I used to work at a deli where people passing through town would stop to get sandwiches. We had the usual hams, salamis, roast beefs, and turkeys, but we also served something called Taylor Pork Roll. I’m still not quite sure what it is, but before you served it, you had to cook it in a toaster oven for 10 or so minutes. Well one day this guy comes in and orders a salami on rye, and I make it for him. He told me it was the best sandwich he’d ever eaten. Only after he’d gone did I realize my mistake. You see, Salami looks very similar to Taylor Pork Roll, and I inadvertantly switched the two. I basically gave this guy a raw pork sandwich. I remember thinking that the deli was going to get sued for giving someone food poisoning, but I never heard from the guy after that. Come to think of it, that could be a bad thing.
I once worked as a work-study programmer for my college. At night, I did backups for the administrative computer. During tapes (the big reel-to-reel type), I would do my schoolwork on a terminal connected to the academic computer.
Well, one night I didn’t have any real schoolwork, so I wrote a program to calculate pi using the formula
pi=4-4/3+4/5-4/7+4/9-…
on the academic computer, a PDP 11/70. The program was running slow because the student lab was full of people working on schoolwork. So I decided to boost my terminal’s process’s priority by one level. I logged onto another terminal in my supervisor account. Then I changed the other terminal’s priority.
Immediately, the disk drives for that computer went silent. They were still spinning but no read/write heads were moving. But my pi program was steaming along. Realizing the CPU demand of my program was stalling everyone else, I tried to change its priority back. But, my supervisor login was just as bogged as the rest of the logins. (I should’ve changed its level first.) So I went to my terminal and tried to CTRL-C out. But the program was in such a tight processing loop that it wasn’t responding to keyboard input. And disconnecting the terminal wouldn’t do anything, as all the processing was on the PDP itself.
My only solution was to turn off the PDP (in full view of all the harried students on the other side of a glass wall) and bring it back up. Well, the recovery for this type of crash is 30-60 minutes, so I have a lot of angry students who are (deservedly) mad at me.
I waited until 11pm to go home that night. 
This is one of those, never make assumptions blunders.
I was a part-time receptionist, so I wasn’t really in-the-know with people in the office. I had been working there for several months and would forward calls from a Mrs. So and So to a Mr. So and So (Mr. So and So was the top man in the office.)
One day she asked me to page him, I said over the system “So and So your wife is on line 1”
Later that day I noticed that people were giving me strange looks. Later on So and So came up to me and laughed it off as it was his mother on the phone. After he left the lobby, one of the girls in the office decided to let me in on why it was so funny. As it turns out So and So is gay.
Talk about complete embarrassment.
I’ll give you embarrasment.
Just today, I wandered in to my Boss’s office. He shares it with the head of another department, who happened to be the only one in today. He’s currently in a wheelchair because he hurt his ankle during a football (soccer, that is) match. So we’re chatting about that a bit, when he says:
“It’s gonna be a bitch driving to France for Christmas though” (he’s French).
So I reply, “Hey, why don’t you let your wife drive ?” (I had always noticed the pictures of his three little boys on his desk).
- insert 5 second awkward silence -
Him: “My wife… no… I’m a widower.”
Whoo - f***ing - oops…
Never assume, indeed. The guy’s in his late 30’s, and it never came up before, so I’m sure he doesn’t hold it against me, but it sure was painful.
Coldfire
“You know how complex women are”
- Neil Peart, Rush (1993)
Coldfire’s story reminds me of a similar thing that happened to me.
I took a couple of hebrew classes at one of the local colleges. The teacher was a very nice lady originally from Europe.
A few months after the last class was over, I went to see a play about a family trying to escape the Holocaust. So I decided to call the teacher and tell her about it.
Someone answers the phone.
“Could I please speak to Mrs. X?”
“This is her husband, who’s calling?”
“I’m one of her ex-students and wanted to tell her about a play that would interest her.”
“My wife recently died in a car crash.”
Then the man starts crying on the phone. I mentioned how she was a great teacher, etc… but what can you say?
