Worst screw-up at work

[Ns1]

Valet job at a hotel: tight spots, took a curve too narrow, hit a yellow post with a lexus GS. Rear panel painted yellow. GIGANTIC SUV: backed into a stall; ski rack hit the sprinkler, flooded the floor

A person at a different valet job: Took a turn too narrow in a gigantic lifted F350 truck (or whatever). Swiped A PORSCHE 4S. Took out it's bumper.
A person at a different valet job: F'ed up a park job and jacked up a Ferrari 360

 

[NuclearNed]

Back in the day when I was but a wee little programmer...

I worked for a company that made prepaid phone cards. A special edition high-dollar phone card was being created to be given out at a corporate black tie affair. The day of the party, I was given the task to activate the pin numbers. Luckily, for some reason I printed out a listing of the database table, which was something like 100-200 pins. Then somehow I deleted the table. This was only an hour or two before the party.

I spent the next several minutes in a feverish sweat manually recreating the table from the printout I had. Sure, I probably could have gone to the network guys and gotten them to restore it from backup, but then I would have had to admit to what I had done. To this day, I think I'm the only one who knows... other than ATOT.



Oh... and another time...

I was fresh out of high school, and somehow I landed a job as a dj at our local radio station. This station played a lot of sports. Often if there were two games running at the same time, and we wanted to air them both, we would broadcast one live, tape the other, then play it when the first one completed.

We recorded the games on those old-fashioned reel-to-reel tape recorders. The first time I was asked to do this, my boss went to great pains to make sure I understood that I could not allow the tape to get twisted when loading a reel. If I did, he assured me, the game would not get taped, and tons of advertising dollars would get flushed down the drain, lost forever.

So that night, when loading the tape, I made extra sure that the reel was loaded correctly. I checked it once. I checked it twice. A while later, I even checked it again. Then I started to record the game, and I went back to the booth to run the game that was being broadcast live.

The first game came to a close, so I went to the room with the tape player and unloaded the reel. I took it back to the booth and attempted to cue the start of the tape. The silence coming from the blank tape was thunderous. I screamed a little right before I lost my grip on sanity.

Then the phone rang.

I nervously picked it up, and tried not to sound panicked as I croaked out in a hoarse whisper "Hello?" It was the station's owner and general manager. My head exploded. I began wishing I had brought in an extra pair of boxers. He wanted to know when I was going to start the second game. This time, my head not only exploded, but also my hair spontaneously ignited. When I broke the bad news, he gave me some even worse news: "I'll be there in a few minutes."

Luckily, I got to keep my job.

 

[nageov3t]

at my last job, we used to run dinner cruises on boats... I worked in customer service, who also took reservations over the phone.

I once made a dinner reservation for 300 people instead of 3 :/

 

[Sphexi]

A buddy of mine worked for a contractor who was hired by IBM, and they were moving some giant, expensive machine or other around, and I guess they had just inches of room between it and the ceiling, and he wasn't paying attention and rammed it full speed (using an electric pallet jack) into some sort of pipe carrying coolant (this is in a chip mfg facility). Not only did he bust the pipe open, spilling coolant out, but they had to shut down the production line, plus the machine he was moving was a total loss, and it was some sort of xray device or other, not sure how expensive but it was enough to lose his job and be threatened with lawsuits for a while until they calmed down.

Myself, I've never done anything super horrible, although at my last job I got a 2-ton load of lumber caught on the steel girder that was supporting it, and when I tried to wrench it free I bent the steel upright support sideways, making a whole row of bays unusable for 2 months until someone came and replaced the girder ($15k in costs). We ended up just using them anyways, since the bend in it wasn't that noticible. Didn't even write me up for it either, lucky me.

 

[Ns1]

Originally posted by: Sphexi
A buddy of mine worked for a contractor who was hired by IBM, and they were moving some giant, expensive machine or other around, and I guess they had just inches of room between it and the ceiling, and he wasn't paying attention and rammed it full speed (using an electric pallet jack) into some sort of pipe carrying coolant (this is in a chip mfg facility). Not only did he bust the pipe open, spilling coolant out, but they had to shut down the production line, plus the machine he was moving was a total loss, and it was some sort of xray device or other, not sure how expensive but it was enough to lose his job and be threatened with lawsuits for a while until they calmed down.

