At a phone exchange, I mamaged to connect about everyone to about everyone else. That took the whole team about 10 minutes manually stepping uni-selectors back to their home position to sort out.
Wrote off a $50k mower by hitting a rock. Boss had to buy a new one. The outfit’s rule is that 10% of the cost is a beer fine. It’s going to be awhile.
Blasting logs into firewood broke the powerlines 250m away. It was only $150 to get fixed on a Sunday.
My biggest screw-ups have all been pretty minor–easily fixed by restoring backups–but an ex-roommate of mine once stumbled upon an undocumented key combination for a twenty year-old (and frequently patched) program… and deleted that day’s orders. It was the first time in seventy-five years of business this local food distributor had completely shut down and not made a single delivery. Quite an expensive day for the company.
Granted, it wasn’t his fault (numerous programmers over the years who failed to document their code–so there were a lot of gotchas not yet discovered), and he did get paid overtime to stick around and help however he could, but it happened by his hands, so I blame him. (We laugh about it now–whenever we talk about it–but back then, man, he was worried he was gonna get the boot.)
One time my boss told me (when I was General Counsel of a fairly small real estate development firm) that the next day we were going to have a meeting where a lawyer was going to come in and explain some things about Issue 1 and Issue 2. Or at least, that’s what I thought he said. I guess what he said was that she was going to explain Issue 1 and I was going to explain Issue 2 to everybody, who included a couple of members of management plus some members of his family. Issue 2 dealt with estate planning and where the business fit in to the estate… This area is not anywhere near any expertise of mine, but with some research I could have said something intelligent. Imagine my horror when the first lawyer, an expert on Issue 1, got finished and everyone looked expectantly at me to expound upon Issue 2. I stumbled around and said something and then copped to the misunderstanding. The family members left. Needless to say, my boss was not pleased. He did not fire me but things were awkward for a bit.
Does almost count?
Another oil field story. I almost jammed a $1,000,000 telemetry tool into the master valve on the master well for the entire field. Estimated revenue lost due to downtime due to repairs would have been around $4,000,000.
I was one of two Master Helmsman (MH) on my ship in the Navy. My ship was an LPD which is an amphibious ship that is over 500 ft long and 100 ft wide. Ships out at sea refuel while underway for practice during wartime. This means that we pull alongside a heavily laden oiler carrying millions of gallons of fuel going around 14 knots. The ships are less than 100 feet apart. There are two spots for the MH on the ship - one is on the bridge doing your helm steering. The other is in aft steering, which is a bit more interesting. Aft steering is in the far back and bottom of the ship in the same room as the rudder posts. This room is under water and you can see the rudders moving and see the shafts from the engine room spinning. LPD’s have seven different methods of steering the ship in in case the first six break. The backup MH sits in aft steering ready to engage the next six. We only test the first of the six backups just before a fuel replenishment. The first backup method of steering is using one of two “trick wheels.” (The last is to have about 10 guys manually pull the rudders using heavy chains). These trick wheels are similar to those tiny steering wheels you see in some lowriders. The crazy thing about the trick wheel is that its facing backwards. You steer the ship using a trick wheel by taking directional orders from the bridge and looking at your gyro. You don’t have a window… Just as the ship begins to pull up next to the oiler, which happens to be when the suction from the Venturi effect kicks in, the Captain orders me to take control of steering. Eh, well sometimes it takes us an extra hour or so to get ready to unrep, and it’s kind of boring down there and perfect nap conditions. What i’m saying is that I fell asleep. So the Captain orders the lee-helmsman on the bridge to order me over the sound powered telephones to take control of steering on the first trick wheel. I wake up and am faced with two identical brass switches. I’ve done this a hundred times, and I don’t know what came over me, but I flipped the wrong fucking switch. I disengaged the steering hydraulics completely. You could feel the ship jerk to the left - the force of the Venturi effect sucking us into the other ship. OH MY FUCKING GOD> I do not know how they managed to reengage the steering quickly enough to stop the collision, and I can only say that I didn’t get in trouble for this because I was the most precise bridge helmsman on the ship.