My biggest mistake at work:
I used to work at a company that sold rare coins for investors. Every day we were supposed to print out a “market sheet” listing the coin prices that we would quote to people on the phone. One day the owner comes and says “I want you to lower by 10% all coins in category X.” My cleverly written program decided to forgo the “category X” part and lower the price of all coins by 10%. Then the market sheets were printed as usual and passed out to the sales representatives, who used them the next day to quote prices and create invoices. The mistake wasn’t noticed until the middle of the next day. (I’m sure some of the salesmen must have noticed, but they were happy since they were making more sales with the reduced prices.)
When the owner found out, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth in the (small) IS department.
La franchise ne consiste pas à dire tout ce que l’on pense, mais à penser tout ce que l’on dit.
H. de Livry
I dropped a user’s hard drive on the floor, and it made a loud clanging noise, and resulted in a dented case, and a drive that would not boot. His back was turned, and he kept everything on his network drive! Whooo Hooo!
Delurk and greetings! I thought this was a good thread to start with…
As a reporter, I was asked to poll our County Council on the issue of whether they would allow a late applicant to be interviewed for the position of county manager. The guy was fairly well-known in the community and threw his hat into the ring after the selection process had already gone through one round.
Working on a very tight deadline, I frantically tracked down all seven members of the council and scrawled their replies in my notebook. I didn’t really even have time to tally their positions until I wrote the story. Flipping through my notes, I tallied up three council members as “yes” votes, and three as “no.” The final one was the deciding vote, and the quote I used was along the lines of “I don’t really think it’s fair to the other applicants to let him throw his hat into the ring this late.”
Unfortunately, I didn’t turn the page; otherwise I would have seen the rest of her quote, which was along the lines of “but he’s such a good candidate we can’t really let him get away.”
I reported that four members of the council were OPPOSED to letting him jump in. My competition reported that four members of the council SUPPORTED interviewing him with the rest of the candidates.
You guessed it; he got the job, and I still get ragged from time to time about my goof. I can laugh about it now, but I don’t think I’ve ever felt anything as awful as coming to work the day that story ran and facing my bosses – who were great about the whole thing – and then calling the council member to explain myself.
I have a major boo-boo. I work in a hospital and as part of my duties as the only third shift worker in my department, I have to answer all incoming calls. One night I told a lady her brother was dead and it turns out he really wasn’t!!
In the hospital, when we have a patient come in via car accident (or any other traumatic event requiring the patient to be flown in or transported by ambulance), often they are given a “state name.” (XCalifornia, XMichigan, they go in order alphabetically)
This is the name the patient is known by for as short as an hour to as long as their entire stay, on paper and in the computer system. ANYWAY, these patients are listed separately along with their real names on trauma sheets instead of on the regular patient lists. This means that whenever someone calls to check on a patient, we have to check the trauma sheets as well as the regular ones.
Here’s how the boo-boo happened. The lady called checking on “John Smith.” I didn’t have a “John Smith” listed on my regular sheet and I didn’t have one listed on my trauma sheets. She was very bitchy when I explained that I was not showing a patient by that name. So, I went into the computer and pulled up the name “John Smith.” The screen showed that he had died the day before. Keeping with policy, I informed her that I had found his record and that I had no information and that she should contact a member of the family. She rudely informed me that she was family and that this was bullshit and to give her his condition now or else. I tried again to let her know to call a family member. She called me a bitch, told me she was the only family he had and that she had been authorized to call anytime and get a condition update on her brother and threatened to come down to the hospital and beat the shit out of me if I did not give her the information. So, I told her that it appeared he had passed away. She got very quiet and hung up the phone.
I got suspicious because if she wanted to know his condition that badly, why didn’t she call earlier and/or already know that he had died the day before? On a hunch, I checked the log book for all our trauma patients and sure enough, there was a “John Smith” listed as having come in the day before and when I looked under his state name in the computer, he was in a non-ICU room and improving steadily! It turns out that one of the dipshits on first shift that day had taken his trauma sheet down instead of another one who actually had died!!! At any rate, I didn’t get into trouble because even if I had looked in the trauma book before giving his sister the info, it said that he was dead too. But I was SO upset over this I threw up in the office garbage can. Interesting side note–first shift had to deal with the puke in the garbage until they had to take it out themselves. Serves them right.
Sorry this is so long.
Born O.K. the first time…
If you are born again, do you have two belly buttons?