Myself, I've never done anything super horrible, although at my last job I got a 2-ton load of lumber caught on the steel girder that was supporting it, and when I tried to wrench it free I bent the steel upright support sideways, making a whole row of bays unusable for 2 months until someone came and replaced the girder ($15k in costs). We ended up just using them anyways, since the bend in it wasn't that noticible. Didn't even write me up for it either, lucky me.

wow that ibm story is horrendous

 

[Sphexi]

Originally posted by: NeuroSynapsis

Originally posted by: Sphexi
A buddy of mine worked for a contractor who was hired by IBM, and they were moving some giant, expensive machine or other around, and I guess they had just inches of room between it and the ceiling, and he wasn't paying attention and rammed it full speed (using an electric pallet jack) into some sort of pipe carrying coolant (this is in a chip mfg facility). Not only did he bust the pipe open, spilling coolant out, but they had to shut down the production line, plus the machine he was moving was a total loss, and it was some sort of xray device or other, not sure how expensive but it was enough to lose his job and be threatened with lawsuits for a while until they calmed down.

Myself, I've never done anything super horrible, although at my last job I got a 2-ton load of lumber caught on the steel girder that was supporting it, and when I tried to wrench it free I bent the steel upright support sideways, making a whole row of bays unusable for 2 months until someone came and replaced the girder ($15k in costs). We ended up just using them anyways, since the bend in it wasn't that noticible. Didn't even write me up for it either, lucky me.

wow that ibm story is horrendous

I know it. The sad thing is the guy dropped out of college to take this job, because he felt his engineering program was going nowhere (he wanted to get into CAD and drafting), and that this would give him a foot in the door so to speak. Obviously after this he was kind of screwed, and shortly afterwards knocked up his girlfriend, and all 3 of them ended up having to move in with his mom.

 

[Bacstar]

Originally posted by: Unheard
I ran a delete query on a table with 100000+ records.

I forgot my where clause.

I did something like that. However, I wrote a query to update the charges on a billing table, and when I highlighted the script I kinda missed the "where" clause and updated the whole database. Thank gawd they had a backup from the night before so I was able to recover.

 

[FusionKnight]

I recently had our test server pointed to our production database. I made a bunch of changes to test which showed up on production. Customers were calling asking why their address was changed to "fadafdafa", etc. Not such a big deal, and we got all the data restored from backup, but, man did I feel like a tool that day.

FK

 

[bondboy]

Originally posted by: lein
Never put a cover sheet on my TPS reports

Didn't you get the memo?

 

[manlymatt83]

I took *insert the company I work for here which is actually a VERY well known telecommunications company* website down.

 

[middlehead]

Not so much my own screw-up, but I exposed a few people at my last job as lazy and/or lying spazzes. I was working a Saturday morning and the regional CEO calls, "We found a bug in the systems, this needs to get fixed today, when can you do it?"

We had four facilities, one each in Texas, Nebraska, South Dakota, and mine.

Texas: "About an hour, we'll do it over lunch and they'll only lose half an hour of production."
Nebraska: "About two hours, I'll do it over lunch and they'll only lose an hour and a half of production."
South Dakota: Same as Nebraska
Me: "35, 40 minutes. I'll do it over lunch so we don't lose any production. Pre-shift meetings take at least 15 minutes anyway."

He was fine with Texas' answer, they were the biggest facility with more nodes to fix, but my system was the exact same size as Nebraska and SD. He tore into them during the next conference call. I wasn't in on the meeting, but my local boss called me into his office immediately afterwards, giggling like a schoolgirl.

 

[hydroponik]

when in doubt, blame customer service is my motto.

 

[GeekDrew]

Wow, there are a ton of production database screwups here... I'm actually surprised. I've executed malformed queries on test and development databases quite a few times, resulting in having to restore a backup of them. I just ensure that there is a backup captured within the hour before I execute the script I'm unsure of.

