What is your biggest work mistake? r/AskReddit | Reddit Jar

huge work mistake forgot an airline crew in a McDonald's in Portugal for five days what's your biggest work-related mistake I used to be a product merchandiser for coca-cola a few years ago basically what I did was go to grocery stores meet the driver dropping the delivery and stock the shelves as fast as possible and get to the next store repeat my second day on the job I was stocking 2 L bottles at this mega grocery store running a bit behind because the order came in late so I was moving fast dropped a bottle of sprite on the floor and it hit cap down that little bust had shot up in the air and cleared for aisles luckily it didn't hurt anyone on my last day of working for coke same thing happened except this time it went flying straight for the cash and nearly hit some lady in the head as I headed to the back room to get a mop every employee was lined up applauding one of them offered to clean it up as it was the funniest thing he'd seen working at the store and that was the last bottle I stopped working for coca-cola accidentally sent out the salaries of every one of our executives and the owner to about 100 people in the company the TL DR is that I requested in front from HR just a list of eligible employees for something and what they sent had the default sheet 1 / sheet 2 / sheet 3 tabs at the bottom of the workbook sheet 1 was the list I had requested she too was for some reason executive compensation it sucked I accidentally knocked over two aisles filled with wine glasses lucky for me everyone was too busy freaking the f ck out there was apparently a customer nearby who also got a few cuts on his legs that they didn't notice me slowly slipping away and reappearing a few seconds later to ask what happened no one ever suspected it was me but I still felt horrible because it was over a few thousand dollars worth of stuff that I broke which may not sound like much but when you're 15 years old working on $11 HR 5 hours a week Roah you were quick to escape it's actually pretty funny it reminds of the time one of my colleagues of the airport dropped a passenger in a wheelchair down a flight of stairs well actually that wasn't funny the lady was severely bruised and the girl got fired on the spot well by me throw away for obvious reasons I was working on one of those TV shows where you do stupid things in public and film people's reactions in the skit we were doing a man would be jogging with a stroller containing a lifelike baby doll and I was going to hit him with a car the jogger was wearing bright green they dress funny on these shows so that you don't mix up the cast with pedestrians so I'm cruising up to the stop sign in a beat-up old Ford my adrenaline is really pumping this was my first time actually being involved in a skit I see the bright green jumpsuit and I got it I hit the wrong guy it was just some dude jogging with his kid I realized what happened when the guy I hit didn't jump onto the hood the way you're supposed to in these stunts I honestly don't remember anything about the incident after that I was in shock the dad had a few broken bones the baby he was fine needless to say there was a huge settlement paid out I'm currently pursuing an unrelated career I worked at a small beach club for wealthy people every summer for a few years I was a bath house kid which is a fancy way of saying janitor we wore our shirts and carried brooms one year a 40 year old man was surfing with his young kids in the ocean and had a heart attack in the water there was the car blocking the entrance to the beach and the ambulance couldn't make it there the very elderly man that owned the car won't allow anyone to take his keys and move it and went to do it himself but it took him so long to move down the walkway the way we had to treat members was with utmost respect and so no one grabbed the keys from him to do this as he moved that snail pace by the time the ambulance got down the beach the man was dead and so his family's life was changed forever thinking back it wasn't really my fault my job was to keep people away from seeing the body as I was 15 and not in the position to do what I wish the people dealing with the old man should have done which is grab the keys and move the car themselves it still pisses me off how just to risking a stupid summer job could have saved that poor guy's life backed when I was in the US Marine Corps we did a mini cax combined arms exercise for the first time at Camp Pendleton all of the brass high-ranking officers were there including the base commander and various reporters now I was a grunt in an Amtrak and Phidias assault vehicle unit before the cax kicked off all the vehicles test-fire their fifties of MK 19's 40mm grenade launcher they were supposed fire a few rounds into the hillside in front of them on top of said hillside our powerline towers with the commanding general of Camp Pendleton watching them one of the gunners on our AAV puts 3-4 40 millimetres grenades into one of the powerline towers knocking out power to half of Camp Pendleton we all just stood there in shock with various oh [ __ ] looks on our faces the base general he was about 15 feet away from me with the press corps chuckles and face palms turns around gets in his Hummer and drives away I think the gunner from that AAV is still doing push-ups for that one did not me personally but my grandfather it was shortly after VE Day in Europe very shortly my grandfather was a tech sergeant with the army and they were taking a tank wrecker through some Vichy French town while they were going past some historic landmark of a hotel the boom came loose and took it out my grandfather had been drinking at the time because as I said earlier it was VE Day this did not go over well with the natives nor his superiors colon stroke I work in publishing one of the companies I used to work for put out a newspaper in New England one production night things ran late in the editorial team was having a time coming up with a headline for one of the feature stories the designer in his infinite wisdom put up [ __ ] f ck [ __ ] [ __ ] as a placeholder until the editorial