I worked for a movie studio in the legal department.
I had a blank check for about $3.5 million and had to make a copy.
Made the copy and took it to my desk.
Yeah, you guessed it. Left the check in the photocopier.
About ten minutes later, the man in the cubicle next to me heard me scream like a little girl as I suddenly panicked, “Oh FUCK!!!” and watched me run like a madman to the photocopier down the hallway.
The check was still there and I think I about passed out from joy and relief. Now THAT could have been a very bad day, and I still get the heebie jeebies thinking about it.
Wow! I don’t feel near so bad about mine now.
The biggest is probably at a multinational corporation:
I shared out my predecessor’s entire drive to the corporate network (just for a few hours, I figured, to xfer all his code, since Windows was being balky about more secure alternatives I was trying). A week later I showed up to work to find the network IT manager typing at my desk in a huff. Turned out shortly after I forgot about it, it contracted some worm and was spamming the global corporate network with it’s attempts to reproduce. Lead to some embarassing apologies.
Since then I’ve done many more things but they’re even more boring than that. Working for a small company hosting custom applications for big clients… things can go wrong fast. The good thing is that most of your coworkers will help you fix things, 'cause they know you’ll help them when they do the same. 
I accidentally deleted nearly all the video files on our server.
I still don’t know how I managed to do it, and am about 30% certain that the computer glitched spontaneously. But as nobody else but me was in there when it happened, the circumstantial evidence points to my guilt.
Luckily it was just week after our sophisticated backup system was set up, so they were all recovered.
Archaeologist on a Roman site. I was excavating a corner of a room. Three beautiful large fluted pots had been found buried under the floor in the other three corners. I put a pickaxe through the fourth. We had a party of visitors so I just kicked dirt over it until they’d gone. Dunno how much it was worth, or how much less three matching pots are worth than four but I got to clear up pot sherds instead of cleaning up a pot all pretty for a photograph.
Accidentally set the price of premium fuel at 41 cents. No one noticed for two days.
Think I’ve recounted this before.
I was sending out a mass email campaign to about 700 opted-in recipients - an invitation to a seminar that my CEO was presenting.
I got the brief, wrote the copy, did the design, got the email addresses, lined them up in the BCC line, got a third party to proof it, did a test send, got signoff from my boss.
Then I sent it.
About 20 minutes later, the phone started to ring with complaints. “You’ve sent me an email that triggered our obscenity filter.” Then the bouncebacks started: “This email has been returned because it contravened our spam/obscenity rules”.
I broke out in a cold sweat. Checked the copy, checked the email. Printed it out and re-read it. Nothing. What the hell was going on?
Then I had a look at it in Outlook and hit “view source”.
I did such design in a junk folder on my desktop.
Fucking Microsoft bullshit. Because I’d built the source HTML file in Outlook Express, embedded in the source, even though I hadn’t asked it to, it included the path on my computer that the original HTML resided.
What was the junk folder called? Well, contained in the code metatags was: c:\documents and settings\jjimm\desktop\shite
:smack:
Yeah, it was a trifle daft of me to do that, but still, stop doing stuff I didn’t ask you to do, fucking Microsoft!
In the end, about 50% of the emails were returned. Countless more were just never delivered.
The CEO, who had flown from Dublin to London for the occasion, turned up at our rented conference room and waited, and waited, and waited. For three hours. And nobody turned up.
Amazed I kept my job after that.
I rammed the guntube of one tank into the turret of another. Technically anyway. I was the tank commander so I was in charge. The driver had the bad combination of being new, having English as a second (maybe third) language and being a complete idiot. I couldn’t reach down to grab the commander’s overide fast enough to swing my turret. If the tube had been elevated anymore it would have killed the other tank commander. Instead it just damaged the bustle rack of the other tank.
