Biggest fuck up you ever made at work?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
61

In the summer after my senior year in high school I worked for a pool supply warehouse. We sold pool parts and supplies to pool men and pool shops all over Southern CA. Some day’s I’d pull orders some days I’d drive a delivery truck. Deliveries often took me hundreds of miles away. On Friday after one of these particularly long trips I was coming back south along the 101 as it ran through Santa Barbara. At that time the 101 became a local and it changed from MPH 4 lane freeway to a 35 mph city street with stop lights. Needless to say this caused a tremendous bottleneck. Tired from a long day and thinking a head to the girl I was going to meet a Zumma that night I didn’t notice that traffic had come to a stop.

I rear ended the car in front of me at about 25 miles per hour. The truck was undrivable and the other car was in bad shape thankfully no one was injured. But a rear end accident on the 101 where neither car can be driven from the scene at say 4:00 PM on a Friday is a big deal. So in an instant I shut down the 101 freeway caused a traffic back up of God knows how many miles. But the real kicker was hearing about my truck over the radio from the helicopter traffic reporter. “It looks like a delivery van has rear ended a silver sedan. Traffic is at a total halt on the 101 south in Santa Barbara…I’d hate to be that guy.”

62

Okay, mine’s not so bad. I was the drama teacher for the 6 - 12th grades, and we were doing “Number the Stars” – classic children’s book about hiding Jews from Nazis. We had borrowed actual woolen vintage army uniforms from the local community theater, and I had handsewed all the Nazi armbands, insignia, etc. It was a warm April night, and in setting up for opening night, the poor boys who were soldiers were sweating like mad in their uniforms. I told them to go outside and cool off a bit. The theater is right on the main street (4 lanes) going through town, and I guess they were so wound up about going on stage in a little bit that they began waving at the traffic and pointing up at the marquee to try to drum up a little business. The next thing I knew, the police had arrived and were herding my Nazis back into the theater and giving me a lecture on letting them out in public while they were giving the Nazi salute. I was sweating bullets, since this was my first big production, but sheesh…these boys were 13 or 14. Not exactly the third Reich. And of course, the kids told the story to all their parents!:smack:

63

You are fucking insane!!!

64

As a baby UNIX sysadmin, I was logged on with root privileges and ran a chmod -R 777 on the root filesystem of a server that was just about to go into production. We had been having all sorts of problems with the consultants on this project, and I basically reset their project to the beginning and doubled their fees for them. I halfway expected them to send me a fruit basket.

65

Wasn’t me that fucked up, but I was on the team. In the early to mid 80s, you may recall that a shuttle went to repair a scientific satellite that was in a useless orbit. Not the Hubble, before that was launched even.

I was on a team that was responsible for the ground operations managing the attitude of the satellite (meaning which way it faces). For the few years it was useless, it was managed just fine because it faced the sun enough to get power, even though for some reason I don’t recall now the scientific stuff was inoperable.

The astronauts on the the team had done plenty of training for years to get to the satellite, hook up to it and use their tools to make the repair.

But I think this was the first time such a thing was done and it didn’t go as smoothly as planned or practiced.

The astronaut, upon having considerable trouble anchoring himself to the satellite. I seem to remember we watched and guided him for hours on our screen. Maybe he was frustrated, or almost out of air or something, but suddenly we saw him do on screen what we all knew he shouldn’t do but were powerless to stop.

You know how watching astronauts move through space is like a dream sometimes?

Sometimes it is not a dream.

This one astronaut decided to ad-lib and reached his gloved hand out to grab the satellite by some appendage and try to pull it to him.

Big mistake.

They say in space no one can hear you scream, but we learned then that in space you can;t hear 100 people scream on Earth either.

He sent the satellite into an uncontrolled spin immediately.

It took all hands on deck at NASA Goddard something close to 24 hours I think to devise and execute a plan to stop the tumbling so the repair could be attempted again. This was not trivial, and it was far from clear it would work.

I don’t know what it cost to get that done, and it was done.

But I can guess, that in mid 1980 dollars, had it not been done, that fuckup in space would have cost the loss of the satellite, and the entire training for the mission, and the cost of launching a space shuttle for 8 days or so. This easily ran well into the mid 9 figure range I bet, so there was no question about spending what it took to correct the tumble.

66

That is brilliant.

Mine…not so much:
I worked as a veterinary technician at a small, rural animal hospital. Animal patients need to be fed, medicated & cages cleaned every day, so Sundays & holidays we techs rotated solo feed & clean detail. The hospital was a small building; exam rooms, reception, surgery on the upper floor, some storage and larger cages & crates for dogs in the large finished basement, with a door to a small backyard where we could walk and exercise the dogs.

