularly (unless you’re working for, like, the UN and you accidentally put “Iran will nuke Israel” instead of “Iran will not nuke Israel” or something).
So I guess as close as I come is that I’ve completely forgotten about a contract until the client called me up testily on the due date, forcing me to rush home and do the whole thing in about a half hour.
In the middle 60s’s I was a movie projectionist in the days before muliti-screen theatres. I was working with another projectionist, breaking in at a drive-in where I hadn’t worked before. It was the first day of a double feature, von Ryan’s Express starring Frank Sinatra and Trevor Howard and El Dorado, starring John Wayne and Robert Mitchum. We were running von Ryan’s Express and rewinding El Dorado from shipping reels onto house reels. I accidentally stuck one of the El Dorado reels in a bin for von Ryan’s express. The scene is running where Frank Sinatra and Trevor Howard are captured allied soldiers being transported in a dark dingy railroad cattle car from Italy to Germany. They are trying to figure out how to take over the train and escape to Switzerland. At the end of the reel, Frank Sinatra has just fashioned a rope lasso for garroting German guards. The change-over occurs and John Wayne and Robert Mitchum are standing side by side in the street after a shootout in high noon sunlight.
Screen goes dark, horns honk, headlights flash. After a couple of minutes, we find the right reel, thread it up and fade back in. The first dialog in the proper reel of vRE, Trevor says to Frank: “Learn that in a cowboy movie, did you?” Although we were over 4 hours away, our screw up made Herb Caen’s column in the San Francisco Chronicle.
Another time I mixed two reels of James Joyce’ Ulysses and nobody noticed.
I don’t still work there, but I’m taking that secret to my grave. 
Nothing else really big that I can remember … one time when I was waiting tables for a living, a girl ordered ham and eggs, and I came hauling ass around the corner of the line of booths with the table’s order on a tray. Slipped and really busted it … dishes breaking and silverware clattering … me sprawled out in the floor.
It was the last piece of ham in the restaurant. Yikes! She was hot about it, too.
I caused an explosion at my workplace. It was a minor explosion and the resulting fire was easily put out with a fire extinguisher, but still how many people can say that?
the joys of being a chemist…
How about you just tell us the opposite of what you did? Were you a train conductor? Former president of the United States?
I worked underground in a lead mine. A fuel truck was off-loading diesel fuel and hydraulic fluid which comes down in pipes to the mine. I was brand new on the job and responsible for opening and closing valves to shuttle the right fluid to the proper storage tank. I got confused and routed the diesel fuel to the hydraulic tank and the hydraulic fluid to the diesel tank. It cost the mining company about $30, 000.
Ok, I’m prepared to get pitted for this…
I had a job inspecting medical equipment in a hospital. By the end of my tenure there, I got to the point where i was so fed up and upset with my job that I stopped testing anything except for a very few select types of equipment (defibrillators, ventilators, and EKG’s, basically.) But most surgical equipment, and all of the drug infusion and pain medicine pumps got an inspection sticker when most of the time all I did was verify that they turned on. My reasoning was that if they didn’t work, someone would tell me the next time they went to use it, and hopefully it wouldn’t be in the middle of saving a patients life.
So while no one died because of my failing, there was a small chance someone could of. 
I was working as a corporate trainer and had to ship some training manuals from WA state to Delaware. It was for an online tool and everything was very “changes at the last minute” and panicky, I sent everything off the corporate print shop after 5:00 pm and asked for overnight shipping. Turns out, I missed “regular overnight shipping” and my order defaulted to…courier. It cost 1500.00 to send a box of training materials from WA state to Delaware.
I didn’t find out about it until the charges hit about a month later. My boss and I were both surprised and horrified - we didn’t even know courier was an option! You’d think if the charge goes from 50.00 to 1500.00 there would be some kind of “are you really sure you want to spend 1500.00 on shipping?” option. I didn’t get in any trouble, but I did get teased pretty hard about it regularly by my team.
Needless to say, it immediately went into our “never never never do this” speech for all new hires.
I also one time took a very very expensive towncar ride in Boston. I had flown from WA state to Boston, and was standing in a very long taxi queue, not dressed for the weather, freezing my butt off. Some guy came by and said “would you rather take a towncar? no waiting!” At this point, did I ASK how much the towncar ride would be? No! I knew the taxi ride was supposed to be about 30.00. I had used a towncar service infrequently in Seattle and it had been a LITTLE more than a taxi (75.00 vs. 50.00 maybe), but I did NOT ASK. I got out of the long taxi queue, settled into a very nice towncar. The driver described Boston as we drove through the city (my first time there). We get to the hotel - 140.00. I nearly had a heart attack. AND I had to tip the guy - not his fault I was an idiot. It was pretty late on a Sunday night when I got to my room and I had to call my manager right away to confess what I had done (same team, different manager).
I still miss that job!
I broke someone elses 7.5 Million dollar tool with a $20.00 Crescent wrench (I sheared off some internal threads on a set of Drawworks on an oil rig). In my defense my office had been yelling at me to not forget the Stainless Steel adaptor I had threaded in there!
Unclviny
in the early 80’s I worked for one of several remote offices of a larger company. I don’t remember the technical terms but we had a computer screen that was somehow connected to the mainframe at the home office. It operated on a black screen with 4-letter commands. I was trying to get a program to run and it simply would not cooperate. I finally got fed up and typed the word “SHIT” and pressed enter. A second later, the screen prompted the message that the entire system was now offline.
I was in a more-than-mild panic that I had done something that caused the breakdown. I called the computer department immediately to fess up what I had done. They all thought it was hilarious but as it turned out, it was just coincidence.
I never typed a naughty command line ever again…
I know what you mean.
I tried to scrape a perchlorate out of a flask. Perchlorates are shock sensitive. Boom! I have small tatoos all over my face and hand from it. I always wear my goggles, so only minor injuries.
Trying to figure out how to quench a bottle of t-butyl lithium I didn’t fully close the flask and walked away. It quenched itself quite quick in the meantime spraying an extinguisher proof fire all over my hood. I closed the hood and let it burn itself out. No damage because that is what hoods are for.
Ether fire. nuff said
Actually, since I was in charge of still maintenance, it’s a pretty accident free record. The only doofus move was the perchlorate. I remember hearing pressure vessels detonating across the hall.
Yeah, oil field machinery can get real expensive real fast. I never broke anything too terribly expensive on a rig, but I did turn over about $60,000 worth of brand-new laboratory unit on I-70 near Eagle, CO. On a straight stretch of road, going only 45, the thing began fishtailing, and I didn’t have the expertise to bring it back under control before it jacknifed the truck and rolled onto its side. It was a total write-off.
Went back to Denver with my tail between my legs, and much to my surprise was given another unit to haul down to Oklahoma, which I did without incident.
I once broke the phone system in our entire office building and caused business to slow to a halt for about three days while it was fixed. Considering I worked at a talent agency and the agents are on the phone virtually all day it was kind of a big problem.
I have no idea how I broke it. I’m pretty sure it was me because it worked before I touched it and didn’t afterward…