team could think of something better the night went on and everyone finished up the paper was proved shipped off and distributed the next day we get the paper in the office and the headline was never changed back mass resignations ensued editor designer even the publisher stepped down the week afterward this one is an anecdote from my Hollywood co-workers and I really wish I was there to see it I think it was on the Paramount Studios lot one of the lot electricians was loading his golf cart with four /o cable which is an industry standard cable that comes in 100 feet coils and each coil weighs about 100 pounds we deal with this stuff all the damn time well this poor guy was absently tossing it into the back of his cart and overshot the bed it kicked off the handbrake and landed itself squarely on the accelerator the golf cart took off like a shot and he has no choice but to go chasing after it naturally directly in its path a production had set up a wedding reception set which the golf cart plowed through wine glasses cakes hors d'oeuvres platters buffet tables you name it they all go flying about and crashing in a huge display of sound and fury the golf cart continued through the set and into an open sound stage where crew and cast alike left out of the way until it finally crashed into the far wall wheels still spinning and yes of course he comes chasing after it all the while shouting look out I'm so sorry sorry look out etc tragically not one camera was rolling at the time I work receiving for a beer distributing company needless to say overnight we went from a million cases a year two to five million cases a year in sales when our company bought rights to just about the entire state of Mississippi at the time we had a small warehouse and space was scarce I tell you that to tell you this the layout of the warehouse was one big roll of higher volume beer going one way and a smaller going the other for the slower moving craft and seasonal beers made a big circle for pick reasons one day 1000 cases of cold 45 came in which is about 800 more than needed I had nowhere to put it so the only direction left was up nicely stacked four pallets high in about 12 stacks deep it was all good until four hours later I heard a pop then another pop then suddenly it all came tumbling down doing so knocked over all the beer in the big high-volume row I ran in from tree and it came to 137 zero zero zero cases of beer damaged the place was flooded and accounts had to go without beer for a week until we replenished stock here is the kicker I still work here I was actually praised for my mistake it was a week before New Year's Day and the company didn't have to pay taxes on the stock insurance cover the damage my boss tells me I saved the company about $45 zero zero zero in tax expenses I was working on a radar dish for EPS 130 system I had a co-worker starts the test program and he ran the last command the computer system is so old that it changed the main test program to the subsequent test programs so it applied full power without a warmup sequence and blew out the stabilization unit I replaced it and he ran the same program before I knew it we had just wasted 20k in about five minutes my boss dropped a low band receiver while he was coring it to the workcenter dented the case and it was a 400 k dollar loss had a delivery driver pull some nasca stunts while offloading a trailer full of al q99 transmitters he took a turn far too fast and half-a-dozen transmitters and exciter units tumbled over and off the cart the transmitters at ecwid filled to prevent arcing so the sight glasses were destroyed in the machined aluminum cases were warped each one of them was well over 250 K and we were not able to fix the court cases I drove a limo for a while I drove a stretch 40 feet limo with a guy's whole family in back celebrating grandpa's 70th the evening went fine drove them home to their house in Sausalito think very steep hills I guess I didn't set the parking brake hard enough because after I got out of the driver's side the car began rolling towards a very steep drop-off luckily the car hit a post and stopped makes me nauseous even remembering it the dad got out of the car surveyed the situation and said we're not paying I didn't argue I used to work as an aide for my state senator at the time we were fighting the construction of a fossil fuel plant in my city it was taking a massive amount of time and money in hearings research and community outreach one day while I was alone in the office the Senate opened and closed the window for amendments for a fresh air bill I never made the connection with the power plant that they were trying to construct I would have had no problem slipping an amendment in there regulating construction of power plants near a school zone all particulates in highly populated areas or any number of amendments that could have halted or slowed the building of the plant I dropped the ball I was the assistant manager at a popular sub shop not someway I opened every Sunday morning when the owner and other asked manager weren't working I was supposed to get in at 8 a.m. to bake bread and get ready to open at 10 a.m. I was the only one there for those two hours well one day I either slept through three alarms or they never went off because when I finally woke up none of them had seemed to be ringing I was awoken by the other asked manager who had decided to grab something to eat at 10 a.m. that morning asking me where the f ck I was I rushed him and he had already started setting up long story short we had to open it's noon which was the start of the lunch rush on the busiest day of the week the owner wouldn't let me open for a month after that his wife was more pissed than he was second f ck up at the same place I put two fingers through the deli slicer my coworker finished making the sandwich and I had to tell him while I was bleeding profusely in the back to throw it all out bleach the hell out of that machine and use the other one to make the customers sandwich then the other asked manager drove me to the hospital backed when I worked at pharmacy place that also prints photos I meant to make 14 copies of