So, you going to tell us what you did, Oedipus?
Perhaps we should ask his mother.
Sounds pretty complex…
Yeah, his dad’s not answering my calls.
This didn’t happen at my current job, but a factory I worked at 8 years ago.
One of the forklift drivers was using a high reach forklift to get a pallet from a high shelf, and ended up breaking a water main. He was working the night shift and didn’t tell anybody what happened, so the water was pouring out for two hours before the next shift started. It ended up ruining about $25,000 worth of paper and cardboard, and shorted out more than a dozen computers.
Then two weeks later, he broke another water main in a different part of the building. At least that time he told someone about it right away. He was no longer allowed to use the high reach forklifts.
Not one I was responsible for, but one I had to clear up.
Several billion dollars-worth of government payments. When I’ve explained it to people, I’ve literally had jaw drops as the implications sunk in.
An engineer used the wrong scale for part of the material procurement on a $20 million project, the result of which was that all of the building structural steel beam order was three feet short. The resulting reorder put the project three months behind schedule, and yes, there was a liquidated damages clause. Ouch.
Certainly not me but one I had to deal with. I work in the pharmaceutical industry serving as IT lead at an out of the way facility that is disproportionately important in terms of dollars and even national lifesaving potential. We have all kinds of fail safes and contingency plans in place for just about everything but we did not account for the ‘loan idiot attack’. Another company was doing construction down the street when a driver of a very large bucket truck decided to tear down the street with his bucket fully extended. He was going about 30 mph when his bucket snagged all of the redundant power cables, data lines and snapped a telephone pole they were connected to straight off at the base. The pole fell with a live wire still on it and almost crushed one of my coworkers that was just about to pull out of the parking lot. That was the one time we had to shut down for the day. I don’t know if his company got sued into oblivion for causing literally millions of dollars of lost medically necessary shipments all over the world but the potential was certainly there.
When I was in public relations, our firm was handling the closing of a hospital. Very sensitve stuff, as you might imagine. Word leaked out in advance of the official announcement. Rather than reacting, we told the hospital management to stick to the original timetable.
Since we told management to stick to the “no decision has yet been made” line, the media accused them of lying. The union reps at the hospital refused to answer their doors or telephones, so they could legitimately claim they hadn’t received notice of the closing (sort of like the Japanese failing to deliver the declaration of war before Pearl Harbor.) The patient staff was hearing one story from the administration and another story from the doctors. Bad shit all around.
We also once accidentally defamed former President Dwight Eisenhower, but that’s a story for a different day.
Hamster King, never assume your marketing company knows anything!
This one is too complex to describe, and many will not see how it was such a big deal, but…
On purpose? 
I didn’t witness it personally but I had to deal with the aftermath. I worked at a pilot plant and the process was shut downto repair some equipment. A worker was replacing an inspection port when he was called away on the radio. It was a gruvlok fitting that was all threaded together but not fully tight. When the process resumed the port was ejected at 30 psi followed by a 1400 F mixture of sand, biomass, CO and H2 among other things that belched out about 15 ft. The jet hit a cable tray and knocked out a bunch of coms but fortunately missed the nearby pure O2 line. Took about a week to get up and running again.
Kunilou’s story reminds me of one that happened at work, although I wasn’t directly involved.
The company published several trade magazines. We had several sales reps who were responsible for selling the ads that generated most of our income.
Due to some reorganization, corporate decided the didn’t need that many sales reps. Plans were made to lay off some of them. Their sales territories were to be reallocated among the remaining sales staff.
To avoid a mass exodus of soon-to-be-redundant sales staff, corporate decided not to give the staff any advance warning of the layoff plan. Meanwhile, to ensure continuity of service for our customers, they prepared a mailing informing them of the changes. The mailing was timed so it would land a day or so after the affected sales reps were let go.
I don’t know if the mailing went out early or if the USPS was too efficient for its own good. Whatever the case, it landed a couple of days early. The sales reps were first confused, then furious, to hear from their customers that they were leaving.
My dentist once anaesthetized his own thumb, poking the needle right through my mother’s cheek.