A technician at our R&D lab ordered a hundred pounds of silica gel. (It absorbs moisture.) He hadn’t realized it can be reused so there was no need for more than several pounds. The rest of us were happy with his mistake though. We had endless fun tossing it into water to watch it pop and coming up with other experiments. Yeah, that’s how some engineers get our fun.
I used to build and test computers for a unnamed computer company. We got very good at it to churning out 60 to 70 full systems per person with testing them and everything.
One day I played a prank on one of the guys who had completed the build of ten boxes and had left them on his monitors when he went to lunch. I went over and loaded a huge fart noise on the win startup sound file on all 10 boxes and turned his monitors sounds all the way up.
When the guy came back he flipped the master switch to reboot all the machines at the same time. Needless to say the entire aassembly floor heard the huge fart noise from 10 different soundsytems and hilarity ensued. I got chastised by the floor manager (who loved the joke) and was told to remove the noise from the 10 boxes. Only I got sidetracked and when I turned around, someone took those machines and loaded them into a shipment to a office (fart noise already preloaded)
Luckily I found a better job and quit before the phone calls about why some of their machines farted came down the pipe.
I know that I have put you through hell, and I know that I have been one rough pecker. But from here on, you are all in my cool book.- Seth Gecko From Dusk Till Dawn
We had just gotten a new manager in our IS dept. During our first staff meeting a female colleague of mine (and good friend) was asking our new boss about what the casual dress code for women was. I quickly replied “Personally, I prefer Saran Wrap!”
I was in his office right after the staff meeting being warned about sexual harassment. My friend knew I was joking.
Enright3
My boss told me to bring back the one marked “Normal Brain,” but something made a noise and I dropped it, so I took the one labelled “Abnormal Brain.” He never caught me, though.
But I hear things turned out pretty bad.
Uke
This wasn’t so much a blunder as an incident in which the joke was on me. When I was a security guard in that county school building, the Superintendent of Schools told me he was bringing some students in the building for a tour. As they all approached to sign out, I whistled the Three Stooges theme. They didn’t know what I meant, but I explained it is the theme for the Three Stooges.
Dr. Gothold said, "I said three students!
A few years ago, I made on behalf of my clients an investment in a startup airline. I normally hate the airline business, but this company had the prettiest balance sheet I had ever seen, a low-cost outsourcing strategy and a high-cost competitor with potential antitrust problems. So I did it. Small position, $1 MM in bonds.
The investment was working well. The company was doing well and the bonds held their own in a tough market. But I gradually became less confident of the markets they were expanding into and thought the company had lost some momentum. I also had some maintenance concerns. I called my broker and asked for a bid. “104,” she says (bonds are quoted as a percentage of par, or redemption value). I ask her if she can pay 4 and a quarter. Nope. It’s Friday, the trader’s gone, 104 is the best she can do today. Screw it, I’ll sell on Monday morning.
You already know how the story ends. Saturday after brunch I come home and flip on CNN to see a helicopter looking fruitlessly for the wreckage of one of the company’s aircraft, about 100 of its customers and employees, and the 12 bond points that would disappear before the market opened on Monday.
Hi, dbwordgirl, and welcome. I can commisserate; one of the hazards of the biz we’re in (I see from your profile you’re a writer; I’m a magazine copyeditor) is that all of our errors, major and minor, are highly visible. It’s no use hoping no one will notice; someone always notices.
When I was new on this job, I had a writer leave out a key verb that seemed so clear from the context – “Due to ongoing reporting difficulties, XXXX is [blanking] the reporting panel” – that I stuck in a “leaving” and forgot about it. Well, the writer meant “rejoining.” I neglected to consider that the writer might have made two mistakes rather than one 
It caused a certain amount of uproar with the company whose status was misreported, but my bosses were pretty good about it.
Catrandom
During the summers when I was in college I was a lifeguard. One day after a particularly late night out I guess I dozed off a bit in my chair. I woke to the sounds of people screaming that someone had gone under. I literally fell out of my chair and landed right on the kid… pinning him to the bottom while I looked around confused.
Man was my face red when I found out what happened. Everyone really teased me about that for a long time.
Oh yeah, the kid died… but it was really funny while it was happening… but I guess you had to be there.
I’d tell you the hilarious story about the summer job as a bus driver… but 28 of the lawsuits haven’t been settled yet… so it will have to wait.