On this particular Sunday, one of our patients was an older Irish Setter with some of the gnarliest, grossest-looking tumors I’d ever seen. I don’t recall the specific diagnosis, but it was some type of completely rampant cutaneous lymphoma or similar. These things were about 5 inches around, and were bursting up out of his skin like gigantic bloody cauliflowers – dumbass owners had waited until they were wide open and oozing before they thought to bring the poor thing to the vet. Anyway, this dog was in one of the downstairs crates when I arrived to go about feeding & cleaning.

After I finished walking another dog, I came back inside, closed the door and released Tumor Dog from his cage so he could stroll around a bit in the basement while I cleaned his cage. To my horror, I heard the door click and turned to see the end of Tumor Dog’s red feathery tail disappearing outside. Racing after him, I reached the corner of the building just in time to see him running gaily through 2 lanes of traffic, tumors a-flappin’, cars swerving, tires screeching. I tore after him – blundering through thorny undergrowth, stone walls and dense woods, gardens and front yards… I’m in hot pursuit, my mind racing, wondering how exactly I’m going to explain it to a) my boss and b) the owners of the poor dog entrusted in my care when I have to present his mashed carcass to them. Meanwhile, the other half of my panicked brain was frantically wondering if I had closed the door behind me, or if every other animal in the hospital was heading for the hills, shitting myself all the while.

After about a quarter mile, I caught up with him and managed to grab him by the scruff to lead him back as he had no collar due to the aforementioned tumors. Had to practically carry him back to the hospital, hands shaking, cold sweat…got him back safe & sound to my great relief. I don’t know whether he survived those tumors, I like to imagine that day was the most fun he’d had in years. Needless to say, I do make sure I’ve closed things securely now. And I have a nice safe office job where I can’t fuck things up too badly.

A far less traumatizing but otherwise amusing fuckup:
While working in a small catering shop, I was carrying a big pan of lasagna out front as the lunch rush crowd looked hungrily on. Breezing down the narrow aisle, the edge of the counter caught the lip of the pan and the entire hot, fresh-out-of-the-oven lasagna flew about 10 feet out of my hands and spewed all over the counters, refrigerated cases, co-workers and the floor. Dead silence as the entire store stared. A quick-witted co-worker saved the moment and shouted out, “LASAGNE SPECIAL, HALF PRICE!!!”

67

I can’t reveal my biggest mistake because it still mentally haunts me and I’m paranoid (or self-centered) enough to think some of yall will know exactly what I’m talking about.

That’s how big of a mistake it was.

:frowning:

68

:eek: that was you!?!?

69

Thankfully, I don’t recall having made any major screwups on the job. Just a minor one comes to mind. When I was 19, I worked at a gas station, and I volunteered to be the one to change the gas prices on the computer system. Having never done this before, I had no idea that there was a separate setting for customers paying in cash or with a credit card. D’oh! Thankfully, the difference was only 3 cents more per gallon, and the assistant manager (and dear friend of mine) caught the mistake and rectified it within aboug 15 minutes.

70

The fire department scolded me for improperly applying a cervical collar to a patient yesterday. I’m pretty sure it didn’t cause any permanent paralysis, though.

71

I worked at KMart in high school, and spent time on the registers. One day, I get called into the back office (almost always bad), and was told there was a problem with my register totals. They sat me down and explained to me that 27 days previous, my till had come up two dollars and thirty one cents short. And they wanted an explanation. They wanted to know what I had done wrong, what I did differently, if I had stolen it, etc. I had to sign a piece of paper saying that I had admitted that it was my fault, and it went on my permanent record there.

72

Ahhh hahahahahahahaah ahhahhaahahahahaaha…

I just spent 20 minutes writing up my “fuck up story” and accidently clicked back and lost the whole thing. Fuck it.

73

I accidentally skipped a page in a procedure and took 30,000 phone customers out of service for 10 minutes or so. (Powered something off before taking it out of service.) Luckily it was after 10PM, and there weren’t too many calls up at the time.

74

I’m guessing it still stings, seeing how you didn’t end up looking very good when they made that movie about it.

75

I complained about a project manager in my LiveJournal. In numerous public posts. Using his real name. During work hours.

I got doosed.

76

I’m carrying the emergency pager for work right now.

I slept through an emergency page last night. :frowning:

77

I deal cards. I delt some guy a huge hand then when i went to turn mine over…I didn’t have any. In the commotion of him celebrating I wasn’t paying attention and mucked my hand. Had to call about 7 different people for permission to pay the hand.

Wasn’t a HUGE deal forking over the $1,000 since he HAD rightfully won, but we had to call everyone and their grandmother “Yeah Boss, sorry to wake you but Cyberhwk REALLY F-ed something up.”

78

But here’s actually a funny one…

I also ran the scoreboard for a local minor league baseball team. I put in the names of all the players and their stats ect. Well I only had one pretty unfortunate misspelling with a certain Michael Schmidt.

79

T-SQL:
DELETE * FROM dbo.Customers

(notice the missing WHERE CustomerID = xxx statement?)

80

Now its on your permanent record here.