a photo from the main computer but it somehow ended up 14000 my eggs are was yelling at me and when the store manager came over to see what was going on it was right at the moment I was politely reminding the exalt out she told me well that should be correct yeah that's how you do it because I had asked for help in the first place I didn't get in trouble but they kept putting me in the lab then a couple weeks later I was falsely blamed for contaminating the lab with Mercury mysteriously all the cameras in and around the lab stopped working right after I'd ended a late shift so no one believed me had just started working as a clerical officer for a government office just a summer job I had to ring up Xerox to organize a guy to come out and fix the photocopier and was telling him all about the photocopier as many problems when got a call waiting a from a man who was organizing a visit from Brian Cowen the Irish Terrace each prime minister who was coming down to open a festival connected with the place I was working at this guy wanted to speak to my boss so I passed the call through and went to go back talking to Xerox man but he was gone I hung up thinking I'd ring him back in a bit after doing some invoices got a phone call then and answered it was the Xerox guy laughing and a little bit confused I had somehow managed to connect the government guy and Xerox the Xerox guy told me he thought I might have just passed him on to someone else to discuss the repair needed they had a very confusing conversation with him asking about his photocopier and being informed he was calling to sort out arrangements for transport for Brian and a possible trip on a boat they even Chile realized they were not talking to her they thought they were he was pissing himself laughing course I was mortified not a not on some of the stories here but still was funny at the time I'm an undergrad doing biotechnology research not super interesting or action-packed but I was sorting through seeds there were the f2 generation of genetically engineered they're AB adopts Asst I must have put the tubes of seeds in my skirt pocket while I was going between the greenhouses and switching lab coats but long story short I ended up leaving the lab with genetically engineered organisms in my pocket anyone who knows about bias a few levels and has information about the chemicals and processes we do in the lab knows that is very bad nothing bad will happen unless those seeds had somehow made it out of their tubes but it's still a huge no-no while I was at uni I was working in a kind of huge metal shop there was this stuff bone tar a very caustic liquid that ate through the container wasn't built correctly or something Komal I noticed something wrong and mentioned it to someone but they said probably normal it ate through and got on the floor but once it gets out it starts evaporating and in its gaseous state it becomes flammable once in contact with oxygen so it created a huge inferno no one was killed but one girl almost died I was able to get to her by dousing myself and carrying her out she was cornered by a bunch of flames and not moving I got burned pretty bad into my cloak was destroyed kept a good amount of the flames off me though and fool that I am I was choking so bad and blinded I collapsed and dropped her and she got a little hurt but still lived so not really my fault but I always wish I had done something more when I saw the damn container was colder than it should have been FML also chick made me an even better cloak after that so good deal I used to work at a telecoms company that was doing contract work for an electric company well one day my boss I and two other employees we're working on some radio equipment at a substation my boss asks me to pull a fuse I did everything goes dark and quiet I put the fuse back in everything works boss looks at me and says I don't know what the hell you just did but I think we just killed power 2x City and laughed later he got a call from dispatch asking what we did because part of their grid went down and came back up we play dumb law a few years back when I worked at a summer camp we were playing dodgeball and I saw this kid I absolutely hated granted he is like 12 I'm 23 at a time so I get this dodgeball overly pumped with air and put all my might into it well this kid ducked out of the way he was a little larger and apparently to my surprise there was another little girl behind her I accidentally railed her in the face with the ball doing some serious bruising and breaking her nose I blamed it on the other little kid next to me and got away with it karma caught up with me and I lost my vision to an earth bazooka gun last year I was putting together construction drawings for a new plant for one of our clients I made a note on a drawing that I thought would help the electrical contractor understand the design I didn't realize it right away but the note I made was mostly right except in one big case that I forgot to point out about six months later in the middle of construction of this huge 150 million dollares plant our office is getting frantic calls from the clients and construction manager apparently the contracts are installed to that one general note I made versus constructing to what was actually shown on the plans the way the contracts are installed it was very against code and had to be torn down and redone final bill to fix was around 150 dollars kay that price was negotiated down and split between the contractor the client and us mine is very small but it was pretty funny I was 17 and was working my first day at jack-in-the-box an essential fact for you to know is that jack-in-the-box doesn't use real potatoes and their french fries instead they have this machine which reconstitutes dried potato into french fry shaped tubes and dumps them into the deep fryer it looks like play-doh as it comes out anyway the manager told me to clean the deep fryer he told me to drain the oil through a paper filter into a big drum and then pour fresh oil into the fryer he did not tell me to turn off the fryer first so once the oil is mostly drained leaving only a thin sheen of oil and various bits of food