Okay, that isn’t even a little bit funny in any context.
-PIGEONMAN-
Hero For A New Millennium!
The Legend Of PigeonMan - updates every Wed & Sat. If I can be bothered.
UkeIke: you took Aunt Abby’s brain!? At the Normal Family Reunion, Bertha (the tippling geneaologist of the clan) was soooo worried about that happening!
Okay, to the topic…
Years ago, I worked as plainclothes security at an amusement park. Besides busting shoplifters, we rotated off working as dispatchers at base. (It helped, not much, with the shin splints from 12 hour days pounding pavement.)
The park had a wild animal park with a monorail running through. Lions and tigers and bears, o my! And several times in a season, The Suits from The Corporation would drop in to oversee their investment. They blended right in; idiots in dark 3 piece suits wandering around the paying customers in shorts, tank tops and sandals. They melded into the crowd like a water buffalo on a Wimbledon tennis court.
Of course they were all given radios. Hey, it was a “suit perk”, so they could keep their fingers right on the pulse of the action.
So I’m dispatching, and The Suits decide to “unobtrusively” tour the wild animal park. It was an old 4-channel Motorola board, w/ each channel designated for a specific park function (e.g. security, medical, zoo staff and parking.) It was monitored by the FCC, but the frequency bled over onto a construction company’s band, to their mingled annoyance and amusement.
So The Suits tootle off on the monorail. It’s summer. The lions and tigers and bears (o my!) were enjoying the sunlight. They just turned into animals.
An hysterical voice blasts in, with no protocol at all:
Suit: Stop them from doing that!
Me: Unit, please identify.
Suit: Do you see what they’re doing?!
Me: No, I don’t and please identify yourself. What is the problem?
Suit: Those lions! They’re…they’re fucking and this is a family park! Get somebody out here and pull them apart!
I lost it. Training blown, sense gone, I handled the sensitive corporate “emergency” by laughing so damned hard I couldn’t talk. No shit. The Suit kept screaming and I couldn’t–could NOT–stop laughing enough to even choke out a response. We’re talking hooting, gasping, tears down the face, can’t breathe O God it HURTS laughter.
The head honcho dispatcher dashed in and soothed it over. Needless to say, I was not encouraged to remain at America’s Playground. People who run amusement parks have about as much sense of humor as Cotton Mather. But that was a biggie for me. A chance to shine in slick corporate circles, and I blew it, big time. Got booted for it, too.
But when I left, my fellow peons gave me an obscene pin featuring mating lions inside a red circle with a “banned” cross-hatch. And the zoo pros were pathetically grateful that I hadn’t dispatched them to pry apart mating lions.
Veb
So Spud,
What you’re saying is that you were unprofessional enough to fall asleep on a job like LIFE GUARD in a swimming pool, then fell out of a chair because people were screaming because of an emergency, subsequently you fell DOWN into the pool, thus pinning down the drowning kid, who eventually died ?
OK.
There’s a couple of possibilities here. First off, the story sounds quite unbelievable to me. So, in that case we can put this down as a case of VERY bad taste and EXTREMELY poor humour.
Unbelievable it may be, but the story is definately possible. Spud, if this story is authentic and you really think it is appropriate to post it as a funny blunder here (“Hey man, the kid died, but it was funny still, guess you had to be there”), words fail me to describe my disgust.
Elaborate.
Coldfire
“You know how complex women are”
- Neil Peart, Rush (1993)
Not a huge thing, but at 16, pretty humiliating… and I only humiliate myself once every 10 years 
I had just graduated high school and started working as a secretary in a brand new, beautifully decorated Government office. The first order of business… I was asked to make a pot of coffee. I put the filter and coffee in, added the water into this new fangled machine and left back to my desk.
A few minutes later, a very stern looking woman came in asking who had made the coffee. I proudly acknowledged that I had done this wonderful thing expecting the kudos… She informed me that it was appropriate to put the pot under the spout rather than let the coffee pour all over the brand new expensive carpet for people to suck out.
Ahhh… I was never asked to make coffee again in my 14 years with them. Maybe subconsciously I knew that it was not my thing, and that lovely coffee stain reminded everyone of that daily.
I am me… accept it or not.