As long as you suck with the best intentions Kell.
Trouble brings experience, and experience brings wisdom.
Glad things look like they are going to work out for you, Kelli. And now by way of introduction, my story of how I sucked…
I used to teach. Once I handed back my students’ papers without recording their grades. Oops. I knew that if I admitted it, they were crafty enough to tell me that they had thrown away their papers, but say “I made an A, honest.” I threw myself on the mercy of my dept head, who advised me to ask the students to record all their grades for me “so I can be sure you are aware of your grades and know what you need on the final.” Worked like a charm.
At least you have a nice job at a newspaper KelliBelli I spent an summer working on a newspaper doing four kinds of pages.
The stock market page: Easy to do, just copy and paste from a document and cut out the last part if it didn’t fit.
**The Birthdays page: ** Man, this was tricky. You had to match up the kid’s photo with the correct info or you knew it would be hell on earth the next day.
** The weather page: ** This page was better, If I screwed up the weather symbols I could always blame the weather institute.
I was really nervous when I made the newly-wed’s page and would triple-check it. Somehow that page seemed more important than all those little brats.
As long as we’re discussing fuckups, how about mobilizing an entire Fortune 100 company on something we had no intent to persue by mistyping one character?
A coworker and I had prepared a detailed analysis of a business opportunity. Several pages of prose outlined the pros and cons of persuing the business. As we wrapped up the document and summarized our findings we wrote, “This is now the time for action…” when what we intended to write was “This is not the time for action…”
One mistyped character changed our meaning 100%.
Looking at the big picture, it’s a good thing that we weren’t in charge of nuclear weapons, air traffic control, satelite positioning, M&M coloring, etc…
Fortunately, coworker had been a short-order cook in college so we were able to knock out the 6 billion cookies in just over 1.7 years. 
Glad to hear of mistakes by others – this has been a worthwhile thread.
I am responcible for schedualing classes at a large mulit-national corporation. This morning, I come in and attempt to sign onto our schedualling program. It doesn’t work. Great.
About 10 minutes later (that would be 8:10 in the morning…) an instructor walks in, looking for his class. There isn’t one schedualed. I check the change notices, and realise I got a change notice send to me on 7/24. I can’t get into the schedualing program, so I don’t know if I rescheudaled it to the wrong date, or just didn’t reschedual it at all. I am thinking I didn’t reschedual it at all. I tell the instructor that my schedualling program is down, and to assume the class isn’t happening. I take his number and promise to call him as soon as I can check. He then calls the guy who is responcible for the curriculm, and HE comes down here. I explain to HIM that the schedualing program is down, and there is no way to check it. He then huffs that he’ll check it using MSE, which is another scheduling program. Well, newsflash, when one is down, the other is usually down, too. And it was. He didn’t apologize for being snippy. I still don’t know how badly I screwed this class up, as I can’t check it yet. ARGH!
This week alone, I have to either take the majority (4 hours) off of work on Wednesday, and leave at 2:00 on Friday to pick a friend up at the airport. I really need the recommendation from this job, but at this point, I am just not invested. I have two weeks to go, and I don’t care. Not good. So kelli, in comparison, you’re a WAY better employee than I am. You took on two jobs, and only screwed one up.
Two weeks, and I’ll be an irresponcible college student. Ahhhh…
lol… im sure my time will come tho… actually it might be just around the corner… omg… my very next action could lead to MY major screwup… oh shit i cant live like this… im gonna end up a nervous wreck now! I hope ill screw up soon and get it overwith…
Actually not being able to fuck up too big is one of the only advantages in having a job with no real responsibility… I couldnt go on working like this forever tho… i hate the lack of challenge! You should be happy you have a job where you actually have enough power to fuck up… and hey it will just make you stronger in the end you know… you got thru this… youll get thru it next time! cheer up! 
Believe me, Skummit, after my most recent error, becoming the fry guy at Burger King was sounding damn good. Oh to be young and without major responsibilities again …
Actually, I really enjoy being a guy my bosses want to count on when something big is up.
Having the responsibility and being able to live up to it must be great… really make you feel worth something… but then again i could see how it can all just be too much sometimes…
We got lady working here whos in her late 50ies and head of a governmet department… they run checkups on banks and make sure big companies merging do it the right way and theres no conflicts of interest (sorry for the bad explanation… i dont have the word im looking for in english… bare with me) Anyways shes the boss of hundreds of people… still she choose to work as a phone operator a couple of times a week… just to be able to have no responsibilities at all and to feel like an ordinary worker… weird… but in a way it does make sense!
Shesh, you guys think those are big mess ups? I almost took out most of the phone records for a certain large midwestern state, for a month, fortunately I had gotten in the habbit of croning my scripts right after the monthly archive,so I only lost about 3 hours worth of data(which fortunately no one ever found out about, although it probably cost the company a couple hundred thou cause they couldn’t bill for the long distance during that time).
The worst story I ever heard was from a guy at work, who had been the Sys Ad for a large security/alarm company. He ran a new script without testing, which ended up taking down the whole system for about ten minutes. Within those ten minutes 5 houses were broken into, one old guy was killed, and one lady got raped. He had to sit through days and days of court from the company being sued, the whole while knowing that he had caused the whole thing.
The moral of the story being, if you’re on a production system, make sure you test before implementing, shortcuts can have big consequences.
Kelli, I also work in Newspaper advertising, and I’ve noticed that when a client doesn’t meet deadlines, we all rush around like headless chickens trying to cover them.
Well, we’ve got deadlines for a reason. If someone can’t stick to it, and there’s a fuck-up, then blame should be shared equally. It’s not something to beat yourself up over, it sounds as if you were following protocol.
You said:
First, tell the bank that they’ve got plenty of fucking money and can afford the (15%?) fee to guarantee position. You can always tell them the colour was a bit faded in some of the papers and the one you’ve got looks great (works for my reps all the time–it’s usually true, too!)
That invoicing thing…send them to Finance, let THEM worry about it, it’s their fuckup. And it’s certainly not worth getting the entire ad for free.
As for that “Smellers” store, well, let me tell you a little story about a camera-ready ad.
On Thursday, we finally got the CR ad for Friday’s paper. It had been scheduled two months before, and we had been asking for it for two weeks.
It was on film, looked great.
The client wanted to change a few things around (those not in advertising won’t understand quite how…GRRRR…that is).
I said "We can’t do it, Camera-ready goes AS IS.
The rep said “well, try.”
I said, “Okay, but it’ll look like shit!”
So. I did a cut-and-paste job on it, sure enough, it came out looking awful. The client called and cancelled the remainder of their contract, and insisted on the ad being free.
Of course, they’re still advertising with us. It remains to be seen if they learned their lesson.
so my point is, you did the best you could while those you depended on were throwing obstacles in your way.
Don’t feel bad about it, K?
Kelli, I can’t help but think that if you really DO suck, you should be able to smooth the mistake over with those guys in twenty minutes, tops.
ducks and runs, screaming “Not the face!” and whimpering