My worst mistake ever? Hrmmmmm... hard for me to say, actually. Probably the time I ordered a NetWare server to run DSREPAIR, which locked the directory service's master replica, causing the server to reject all DS operations, including reads. Usually not a big deal, except that it was acting as the only authoritative login server for our headquarters, and was also the only online LDAP server to authenticate users on our public website & internal websites. Oopsie. Fortunately, most of the affected staff were in meetings, and weren't using their computers. I only got a handful of complaints in the 15 minutes it was down, including one from the office of the Superintendent. My boss didn't seem to care nearly as much as I did... when I told him what happened, he just chuckled and said something along the lines of "not your best decision ever, eh?," and then left the office.

 

[silverpig]

I get to work with concentrated hydrofluoric acid. There hasn't been a screw up with it where I work, but I read about a guy who was using it in a fume hood and not a proper wetbench and wasn't wearing much protective gear. He spilled 100 ml of it on his legs. It instantly went through his pants and started burning his legs.

Now, HF isn't actually a very strong acid. It's the fluorine that does the damage as it goes straight for your blood and bones.

They hosed him off immediately but his legs were badly burned. He went to the hospital and after a day they amputated both legs. A week later he died. *just re-looked up the story... after 7 days they amputated his right leg. After 15 days he died*


Someone in our facility though disposed of a chemical into a solvent waste container (just 4L plastic bottles with caps) that ended up producing massive amounts of ammonia gas. The bottle bulged to twice it's normal size and the cleanroom had to be evacuated for a day.



edit: fixed the numbers... result was the same though.

 

[2Xtreme21]

Originally posted by: silverpig
I get to work with concentrated hydrofluoric acid. There hasn't been a screw up with it where I work, but I read about a guy who was using it in a fume hood and not a proper wetbench and wasn't wearing much protective gear. He spilled 100 ml of it on his legs. It instantly went through his pants and started burning his legs.

Now, HF isn't actually a very strong acid. It's the fluorine that does the damage as it goes straight for your blood and bones.

They hosed him off immediately but his legs were badly burned. He went to the hospital and after a day they amputated both legs. A week later he died.


Someone in our facility though disposed of a chemical into a solvent waste container (just 4L plastic bottles with caps) that ended up producing massive amounts of ammonia gas. The bottle bulged to twice it's normal size and the cleanroom had to be evacuated for a day.

I think this takes the cake... :Q

 

[PingSpike]

Originally posted by: Sphexi

Originally posted by: NeuroSynapsis

Originally posted by: Sphexi
A buddy of mine worked for a contractor who was hired by IBM, and they were moving some giant, expensive machine or other around, and I guess they had just inches of room between it and the ceiling, and he wasn't paying attention and rammed it full speed (using an electric pallet jack) into some sort of pipe carrying coolant (this is in a chip mfg facility). Not only did he bust the pipe open, spilling coolant out, but they had to shut down the production line, plus the machine he was moving was a total loss, and it was some sort of xray device or other, not sure how expensive but it was enough to lose his job and be threatened with lawsuits for a while until they calmed down.

Myself, I've never done anything super horrible, although at my last job I got a 2-ton load of lumber caught on the steel girder that was supporting it, and when I tried to wrench it free I bent the steel upright support sideways, making a whole row of bays unusable for 2 months until someone came and replaced the girder ($15k in costs). We ended up just using them anyways, since the bend in it wasn't that noticible. Didn't even write me up for it either, lucky me.

wow that ibm story is horrendous

I know it. The sad thing is the guy dropped out of college to take this job, because he felt his engineering program was going nowhere (he wanted to get into CAD and drafting), and that this would give him a foot in the door so to speak. Obviously after this he was kind of screwed, and shortly afterwards knocked up his girlfriend, and all 3 of them ended up having to move in with his mom.

This was at the Vermont plant right?

A friend of mine worked there...I'm not aware of any screw ups he made, but I remember him telling me some construction crew was working on something in the plant and managed to kill the power to a huge section. I guess part of the chip making process involves dipping wafers or something in acid for a precise amount of time. So a bunch of product ended up ruined. He didn't tell me what the fall out for the construction company was though.

 

[ultimatebob]

I never bothered to test the DB2 backups on a server to find out if they actually worked or not. When the hardware failed, we found out that they didn't the hard way

 

[kalrith]

At a former job as a cook, I left the flame on under some margarine when I went to eat lunch (still in the building). About halfway through my lunch, I remembered and found the melted margarine overflowing and making the flames really big. Then, to make matters worse, I panicked and took the pot to a sink and ran cold water over it. That filled the place with smoke. The ceilings were 12 feet, and probably the upper half was completely filled with smoke. That was not a good day.

At my current job I haven't made any huge screw-ups. My worst one by far was forgetting to renew our domain, which caused us to receive no emails for about 12 hours.

 

[lokiju]

Brought down the network by ghosting a classroom size of computers at once. I plugged it into the wrong switch.

Blew the power for the whole building once with a co worker while setting up a temp training room in a hanger.

Was driving a golf cart from one building to another with a buddy of mine that I had just gotten hired and decided to floor it around a corner and then slammed on the breaks, sliding a few feet and squealing the tires, but of course right at that moment a door to the outside opens right next to me and it's my manager, my director, the vice president and president of the company.

My manager looked like he wanted to punch me

I've imaged peoples PC's thinking we had all there data backed up only to realize after the fact that they had some important file/document/database that was the only copy that was in some weird directory that they totally forgot to mention. I'd feel bad a bit when those sort of things happen, but it's up to the user to tell me wth they need backed up. Of course I just started making backup images first before wiping it out.

Now days though I manage about 300 remote offices broadband and VPN connections and I've had a few sites get shut down because of a mix up, but thats usually fixable within a few hours.

I was working at a call center doing tech support for my first IT job over 10 years ago now and there was a time I thought I had hit the mute button but guess it didn't take and I went on to tell a co worker how much of a dipshit the guy on the phone was, needless to say he wasn't very happy and got all pissy but I assured him I wasn't speaking about him but about another person.

 

[CKent]

When I was driving a delivery van I tapped some limo at a gas station. I mean tapped, there was no damage at all. I could have flicked it harder with my finger. Since most people are dicks though, and the driver and/or owner of the limo was no different, they wanted my info and it came back to my boss's boss. See, they hadn't checked my driving record, which was absolutely horrible... this caused them to, at which point I got canned :frown:

 

[iRONic]

19 years old - I worked in a candle factory. I accidently pumped 18,000 gallons of liquid wax from a rail car into an 8,000 gallon capacity tank. Not good. Real big mess.

 

[RollWave]

Originally posted by: Number1
Any medical field people in here? Now I would love to ear about their screw ups!!

Would you? Would you really? I dont think you'd want to go to a hospital every again if you know there were residents there haha.

 

[KLin]

Originally posted by: CKent
When I was driving a delivery van I tapped some limo at a gas station. I mean tapped, there was no damage at all. I could have flicked it harder with my finger. Since most people are dicks though, and the driver and/or owner of the limo was no different, they wanted my info and it came back to my boss's boss. See, they hadn't checked my driving record, which was absolutely horrible... this caused them to, at which point I got canned :frown:

:laugh:

 

[Fern]

While in college my friend and I got a job with his Dad's company. That company did work inside the secure regional telephone facilities. This is where all the phone equipment is contained inside bomb proof like fortress-type buildings.

Anyway, we working there on the weekend all alone, no phone company employees around. When all h3l broke loose, the cops, sherriffs and fire Dept people came runing in through the doors yelling and stuff. They found us on ladders working. etc

Turns out one us while leaning over up on the ladders kicked a switch with our foot and turned off most of the phone service to the town, including the 911 stuff, police and sherriff and fire dept service.

Man, were they pissed.

Oh, since his dad owned the company we didn't get fired either.

Fern

 

[Number1]

A coworker working on a high power radio transmitter needed to observe what was going on in the power suply section of the transmitter. He shut the power off, opened the door to the power suply and bypassed the interlock switch with a screw driver. He did his test, shut the power off and proceeded to retreive his screw driver. Little did he know that the now open interlock circuit was also a discharge path (safety feature) for a huge capacitor now fully charged at over 10000 volts.
The capacitor discharged through him. He went flying a good 10 feet back, landed on his back and his arm started twitching all on its own. He went to the hospital to get checked out and was OK.