What is the single largest screw up you've ever witnessed at your job?

In My Humble Opinion
141

Nobody died, and no money was lost (in the short run, at least), but it was memorable mainly for the schadenfreude.

We were making an advertorial section for a major magazine, which consisted of interviews with about 20-odd CEOs. One agency had been hired to do the interviews and write the articles, and our job was production (design, layout, etc) plus copy editing the writers’ work.

The boss of the writers’ agency was kind of a prima donna, even though their writing was fair at best. We sent back one article with extensive fixes (several things flat-out wrong and many more that were just sloppy), and received back an angry letter from the boss saying that **they **were the writers, **we **were the hired help to do the grunt work, and we were **not **to tell them how to do their jobs.

Up to this point, the manuscripts would go through us before being sent to the magazine and the CEO-interviewee for review. This time, however, she made a point of sending it to everyone directly, only adding us as a BCC. Since we’d have to put it in the layout anyway, we opened up the article to see how it was.

The writer had included his comments in red text throughout out the article. A bit sloppy-looking to send to a client, but no biggie. Except that his comments included a lot of rude potshots at the CEO (“I guess that’s why their cars are such shit.” “Does this moron even listen to himself?”). As icing on the cake, the final comment was “[co-worker], please remember to remove the comments before sending this out.”

This was sent to everyone. All the involved staff at the magazine (who’d hired them), the CEO of a major car company and his whole PR department. And because they’d tried to slight us by adding our names in the BCC field, we had absolutely no involvement in it at all.

After that, we once again were in charge of copy-editing, and they were very quiet.

142

Oh Hell, let’s set the WayBack to 1969, small town in Midwest.

Tiny (Civil) Engineering firm founded by a decent fellow who knew his stuff, but couldn’t sell worth a damn.
This caused him to sell a portion of the equity to, and hire, a fellow who was a complete screw-up, but could bring in some work.

Big job walks in the door: Farmer has a field along a road just outside town and wants to plant houses.
Bozo sends out the crew to mark and measure the field, then draws up a plat and we start staking out the roadways and lots.
Then the owner asks: Uh, what is the water level there? Oooops. All that time and energy (which they couldn’t afford, even using summer hires for grunts) and the field is 24" above the warter table.
The field was a floodplain. You can’t build houses on floodplains.

I sometimes wonder if the founder ever bought out the idiot (or maybe just had him killed).

Can’t remember the name of the company, but can remember the surname of the idiot: Tippy.

143

1976, I can’t remember if it was election night or the DNC convention night. I worked at a newspaper as a copyboy. We were hooked into AP by some special phone circuit to get AP updates of the Convention/Election.
I had to change the paper, so, I rerouted the connection. For some reason, the AP quit sending the info at about 6:30 pm. Everybody was asking me what the problem was, and I replied “I guess that there’s nothing new…”
At about 9 pm, the managing editor came and advised me that my re-routing was a MIS-routing, and that all of AP’s signals from Oklahoma City to Kansas City had been disrupted, between 630 and 900 pm, on that Convention/Election night.
Surprisingly, I didn’t get fired.

144

I have two from others, and one from myself.

At one of my past jobs, we had various email lists that anyone in the company could email to, including listserv-ALL. One day, a fellow employee apparently decided it was his civic duty to notify the nearly 1000 person company about a new documentary that gave shocking insight into the “radical Muslim threat.” While it did seem to talk about recruitment techniques and such, it definitely had an overtone of “all them nasty Muslims is comin’ to kill us!” A few weeks later, he again emailed the entire company - to let us know that “the powers that be” (his actual words) had decided that he should move on to other things. A co-worker told me that it actually wasn’t his borderline hate-speech email that got him fired, but have my suspicions that it contributed.