At my old workplace, the building maintenance supervisor once put 120 volt electric current into a 10 volt data cable.
At my old workplace, an assembler forced one part to fit into another part by banging it into place with a hammer. This made the unit untrustworthy; it ended up catching fire—in the customer’s location, not ours. Cost us some big bucks. (Details blurred slightly to avoid non-disclosure issues.)
Some technician who is supposed to be one of the senior technicians dumped some chemicals down the drains… which are not supposed to go down the drains. They noticed because of the smell in the pipeline affecting other labs.
Same technician doesn’t know how to use one of the instruments that are part of the job description, and instead hands the job off to me, when it is time to explain something.
Same technician refused to sign off on the request from my lab for some materials we needed. Even though we needed them.
Buell.
This happened about 8 or 10 years ago. My company had the contract to publish the in-flight travel magazine for Egypt Air. Naturally, the content featured destinations you could fly to on Egypt Air, including Mecca. During the hajj, pilgrims must walk counterclockwise 7 times around the Kaaba. The magazine editor published a photo that clearly showed pilgrims doing the required walk – except, the photo had gotten transposed and so the pilgrims appeared to be walking clockwise. While this is not a detail that many of us would notice, it would be excruciatingly obvious to devout Muslims especially if they’d been on the hajj.
The officials of Egypt Air noticed the backward photo immediately. My company had to redo the entire print run at their own expense, so it was a very expensive mistake.
I am so glad it wasn’t me that was in a position to make that error. It’s a mistake I could easily imagine myself making, and I did serve as acting editor of that magazine for a while.
Decades ago, I worked for a large Telecommunications in Britain.
In those days computers used tapes, especially for the backups.
So since we were a massive company, management sensibly decided there would be a ‘disaster store’ for the backup tapes.
However it would have been better not to site the store in a basement adjacent to the River Thames … yes, there was a leak! :smack:
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Just after I started my first full-time job, two guys were trading emails insulting the organizations’ CEO and one somehow sent one of his replies to every person in the organization. Was not a fun week for those two - I don’t think they got fired but were hauled into HR for a lot of stern discussions.
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Working for a government department we used a special system for communications with out Ministers Office. This system had a ‘notes’ section, that, once something was saved could not be edited.
For some reason a contractor decided that a ministerial adviser (so, a very powerful person in the MO) was an arsehole and one morning proceeded to use the communication system to tell the adviser that in multiple, colourful ways. He was escorted our by security that afternoon.
- I did the site drawings for a major new memorial and so my name was on the documentation that was sent out to architectural firms who wished to submit entries for the design competition.
It just so happened that the son of a friend of mine was working as an intern at one of the companies. I’ve got no idea what he was thinking, maybe trying to impress his boss with his contacts or something, but he called me up one day to ask for some extra information.
Because this was a competitive process, anything extra we supplied to one firm would have to be supplied to all the others and for probity reasons I had to formally report the conversation to my boss. He damn near got his firm disqualified from entering before they had even started their submission. :smack:
I was hired for a contract database administrator position by a company that had an in-house application that had been written in one language, translated to another, then another, etc. But during all the re-writes, no one had ever done anything with the database. When performance degenerated, they would simply beef up the server machine. Eventually they maxed it out and the application tanked to the point where 3 minutes for a response on a simple query became the norm.
I came in, did some fundamental analysis and applied some missing indexes. Query response time immediately dropped to less than 2 seconds per query. Update processes that took 6-8 hours to run now completed in less than 20 minutes. They thought I was god and the sun shined out of my butt. It also turned out that they had absolutely NO backup procedures being performed. :eek::eek::eek:
That job was originally for 30 days. I stayed there a year and a half, rewriting procedures, optimizing and redesigning large portions of their database. But truth to tell, it was Database Administration 101. They had people there who knew how to do what I did, but because they weren’t officially DBAs, the company wouldn’t let them make the changes that they had documented before I showed up. And their changes were right on target. Management had completely ignored the memos when first submitted. That screw-up cost them 19 months of me being there at $65 an hour.