Oddly enough, I’ve always had the same dream. When it occurred to me what happened, I had a good laugh about it, even though I really couldn’t afford the loss of the money. I tend not to get stressed about things in real life to the same extent as I do when I’m having a bad dream. Happily, it didn’t have any effect on my record.
My ex-husband had about four hundred dollars worth of deutschmarks left over from a vacation that he was too lazy to convert back to dollars. Probably figured he’d go to Germany again some day and use them then. But a year or so after the adoption of the Euro, it was just so much pretty paper.
Early in my career I screwed up an engineering change notice. You’d think that any of the couple dozen people who are supposed to review these things would have caught the error, but apparently “review” means “sign the stupid form since you have to but don’t actually look at anything”. When it got to the manufacturing floor, the manufacturing folks realized they now had two conflicting sets of documents. An assembly line with $60 million worth of product in process immediately ground to a halt.
A bunch of guys in suits showed up at my cubicle a very short time thereafter, armed with a stack of engineering change notices already filled out. All I had to do was sign my name and make sure I never, ever did anything like that again. Or else. I spent the next week or two waiting for a guy in a suit to show up and tell me to clean out my desk and never come back, but I got to keep my job. My boss got to write a letter to the US government explaining how a lowly junior level engineer barely out of school managed to muck up the entire works for half a day.
All this over one stupid number that I forgot to double check because I was in a hurry. :smack:
A portion of my old job was to trade mutual funds. On certain occaisions I would fill out a form and fax it, as opposed to trading electronically. I accidentally made an R a P (or vice versa) ona fund ticker and the trade went thru. By the time it was caught and corrected a couple days later it was a 21 thousand loss. Don’t know how I kept my job (in my defense, no manual trades go out w/o another set of eyes, and this trade was OK’d by my boss).
Came >.< this close to almost blasting our entire GIS database at work.
CONTINUE | CANCEL close. Sure we have backups. But it would have been a long day.
Just last week, while on vacation, I decided to buy two big, heavy cookbooks.
First mistake: paying full price for big, heavy cookbooks when I could get them for 60% of the cost from Amazon, with free shipping.
Second mistake: I bought a bunch of other stuff from the same store, breakable things like a full set of porcelain lion-head bowls. I of course got those shipped, since there’s no way they’d make it home in my luggage. The books, though, they were HEAVY. I decided to take them with me and put 'em in my suitcase.
Unfortunately, there’s a 50 pound limit to luggage. I was 20 pounds over. I had to pay an extra $50. :smack:
Had a 200-dollar car tow bill because I forgot what day it was that the sweepers were coming to clean my parking lot.
Thought nothing of adding my step daughter and her husband to our car insurance. A few months later SIL is distracted while driving and causes a tractor trailer rig to jackknife and causes 4 other vehicles to crash, including a fairly new Hummer H1. Luckily no injuries. Finally tally: $155,000 in damages, insurance has a $25,000 limit on property damage. Had to sell my 66 GTO and take an highly taxed withdrawl from my 401K. The hit to my retirement will likely mean I have to work 3 to 5 more years.
Having only a $25K limit is scary - lots of cars are worth more than this. I am not comfortable with less than $100K property and 1 million liability.
Many years ago I tapped a mirror on a quartz block against another part of an optical system at work. Everything except the block was painted flat black and recessed into a machine. I didn’t see the part that was in the way. There may have been a small chip, but we tested the parts and everything seemed fine.
A few years later, the mirror fell apart in the same area while a tech was doing a clean. It’s possible that I chipped it and it took years for a crack to propagate through the quartz. The replacement mirror cost $180,000 along with thousands of dollars in lost productivity.
Paying the electric company $3,818 a few months ago.
See, what had happened was… I overlooked the importance of using a decimal point when paying my bill online. Then, for some reason I woke up at like 5am a few days later and suddenly remember that I had to make a payment on my furniture and decide to get my ass up and do it before I forgot.