I had several equity derivative institutional customers that should have known better lose tens of millions of dollars when the Asian crisis hit. Not technically my fault given caveat emptor and all that. I lost my job soon after since there were no new suckers until the invention of leveraged sub-prime exploding nuclear balance sheet waste was invented. Sigh, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
In college chem lab, my lab partner and I decided against waiting 2 hours to use the hooded set up and just ran our experiment at our bench. We were next to the window, how bad could it be?
They had to evacuate a 4 story building due to the ammonia gas that resulted. Oops. At least it was April and warm outside…
Trying to think of my worst work screw-ups – I’ve misrated people before but that’s not considered to be an enormous mistake – sometimes people are house-poor or have other obligations we don’t know about.
I’ve deleted whole projects before and had to restore from a draft in a short period of time, and barely made deadline.
I don’t have any but I can think of one my husband relayed…
He was in the middle of a huge project that involved rerouting phone and internet service to thousands of customers. He wrote a job for the contractors that involved doing some of this work. The contractor, for some unknown reason, read this as license to cut the existing cable.
The customers on that line hadn’t bee rerouted yet. He knocked out service to several blocks of businesses, including a hospital.
When I was a student I was working in a sausage and pie factory and was told to put labels with the “Use by” date on some packets of sausages. The date I was supposed to put on was “x/x/1999” but at one point I found I’d just done 1000 packets of sausage with “Use by x/x/1899”. Instead of re-doing them I just hid them amongst crates of correctly dated packets.
While not necessarily the most costly mistakes I’ve made, the two I’m most embarrassed about:
1.) Youth league referee. It was like my third game. One kid blatantly fouled another just steps from the goal, so I awarded a penalty kick. Nobody told me that there were no penalty kicks in under-8 soccer. Both coaches came out and patiently explained this after the fouled kid scored, so I had to explain to the kids and the crowd that the penalty kick didn’t count.
2.) I was a pool boy. After flushing the pump for the pool in an apartment complex, I left a valve open. I found out a few days later when I got a letter from the owner with a final paycheck and a picture of the pool half-drained.
A friend of mine worked in a motel, and needed someone to cover him for three days. It was a family owned place, and the owners lived in a few converted rooms behind the front desk. Since the owners were on vacation, I’d spend those days on 24 hour duty, catching sleep in the living quarters while I could. I knew the owners and they trusted me and it was all clear with them. Still, it was a position of responsibility and both mine and my friend’s reputations and jobs (I worked at a nearby motel that would surely hear of any incidents) were on the line.
I started at night. I got all settled in, chained the lobby doors shut (it was a rough neighborhood), did the final nightly report, and prepared to go to bed. As I settled down to sleep, a man called the front desk to complain the the cheerleaders in the next room were making too much noise. I slipped on my shoes and went out the living quarters door.
As I stepped out, I heard a sickening click behind me. The living quarters still had it’s motel doorknob, and it locked automatically. I was barely an hour into my job and was completely locked out of the place, and nobody in town had the key.
Luckily I spent most of my childhood as a forgetful latchkey kid who was locked out of her house plenty. After reviewing the options (Call locksmith and lose all that money? Call the bosses? Try to get a nearby motel to help? Sleep outside?) I managed to vibrate the lock off of one of the windows and crawl in.
When I was very, very new, I was tricked into running a bogus obituary in the newspaper. The guy said his brother had died, but he was using his own name to throw off the cops, who were trying to catch him. They caught him. I learned many, many ways to verify things, and always did it six ways from Sunday after that. I did not get in trouble, but felt absolutely sick.
I can’t think of a fun screwup of my own (have plenty, but all very pedestrian, AFAICR). But I had to pop in and say this is freaking awesome. What I wouldn’t give to have bought one of those sausage packets! “Let’s check the expiration date … Hmmm, this expired 98-and-one-half years ago. :dubious: Ah, what they hey–it’s just pork, what could go wrong?” Nom-nom-nom.