At the same place, we used to have a software engineer who was very friendly, but not particularly good at her job. I shall call her Jane. By “not particularly good at her job,” I mean that she must have lied through her teeth on her resume. One morning, a couple co-workers came in to find large portions of our software revision control database missing. History showed that Jane had inexplicably deleted it. So they started to restore the deleted entries. Then, as they were working, more entries started disappearing! Jane had arrived for the day and resumed her good work. One of them frantically rushed off to Jane’s office to stop her from nuking the database. A few months later, her boss gave her a set of straightforward tasks to prove her software competency, with the understanding that she would be dismissed if she could not complete them. She must have known her goose was cooked, because she apparently just spent the time searching for a new job. She was a very nice person, and I sincerely hope she found a job doing something she can actually do well.

The third was mine:

Early into my career, I once made the same mistake, with a fully configured and tested system, except there was no pre-existing backup. I stayed late for two to three weeks after that, reconfiguring and retesting the system on my own time. How embarassing.

145

You mean you *shouldn’t *build houses on floodplains.

Houses *can *be, and lots of houses *have *been built in floodplains, just accompanied by the right payments to zoning authorities.

146

Prior to the advent of backpack live TV transmitters (which slave multiple cell phone data cards together to send the video to the station) the main workhorses of this job are microwave and satellite trucks. A sat truck has a large dish mounted on the truck’s roof and transmits to a satellite. Microwave trucks have a small dish often attached to a extendable mast (upwards to 60’) to feed the signal directly to the station.

One fellow I worked with a few years ago was operating ‘Old Unit 4’ on it’s last day in service before it was to go to the shop to be stripped of any usable parts before retirement. He has worked the morning shift and was very tired, to the point that when he was finished with his assignment he forgot to drop the mast back down when he drove off.

Made it almost a block before taking down some wires and a traffic light. Totaled the mast. No injuries fortunately. Tens of thousands of dollars of damage to truck and surroundings. The tech was given a week suspension and has had a great career since. It’s often said that you never meet a tech who damages a mast twice.

Normally there are various safety alarms to prevent this kind of thing but they had all been disabled on that truck.

Here’s a partial list of ENG truck accidents in the last few decades.

147

Our group had made a communication product for our travel company. I came aboard and over time as people moved on I came to be lead designer. I kept improving the threading and efficiency and the clients liked it. I had gotten used to quick testing and turnaround cycles. So after some improvements I load tested it against the test system and it was fine - the test system is notoriously slow. I then tested it again against production, the same way the clients said they were running. It ran really fast! So fast that it core dumped one of the 8 systems that serve multiple airlines. It didn’t shutdown any airports, but it slowed things down a bit. The core systems team then checked the logs to find who/what was running at the time. They called to tell me to stop it running that fast :cool: and to let them know before I was going to run that kind of load test (ok, my bad :smack:).

148

I work in a convenience store, and we have a Redbox machine out front. In case you are unfamiliar, a Redbox machine is like a vending machine for DVD rentals, about the size of a soda machine.
One day I notice there’s a big dent in the Redbox machine, and the latch is damaged. So I notify Redox, then I start to review the video to see if I can tell what happened. Fortunately, one of our outdoor cameras was mounted just above and to one side of the Redbox.

A US Postal Service Mail Carrier stopped in to our store to get a soda, and backing his truck into the parking space overshot a bit and hit the machine. Hit it hard, no mistaking that, you can see the machine (which is bolted down to the sidewalk) rock back when it gets hit, and it only returns to normal when he pulls forward about 6 inches.

An employee taking out the trash notices the truck just inches from the Redbox, and the big dent in the Redbox, and goes back into the store to speak with the Mail Carrier. From their gestures, it seemed like the employee was saying “you hit the Redbox” and the Mail Carrier was saying “No, it was like that when I arrived”.

Redbox sends their guy out to check the damage. He reports that the computer in the machine (standard desktop pc) had its motherboard broken by the impact, the machine is totaled. He watches the video, and calls the police.

Because he was backing into the space right in front of the camera, we got an incredibly good image of the number on the truck.