Upon logging I immediately noticed that I had a balance of about $3,500 which confused me because I was only supposed to have a few hundred in there. So I had a big smile on my face thinking I got credited $3000 for some reason or that the bank screwed up in my favor… (again, it was 5am and I was tired and confused…).
Then I look at it again, and I start wondering why the heck my balance is in red and then lean forward to get a closer look at the balance and eek!! it had a minus infront of it. Long story short… I got my money back a few weeks later, but got hit with a $35 overdraft fee (since my bank took the money out of my savings account to keep it from bouncing) on my $38.18 electric bill.
Nah … it sucks the money back in after a few seconds. Same thing with your ATM card.
I once took a summer school class without bothering to fill out a student aid application. So that was like $600 out-of-pocket for a speech class. :smack: And since I still hadn’t filled out the paperwork I sure as hell didn’t pick up two classes in the fall.
That was three or four years ago. I haven’t managed to re-enroll for any classes since. Now I’ve got an 18-month-old and one on the way. No time for school for mommy for a while!
I once was planning my return trip to the States, and looked at the train schedule to take me to Narita (about 40 minutes). Since the trains for the morning were on the hour, I assumed, without taking the extra 4 seconds to check, that the afternoon ones would be the same.
We get to the station to find out we’re two minutes late and the next train wasn’t for an hour, which we would miss the plan.
We took a taxi, which cost well over $100. This was back when I was a student, and that was expensive.
For someone else’s money, I approved a quote by my salesman for $15,000 less than what it should have been, without checking the math. My boss didn’t like that one.
Oh, this reminds me of something I did a couple of years ago.
I came home to a message on the answering machine asking me to call such-and-such numbe about the gas bill. I did - it was indeed the gas company - and found that there was a balance due on account such-and-such and it was in danger of getting cut off. It wasn’t my account, but I thought it might be the nanny’s. Entirely reasonable that she’d listed our phone number as her work phone number on the account. I figured something was up so I figured I’d help her out and pay the bill for her - using the online system - and we could sort it out afterward.
Only after I’d made the payment, a couple hundred dollars, did I realize maybe I should check with the company specifically and make sure the account was the sitter’s.
You guessed it - I paid someone else’s gas bill. For some reason, our phone number (which had been ours for about 15 years at that point) was on a total stranger’s account.
IT took a few weeks, and faxing a copy of my bank statement to the gas company, but I did get our money back. In the meantime I was able to save someone else from getting their gas turned off, at least temporarily.
Me too! Except in my dream its a remedial high school course (usually science), so my failure to attend invalidates my subsequent B.S. and J.D. I hate that dream!
My dad recently had an expensive brain fart. He was going to mow the lawn, and he got distracted my something and forgot to check the oil before he started up the mower. It cost him $400 for a new engine block, plus another couple of hundred to have the grass mowed during the three weeks that it took him to install the part properly.
Same here, except that I missed the rebate deadline by more than one day.
My most expensive brain fart involved stock options I received when I started at my current company. They vested over (I think) five years. Due to vagaries in the market, an acquisition (where the stock was converted from the original company’s to the new company’s), by the time I could excercise them the stock was trading for less than the option price.
Flash forward a couple of years, and I’m shopping for a house. I’m going over how much money I’ve got for a down payment, and remember the options. The stock price had improved, so I figured I’d be able to get another thousand dollars or so to pay into the house, so I browse over to the website of the brokerage firm holding the options. After fighting through the login process (it had been a while since I looked at them), and activating the account for trades (a step I’d never gotten around to), I looked at the option information.
“Nice”, I thought, “if I sell at today’s price, I’ll profit ~$3000”. Then I see a couple old messages in my account, so I read those.
“Warning: option packages A and B will expire on {date} at close of trading”.
Huh. That’s…today. Close of trading is 4, so I’ve got a couple of hours… Oh wait, that’s Eastern time, I’m in Mountain… :eek:
I made a call to the brokerage, and they said that they could try executing the sale in after-hours trading, but there’s no guarantee that it would be accepted.
It wasn’t. So I lost out on roughly $3000 because I forgot about the existence of my stock options until literally the last minute… :smack: :smack: