What's your worse workplace mistake?

[Red Squirrel]

You know, stuff that could of possibly ended getting you in trouble, or fired etc.

My worse one was recently and I'm still going through hell because of it. I work in IT in an environment that has lot of weird setups and tons of crappy apps that are binded to the user account and profile.

I was deleting users that were getting layed off and my first mistake was deleting them instead of just disabling them.

I am making up fictional names here. One user was called George Smith so I do a search for jsmith and delete that account. It was the last one. I would double click the account to check the first name to ensure it was in fact the correct user, except for that one. So I move on to go rename the home directories to .del (good thing I did that) then I get to gsmith and I get an error that it's in use when I go to rename it. I figure that's odd, then I realized, that was Gary Smith's directory! Then I realized I had deleted his account instead of George which was gesmith.

Yeah... anyone ever done something stupid like this?

By coincidence I had done a CSVDE the day before so I tried to reimport that user but no go, the command just failed. So I recreated the user manually and then added to all the groups that were in the dump file for that user. I restore the exchange mailbox and readd the permissions on the home folder as it was a sid now.

That part was easy. I call up the user saying I noticed their account got corrupted during maintenance and that I am looking at it and I get the user to log out and back in to test everything.

Every day, there's a new problem that surfaces. Some weird app or setup wont work, because it's embeded by sid or something and does not like the new account. The new account also means a new profile on all the citrix servers, so everything does not work... what a mess. Obligatory: FML

 

[paulney]

The website is down!

 

[JohnCU]

going to work thinking i was fine but fucked up on sleeping pills/alcohol and hit a car in the parking lot, almost fired

 

[RedArmy]

This isn't my mistake but it's the worst one I've witnessed, just for the pure shock value. Back in high school I worked at OfficeMax with a bunch of people that I knew so the workplace atmosphere was always laid back, even with the managers.

Well, it was late one night and it was approaching the time to close the store (hardly anyone in it any of the time anyways). Me and my friend (also worked there) were up at the front of the store just talking while one of the females (late teens, early twenties) that worked there was operating the register.

Well, that particular female's mom had passed away only a few days ago so we were trying to be careful of what we said around her. I say something to my friend (I don't remember what) and he responds with something along the lines of "JUST LIKE YOUR MOM".

We were literally about 5 feet away from the woman when he said that and I was just like :Q. I tried to warn my friend about what he said but I don't think he really got it until later on.

I also have another story that I told on here in that epic job thread a while back, but I'm too lazy to find it.

 

[ggnl]

Originally posted by: JohnCU
going to work thinking i was fine but fucked up on sleeping pills/alcohol and hit a car in the parking lot, almost fired

ditto...except sub klonopin for sleeping pills

 

[JohnCU]

Originally posted by: ggnl

Originally posted by: JohnCU
going to work thinking i was fine but fucked up on sleeping pills/alcohol and hit a car in the parking lot, almost fired

ditto...except sub klonopin for sleeping pills

they make you go to rehab, too?

 

[ggnl]

Originally posted by: JohnCU

Originally posted by: ggnl

Originally posted by: JohnCU
going to work thinking i was fine but fucked up on sleeping pills/alcohol and hit a car in the parking lot, almost fired

ditto...except sub klonopin for sleeping pills

they make you go to rehab, too?

nope, just rescinded a promotion that was offered shortly before. took almost 2 years to make it up.

 

[Sea Moose]

i brushed up against a 240volt connection, i got thrown to the ground. Could have resulted in my death

 

[Red Squirrel]

Originally posted by: Sea Moose
i brushed up against a 240volt connection, i got thrown to the ground. Could have resulted in my death

Ouch, I remember completing a circuit of 120 volts and a couple amps, it's quite the surprise when it happens. I never felt 240 volts but I can only imagine how much bigger of a surprise it is. Totally light up your life.

 

[lxskllr]

Not exactly mine, but it was under my supervision so it was my fault. I was laying out beamseats on a bridge, and it came time to set the elevation for the top of them. I gave my instrument man the field book with the proposed elevations written down. He got the pages confused, and gave me the elevations for the wrong structure. The pier got poured, and when I checked the seats, the elevations were of course all fucked up. They had to fix it by buying some expensive shims for the slightly low seats, and jackhammer out the really low ones and re pour them. I don't remember the cost, but it was pretty damned steep. Probably close to $10,000

 

[Mo0o]

This didnt happened to be but another lab assistant at a lab worked at in college

She spilled a beaker of some kind of chemical. It was supposed always stay in the fume hood because it's a carcinogen and a teratogen but for some reason he brought it out and subsequently spilled it all over teh floor. Had to evacuate the entire floor and freaked out one of teh postdocs who was pregnant at the time.

 

[Sea Moose]

Originally posted by: RedSquirrel

Originally posted by: Sea Moose
i brushed up against a 240volt connection, i got thrown to the ground. Could have resulted in my death

Ouch, I remember completing a circuit of 120 volts and a couple amps, it's quite the surprise when it happens. I never felt 240 volts but I can only imagine how much bigger of a surprise it is. Totally light up your life.

My death would have been a positive for you guys, then you wouldn't need to put up with my lame threads

 

[paulney]

Can't recall a mistake of my own right now, but I can tell of another person's mistake. We rent an office in a building which is shared by several companies. We had a great receptionist there before, but unfortunately due to family reasons she had to move to another city. A new person was hired 3 days ago.

She was instructed about all the companies that share the office (there's just a few really) and what to do if someone walks in and inquires about any of them. Then my co-owner talked to her personally, introduced us, told her about what kind of questions people may have, etc. The next day a person walks in with an important document and inquires about our company. The receptionist doesn't even bat an eye and tells the customer she had never heard about us.

We almost lost a customer right there. Thankfully, she called from the building, I picked up the phone, defused the situation and then asked to talk to the receptionist. She tells me: 'I already took her document and put it in your mailbox. What more do you want?'

She was fired today.

 

[seemingly random]

Stating what I really thought about things when a new division manager asked me what I really thought about things.

 

[seemingly random]

Originally posted by: Sea Moose

Originally posted by: RedSquirrel

Originally posted by: Sea Moose
i brushed up against a 240volt connection, i got thrown to the ground. Could have resulted in my death

Ouch, I remember completing a circuit of 120 volts and a couple amps, it's quite the surprise when it happens. I never felt 240 volts but I can only imagine how much bigger of a surprise it is. Totally light up your life.

My death would have been a positive for you guys, then you wouldn't need to put up with my lame threads

Quit getting our hopes up

 

[GodlessAstronomer]

I was working part time for a fancy cafe and we were doing some out catering for a big city council meeting. There were two full trays of full champagne flutes (about 15 flutes per tray). I lifted one, it got wobbly and I dropped it right on top of the other one. Right in the middle of this huge function, in full view of the friggen mayor. I was humiliated.

This one isn't me, but I witnessed it. When I was at polytech studying automotive, one of my fellow student had a car up on the four-post hoist (the type of hoist that the wheels rest on ramps, not with arms that lift the car by the frame). The brakes were not engaged and the engine was running (he was doing diagnostics of some kind). The car had an auto transmission, and while he was under the car working on something he bumped the transmission shift linkage, sticking the car in drive. The car lurched forward, front wheels came off the hoist and the nose of the car took out half a wall in front of the hoist. Whoops!

That was a stupid mistake caused by a comedy of errors. Engine running on a four post hoist, no brakes engaged, transmission in N, not P. Foolish and expensive error.

 

[nutxo]

One saturday I was working by myself and runnign 2 presses at once. Big no no. I stepped away from the big press for a few secs and BOOM BOOM BOOM! There was a jam and the stripper fingers got stuck in bars and tore the delivery end apart. While I was frantically tryign to fix it another big boom from the other press. It tried to pick up and feed a stack of about 30 sheets of 80lb c1s..

I turned off the equipment and invited my wife to a surprise lunch. I was going to return after lunch and clean up. As we ate I explained what had happened and how I was going to be looking for work monday.

After lunch she said shed wait in the car while I cleaned up. I got back to the shop and my bosses van was in his space. I walked in and asked him if hed seen it yet. He hadnt. I walked him through exactly what Id done. Apologized profusely. I even said Id be takin my personal stuff and he could keep my last check.

He told me he woud clean my machines, go home and dont worry about it. We'd fix it monday.

The one machine was less than a month old and cost liek 75k. He never mentioned it again after it was taken care of. Best boss Ive ever had. I miss working for him and I miss hanging out with him.

 

[zerocool84]

I dropped a pallet of doors when I was bringing them down with a forklift.

 

[paulney]

Not me personally, but with my indirect participation: a supervisor and me were unloading a small truck from the warehouse that arrived to the electronics store where I was working. We were unloading VCR boxes. That was back when VCRs were fairly expensive and considered state of art video technology. The supervisor loaded too many of them on a dolly, so his arm could not grab the top box. There was a crack in the pavement on the way from the truck ramp to the store door. He knew about it, I knew about it. He called the shots. Sure enough, the dolly jerked on the crack, and the top VCR came flying off. He cursed, put the box back up, and we stuffed the boxes into the backroom.

Sure enough, a week later some unfortunate poor soul came back with this VCR saying it was broken. It was indeed messed up: visually ok, but the playback showed a ton of noise and could not be fixed. The head must have gotten beat up during that fall.

Customer got a new VCR under warranty, and we shipped the defective unit back.

 

[JohnCU]

Originally posted by: ggnl

Originally posted by: JohnCU

Originally posted by: ggnl

Originally posted by: JohnCU
going to work thinking i was fine but fucked up on sleeping pills/alcohol and hit a car in the parking lot, almost fired

ditto...except sub klonopin for sleeping pills

they make you go to rehab, too?

nope, just rescinded a promotion that was offered shortly before. took almost 2 years to make it up.

 

[shortylickens]

Hynix Semiconductor.
I worked in Photolithography.
After a monthly maintenance action on a machine that exposes wafers, I made some little little error while performing minor calibrations with a test wafer. After the procedure was done it apparantly had an offset of 1 or 10 or 100 microns, I forget which.
Anyway it was bad. The kind that make a microchip useless. About 20 or 21 casettes went through before a process tech caught the error. Luckily, Etch was running slow that night and none of them had been processed. If they had, we estimate that about One million, five hundred and seventy five thousand dollars worth of silicon would have been ruined.
As such, the time required to reprocess those wafers only cost us about one-hundred thousand.

In my defense I had been on the night shift for about 17 months and had never caught up on my sleep. I was making mistakes left and right. For that matter, so were most of the rest of the folks in the place. I simply dont do that well on a 12-hour night job. I had to learn that the hard way. Of course, I had already learned in the Navy I am useless when tired, but I always assumed that was because I never slept. Turns out that not all sleep is the same.
In Psychology class we learned that there are 5 stages of sleep, and you body cycles through stages 2,3,4, and 5 throughout the night. If you dont get plenty of each stage, you're mental alertness will fail you througout the day.
Apparently, since I was sleeping days and working nights, I was NEVER getting proper sleep, ever. Nor were most of my coworkers, but some of them were better than others at faking alertness.
Statistically in a group of 1200 people, only about 3 or 4 of them are truly nocturnal. The rest are normal people trying to get by.

 

[Wheezer]

I worked for Pepsi for a number of years....one of the things they were very strict on was the end coding date on the product...well one summer night during our busiest week I ran 3,000 cases of Mt. Dew with the wrong year printed on the package...man was my boss livid. I had to print up 3,000 stickers and apply them by hand...it took me and 3 other guys about 2 weeks to get it all done.

I have only been wrote up twice in my life...once when I put the forks of a forklift through the roof of a semi-trailer (LMAO...THAT was funny) and this.....I had actually forgotten about it until this thread.....now it's one of those LOL moments.

 

[Azraele]

Not mine but I witnessed this. At work there are huge machines that tear and fluff fiber to be blown into pillows. One of the machines was being fixed and all the panels were off, so all the safety features were pretty much bypassed. The machine got turned on for some reason or another, and one guy either got his hand too close or something and the machine basically tore his hand off.

 

[Sea Moose]

Originally posted by: Azraele
Not mine but I witnessed this. At work there are huge machines that tear and fluff fiber to be blown into pillows. One of the machines was being fixed and all the panels were off, so all the safety features were pretty much bypassed. The machine got turned on for some reason or another, and one guy either got his hand too close or something and the machine basically tore his hand off.

Fuck this wins, the repair person should have isolated the power supply and tagged/locked the isolation switch.

 

[Mardeth]

Accounting: Lost $2 million. Luckily found it later.