Soon, a Supervisor from the local Post Office asks to come by and view the video.
I was not actually there when he viewed the video, but I was told that when he arrived it seemed like he expected he was wasting his time: that the video would show it wasn’t their truck, or at least not clearly show either way. He watched the video of the truck pulling into our lot, turning around at the entrance to the lot, backing all the way across our lot, and the brake lights coming on roughly 2 tenths of a second before impact, … and his attitude changed.

I am told that as he was leaving, he offered this comment, "He’s not in trouble for hitting that machine. With the number of miles these guys cover, they hit stuff all the time.
“But he left. He’s fired.”

149

Not my job but a hell of a screwup, in a pharmacy I was in they had a warning up about oral dosing syringes misaligned wih printed ml marks, they were in reality giving double the dose:eek:

150

I’m sure my pilot would have continued to fly all day long to rescue me and my crew from attacking alligators or something. I mean, it is not like the helicopter wasn’t operable at all, because he ended up flying us off the site and taking us home (I was white-knuckling it all the way there, though).

But it wouldn’t have been safe to fly. And pragmatically speaking, knowingly flying around passengers with a bent blade is lawsuit waiting to happen.

Warfare is all about danger, though.

151

A guy I used to know had a story about an accident he’d had when he was in his teens and out hunting with his uncle.
They were walking back home after hunting, and he was carrying his break-action shotgun with the breech open, the stock in his hand and the barrel resting in the crook of his elbow. He tripped and fell forwards, and as he hit the ground the breech snapped closed and the gun fired.
He blew off about half of his uncle’s foot.

He was sure that his uncle would never take him hunting again, and so was quite surprised when his uncle told him “there is nobody, not a single one of my friends, that I would rather go hunting with than you.” naturally, he asked why, and the uncle said, “Because you are NEVER going to make that mistake again.”

152

There was a similar problem out in the general populace back in the day.
When I first got onto the internet (about 2 decades ago), one of the cool things was “mailing lists”. Basically, some folks with a common interest correspond via email. Everyone would send their emails to a specific address, where the server would then forward it out to everyone on the list.
The problem was, sometimes a person would go on vacation and set one of those “away” messages that auto-replies to incoming mail with “I’m on vacation, but will get back to you as soon as I can”. Or maybe their inbox got full, and would send a reply message that your message couldn’t be delivered.
Whatever the cause, one or more members of the list had accidentally set up a system where every message from the list triggered an automatic reply to the list. Which meant it would snowball until it got shut down or crashed.
One day there are 6 messages from the list, the next 30, the next 150, then zero.

Computers and humans are both pretty stupid, but nothing approaches what they can achieve when being stupi together. :wink:

153

This one is a bit of a near miss. Me and an intern were taking a boat through a lock. We were locking through with a barge so we had a very small space. The only floating bit to tie off was broken so we had to tie a line at our stern cleat, loop it around a bollard on top of the lock wall and pay out the line as the water dropped (about 30 feet).

The intern’s job was to sit on the front of the boat and pay out the line. I went inside to do some paperwork.

The first indication of trouble came when I realized the boat was heeling over. It took me a few seconds to realized the lazy-ass intern got tired of holding the rope and tied it off. So as the water level dropped the boat was starting to hang by the line. I started screaming at lazy-ass but now that the weight of the boat was on the line there was no way it could be untied from the cleat. I got forward and cut the line. The starboard side of the boat was 2-3 feet higher than the port side so we rocked a bit but were unharmed.

154

Ah, HALON systems.

A longtime operator in this military mainframe facility was a wizard about what the computer was supposed to be doing, and pretty uncanny about knowing what it actually was doing (“hmm… this job shouldn’t take this long… should have terminated normally about 30 seconds ago…”), but in everything else he was… putting it charitably… “eccentric”.

At one point he got it through his head that he needed to show everyone where the HALON cutoff button was.

This is the button that, if the HALON system was activated, would stop the HALON discharge during the evacuation countdown, deferring discharge until it was reset or until the manual immediate emergency discharge button was pressed.

So he strides over to the wall where the HALON cutoff is, lecturing about how (he understood) HALON fire suppression works, and explaining that if you need to stop a false-alarm discharge sequence you “push [blindly reaching to the wall… he knew the room that well] this [flipping open the button guard, still looking at us] button [pushes button]”.

Did I mention the manual immediate emergency discharge button was only 6" away from the discharge abort button? That’s the button he blindly reached for because he was too busy grandstanding and lecturing.

The System Duty Officer was knocked onto her keister by one of the underfloor vents. All the systems hard-powered-off (since HALON discharge also activated emergency power cutoff). The facility was offline for more than 36 hours. The fairly technical function of the facility was done by entirely manual means for that period, including data distribution (reduced to message traffic over AUTODIN or facsimile).

Headquarters decided his particular expertise with the systems was no longer enough reason to keep him on.

155

At my university, exams are held only once a year; for some students, it’s the only assessment the students will have for that module. So they are A Big Deal.

Last year, someone lost an entire set of exams for a module of final year students; he’d taken them home to mark them, but couldn’t be arsed to actually bring them back to school.

So he just stuck them into the post with second-class postage, no tracking, no signature required, no return address label, etc. I don’t know if they ever showed back up, but he sure as heck never has.

156

Soz for the double post, just remembered another school-related thing.

My last gig was in the US, and after lecturing one morning, I headed back to my office for lunch &c. Big kerfluffle in the main office: one of the biology lecturers had decided to do a lesson on blood types that morning, so , whee, fun, the students were all going to find out what their blood types were, you know, by getting stuck with a tiny needle, then smearing blood on a glass slide. Jab a kid, wipe the needle in alcohol, move on the the next.

Now, we did this with my biology class in the 10th grade, in 1980, and no one thought anything of it, except the one poor kid who turned white as a sheet and passed out.

In 2012, however, it was a different story. One of the students in the class was the daughter of an RN, so she rang her mother up whilst her unquestioning classmates submitted to the jabs.

RN mum understandably went WTF; head of the programme was contacted (he himself was a former biology teacher and was flabbergasted. )

Matey was sacked on the spot; the university had to eat the cost of all of the subsequent blood screenings and health checks.

Bizarre thing is, he wasn’t some doddery old puffin unaware of any major health issues that had come onto the scene over the prevoius three decades; he was an early career PhD with HE experience, and this was his first properly permanent position. How in the heck he was unaware of the kabillions of health and safety checks and permissions needed to carry out this little whimsy baffled everyone involved.

Non-school related cock ups on the job: I had a colleague who broke one of the Lewis Chessmen.

At the same place, I broke a unique, 14th century religious artifact (a silver agnus dei lid). Snapped it in half like a frozen dog. On the plus side, rather than being unique, it was now one of a set. That’s how I spun it anyway, when I went to tell my boss.

Neither of us were sacked or reprimanded.

157

Mine comes from my time in the Navy. I was a nuclear submarine junior officer.

I wasn’t a direct witness to every part of this screw up, but I was onboard at the time and read the final incident reports in the aftermath to learn exactly what happened in places I wasn’t there to see.

So we’re heading into a port in the Persian Gulf. It’s the middle of the night and we’re on the surface. We’re ahead of schedule, so we’re going very slowly (about 5 knots) towards the port. On a surfaced submarine, you have an Officer of the Deck (OOD) in charge of the boat (gives the orders to the helm to ‘drive’) on the bridge (with a junior watchstander, the Lookout), which is open-air on top of the Sail (the Sail of a submarine is the big protuberance upwards on top of the hull) of the sub. You also have the Contact Coordination team, which is in the Control Room and consists of the Contact Coordinator (CC), Fire Control technician of the watch (FTOW), and Sonar team – they are responsible, using the periscopes, radar, and sonar (and some other minor electronic systems), for keeping track of all the other ships on the surface to avoid collisions. Providing overall senior guidance and leadership is the Command Duty Officer (CDO), a senior officer watch-station only assigned when the Commanding Officer (CO) needs an uninterrupted night of sleep. In this case, the CDO was the Executive Officer (XO).

A few days before, the Commanding Officer was having a conversation with one of the Department Heads about the officer watchbill (the schedule that delineates which officers will be on watch as OOD, CC, and other watch-stations at all times). The Dept Head expressed concern about this particular night, saying that the assigned OOD (another Dept Head) was not a particularly strong OOD, and the assigned CC was a very junior officer with limited experience, and this would be a more difficult watch in the busy shipping lanes of the Persian Gulf at night – he suggested pairing up a weak OOD with an experienced CC, or vice versa. But the CO wanted his strongest officers to get a good night of sleep before the somewhat challenging evolution of pulling into port the next day, so he vetoed the Dept Head’s concerns.

So back to that night. We’re proceeding in port, on the surface, very slowly. A surfaced submarine is difficult to see at night because of our much smaller profile and reduced height of our Sail and masts. In the Control Room, the CC and the FTOW are alternating time on the periscope – and the FTOW, a junior young man, alerts the CC of a new contact on the horizon. He expresses concern that it may be heading towards us. The CC looks through the periscope at the contact and tells the XO (CDO) – but the XO looks through briefly and brushes it off, saying that the contact is on a parallel course and not heading for us. They inform the OOD but the CDO reports that the contact is of no concern. The radar operator is another very inexperienced watchstander and fails to notice that the contact is getting closer on the radar screen.

Minutes pass. The OOD and Lookout think the contact appears to be closing, and ask the CC and CDO for a recommended new course. They say “stand by”, and continue to look through the periscope. At this point, the OOD could have literally given nearly any order – turn right or left, speed up, or slow down, and that would have probably been enough to avoid a collision. But he did nothing – waiting for a recommendation from the CC and CDO, who for some reason never provided a recommendation. He finally gives an order to turn, but it’s too late – the contact, a 50-thousand-ton Turkish freighter, literally runs over us (waking me up with an incredible clatter and almost hurling me out of my bunk), such that the front of their hull is over the top of the back of ours, with our screw (propeller) tearing gouges out of the skin of the freighter. The officer that climbed up to the bridge to relieve the incompetent OOD later told me that the scene was so bizarre, and the freighter was so enormous, that it took several seconds for his mind to interpret what he was seeing – at first it just looked like some Picasso-esque amalgamation of metal and night-sky.

At this point we are in deadly peril – if the freighter sinks, it will almost certainly bring us down with it, and we have little time to properly rig the ship for submergence. To get us free, a senior enlisted engineering technician suggests that we release the air (and fill with water) in the aft Main Ballast Tanks – a maneuver usually reserved for submerging the ship, in the hope that this will lower the aft-end of the submarine beneath the hull of the freighter and allow us to get free. To aid this, all off-watch personnel are sent to the aft-end of the ship to assist in ballasting (using the weight of all of us, including me, to further push down the ass-end of the boat). This is extremely dangerous – the weight of personnel and the water in the aft Main Ballast Tanks could sink us if not done carefully.

But it works, and we got free.

And a bunch of officers got fired in the aftermath – including the CO, XO, and the OOD at the time. They were mostly hated and the crew was glad to see them go. In my view, the OOD was entirely incompetent, the XO was partially incompetent, and the CO was competent but an asshole with poor people skills.

158

I used to work for a large domain name registrar (the first one). We sometimes (inadvisably) would go into the production database and use SQL to correct errors in the data.

One guy needed to make a change to one record. The way you do this is a line of code that specifies the change (UPDATE), and which records to apply it to (WHERE). This guy forgot the WHERE clause, and when you do that, it applies the change to every record in the database. Ten million of them. I think they had to restore the database from a backup, or roll back using re-do logs, or something that was a huge pain in the ass.

Happened around 2000-2001.