1.) Workmen hauling up a very large and complex electronic assembly the size of a half keg of beer, all made out of electronic components fitted closely together in neat and compact arrangement. Heavy as hell. They were hauling it up from one floor to the next with a winch when it slipped out of the sling it was in and fell to the concrete floor one storey below. It didn’t shatter (which shows how well-assembled it was), but it did break. And broke the floor. Fortunately, it wasn’t being used anymore, and wasn’t needed. Still – a total waste.
2.) Saw someone turn on a laser without the cooling water running. This totaled the laser rod in nothing flat.
3.) Saw someone fire a pulsed laser right down the barrel of a collimator, where it promptly fried every coated surface in the expensive device.
First test of a new jet engine for a fighter. Instrumentation everywhere. Lots of brass there to watch, both company and military. Rollover, speeding up to ignition and idle, huge bangs and everything going haywire on all the scopes, emergency shutdown.
Somebody had left a wrench in the inlet, it got ingested, ruining the whole cold section. The test cell inspection sheet was fully signed off, too. Union guy so suspension only, not firing.
Retail Company. My screwup in some software, but a store manager ran (allegedly) $1.8 million in returned product through that software, completely failed to print anything off (which was a requirement, one copy to keep, one to send with the goods) and then shipped the stuff off. My glitch caused the loss of the electronic data, which wasn’t meant for the purpose he was using it for and transmitted zero data to corporate, but then, that’s why we had PAPERWORK, which he had refused to do.
What arrived in the corporate DC was worth about 1/3 of what he claimed. Of course, he screamed it was entirely the fault of the software! :dubious:
Only thing that happened to me was that I said “Sorry” about the software glitch. Store manager had some ‘splainin’ to do.
When I was working Y2K remediation, a colleague erased the database where all our remediated code was stored, and the DBAs hadn’t run a back up for eight months.
A former colleague, and some former DBAs.
The time I accidentally kicked off the payroll cycle a week early doesn’t count. :eek:
What gets me about all these stories is how just one person can cause such a problem and from my end, its often a lowly paid, lowly regarded, employee.
That is, until they mess things up and suddenly they become VERY important.
Saw a prototype turbocharger with the turbine housing made in the mirror image of what it was supposed to be; the turbine wheel was expecting exhaust gas to spiral in from one direction, but the housing was bringing it in from the other direction. Somehow the direction of rotation for the turbine/compressor spindle hadn’t been made clear in the original drawings, and a wrong assumption got made somewhere. It performed awful, but no one could figure out why, until someone finally noticed that the turbine inlet was facing the wrong way. A new housing had to be made from scratch. Not hard to flip it in the CAD software, but then a new form had to be made to produce the mold, then pour a new casting, then machine it again…No doubt it was thousands of dollars just to correct this mistake, and a substantial cost incurred by delaying the test program. Not a big dollar amount compared to some of the goofs listed upthread, but the fundamental nature of the error is a bit like JPL not checking for pounds/newtons on their thrust units; it’s such a basic thing, you can’t believe nobody would have thought to verify it.
This happened while I was a structural engineer for an Architectural/Engineering firm. Another team in our department was designing a steel truss system for a huge airline hanger. When they did the load calculations for the design, they didn’t take into account the additional loads due to the gusset plates and bolts for the many truss connections. Which for a regular building is OK, since most of the connections are simple shear connections and don’t really add any additional weight. But for a huge truss system, the additional weight is significant.
After the entire design was completed and the drawings were issued, someone realized that the additional weight needed to be added in. When it was, pretty much everything was found to be under-designed. Fortunately, this was during the transition from an old, more conservative, design system (ASD) to a new design system (LRFD) and the the trusses were designed using the more conservative system. Then there were a lot of frantic structural engineers checking the trusses using the new system, and they found that they just squeaked by, so fortuntaely they didn’t have to change the design. But there was a lot of tension in the office while they were checking!
Not me: I worked for a company that did back-office transactions for 18 of the 20 largest banks in the US, along with several credit card companies. One of my cow-orkers in the maintenance department was working in the server room and needed to use a shop-vac to clean up the mess when he was finished, he couldn’t find an open outlet so he unplugged a server!
Me: I was helping out in the packaging area at the brewery I used to work for. I grabbed a box of bottle labels for the labeling machine and loaded them up. Unfortunately I missed that in very small type on the labels it read “Less than 3.2% alcohol”, which this batch wasn’t.
We had to recall dozens of pallets of beer from distributors and it was all crushed. Eventually I found out it was about a $30,000 mistake.
An emergency stop-everything button that does more damage of its own when you poke it sounds like a serious design fail. Unless it’s a self-destruct button in case your top-secret installation gets captured by the enemy.
Sounds like that big red button needed its own bigger redder button.
I had nothing whatsoever to do with this one, honest. And I didn’t work in at any of the involved agencies at the time. I include it here because it was especially newsworthy at the time.
There’s a department at the US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) https://www1.nga.mil/Pages/default.aspx whose job it is annotate satellite photos with what buildings do what, and which ones are potential military targets and which aren’t. They also make maps and digital targeting databases from these photos, etc. Seriously secret stuff.
One of my pals works there doing that job, picking out and marking potential targets. And has done so for a couple decades now.
Once I crashed the system where I was working.
Brought everything down and to a grinding halt.
I only take partial blame as management had me modifying programs written in ASSEMBLER and I told them I had no clue as to what I was doing.
Another company I worked for had facilities all over the US. Many had been updated and several senior executives were touring them.
At one facility one of the senior executives remarked to a manager that ‘it’s awfully dark in here’.
The manager, who didn’t get it, said that all new light fixtures had just been installed.
Unfortunately for the senior executive, other people who heard the remark did get it.
He lost his job, as did several other senior executives, and company was facing a huge lawsuit.
That reminds me of a screw up I saw a few times working in prison.
We have what are called Special Housing Units for the difficult prisoners. One of the rules in SHU is you are only supposed to have one prisoner at a time outside of a cell.
In the control office, there’s a big panel that opens and closes the cell doors. And it’s supposed to be set to operate each door individually. But there’s a switch you can flip to operate all the doors at the same time. It’s only supposed to be used to open all the doors in case of an emergency like the building being on fire.
But some people get bored in the office and start playing with the buttons and switches. And they switch the panel to the group setting and forget to switch it back. And the next time you’re out in the corridor to move one prisoner and you tell the guy in the control room to open one cell door, he opens up every cell door.
Fortunately, it would catch the prisoners just as much by surprise as it did us. A few of them would poke their heads out to see what was going on but most of them would just stay inside their cells. We’d tell everyone to get back inside their cells and tell the guy in the control room to close all the doors.
The single largest screw up I’ve ever witnessed at my job is the launch of the Challenger. Not an individual screw-up, necessarily, but certainly there were a number of individuals who could’ve given the “negative” signal and prevented it.
I’ve been either the cause, or close participant, in many many individual screw-ups, many that dramatically altered people’s lives. As a former law enforcement officer and undercover narc, I saw some monumental screw-ups, some by generally good people who had momentarily lapses in judgement.
Now, as a data person in a casualty insurance company, I get to read accounts of horrific screw-ups in our claims data. Thankfully I didn’t have to witness them.
A few years back I was working for an international oilfield services company. At our company headquarters office we had just brought on a brand new receptionist. It was her first job out of high school and by all accounts she was doing a good job. It was part of the receptionist’s duties to reconcile all the wireless bills for our 5,000 employees. With that many cell phones and sat phones and all the other equipment we had deployed in over 30 countries around the world, that was pretty much an every day activity for her.
When someone left the company and turned in their cell phone, we would report that information to her and she would contact the service provider to cut off service for that number. It was all done via a website.
About a month into her job tenure, she was given a number to have disconnected. Instead of disconnecting service for that one number, she discontinued service for the entire company! Within 24 hours we had everyone from the company president to the pipe recovery crew in Irkutsk to accounts receivable in Manilla without phones, without sat phone service to relay well data, no way to cut or deposit checks or run invoices, no intranet, etc.
By the time the problem was identified and corrected, we had approximately 24 hours of dead time for a multi-billion dollar company. Amazingly enough, they didn’t let the receptionist go. I rather liked them for that.
How about our foreman and three members of the safety commitee driving to another city for a SAFETY convention.
He was driving a rental car and was pulled over going about 90 mph in a 60 zone. And to make matters worse, there was open alcohol in the car. The car was impounded for a week, as well as him being fined.
End result, he was fired as well as one other person.