gunk in the fire the whole thing suddenly bursts into flames big flames to the ceiling I don't remember what I did probably just stood there and stared next thing I know the manager runs by me with a big brown bag which he dumps into the fire fire goes out turns out it was a 25 pound bag of dried potato powder suffocated the fire in an instant I don't know if they teach them that or if he just had a sudden inspiration but it worked took me a long time to get all that crap out of the fryer and get it clean but at least we didn't burn to death TL DR I almost burned down a jack-in-the-box my first day on the job not big but sad I was working at a Kinkos back in my high school days a youngish guy walks in maybe 35 or so and says he needed to send a fax I said absolutely and took the paper from him it was a funeral notice for his 11 year old daughter that had to get faxed before the newspaper deadlines today I shifted into okay I'm taking such good care of this poor grieving father mode I asked him for the number to fax it to run told him I'd take care of everything for him he said that was great because he had to get to the funeral home and other errands double-quote he walks out and I go to the fax machine and starts sending his fax I get your call cannot be completed as dialed message the number he'd given me was a digit off or something he didn't come back for hours I stayed five hours past the end of my shift waiting for him but he didn't come back eventually I just had to leave felt terrible to this day I can't drive by the church the funeral was going to be held at without tearing up I was working as a junior prospecting for silver in Idaho it was one of my first field assignments with the company and I was just starting to integrate socially with the crew these were some real drunken backcountry geologists as the new guy I had to deal with a lot bs around the camp like cooking and once digging a [ __ ] a trench we relied on an airstrip the previous claim owners had built four really flights every three weeks this time it was a new pilot coming into the strip TL DR IG OTT confused who had left and right and I described the strip backwards and the pilot totaled the plane I thought they were going to bury me in the hill and burn my staff a few years back when I was landscaping I started one of the work trucks on fire in downtown Milwaukee we had just finished grading and seeding and we were glowing straw from a straw blower sitting on the back of the flatbed truck I reached atop the stack of hay bales next to the straw blower and pulled one down the one underneath it fell as well and landed on the exhaust of the straw blower motor as soon as I could blink it seemed like the whole bed of the truck was on fire I tried to kick down all the straw off of the truck but end up bailing when I couldn't I grabbed my personal belongings out of the truck and watched it burn while the MPD made their way over there were at least three five gallon tanks of gas on that flatbed that didn't catch fire what a day from that day forward we had a trailer made to house a straw blower I was working at a five-star hotel in college there was a spill that needed vacuuming and I was told the vacuum was in one of the ballrooms I go in there and the lights are out so I start feeling along the walls for a switch this was in the UK and I'm from the US so the switches look feel different than what I was used to I find the switch and push it no lights just fire alarms that's weird I thought took me about five seconds to realize what had happened being still in the dark so I sneak out a back exit and head to the front of the hotel two things really led to the unpleasantness it was about 11:30 at night folks who weren't too happy to have to get out of bed and head outside in Scotland in winter the firefighters were on strike at the time and they're the ones that had to turn off the alarm never fest up to that one accidentally set a bunch of snakes loose in a warehouse sized pet store it was my first job and I was put in charge of the fish and reptiles I would have to feed the snakes about once a week which involved putting them in a box with a live mouse putting the Box in a closet and leaving it alone while it did its thing you could only feed one at a time so I would just leave the padlock off the snake tank while I changed them out well I guess those [ __ ] were deceptively quick on the draw because like 3-4 got out while I was doing this and I actually didn't find out about it until like a week later when they started showing up in the aisles I remember talking to a classmate in the store telling them there were snakes loose in the having him visibly swallowing him fear and refusing to believe me this one wasn't me but it bears sharing there's an operating system called VMs very secure the military loves it it has a concept called logicals which can be used to give symbolic names to devices and directories there was once a gentleman let's call him Charles because that's his name who was looking around a VMS machine and noticed that there appeared to be two directories with the same contents so he deleted one what he didn't realize was he'd actually been looking at the same directory just through two different logicals unfortunately that happened to be the directory containing the operating system he deleted the operating system of a customer's machine that was running their entire business needless to say he wasn't working with me the following day we met up on another job a few years later he was a much more cautious man by then first IT job right out of undergrad I was creating HR reports were requested most of the recipients would request a spreadsheets of various data motive it's sensitive HR info like SSM payroll etc I was there for maybe three months when this very nice HR person asked for some retiree data for mailing the data would include names SSN retiree benefit level dollar sign dollar sign spouse children their SSN zet cetera I retrieved the data from the HR system PeopleSoft pulled it into a spreadsheet excel at the last minute the HR person asked it to be sorted by name I went into Excel highlighted the last name column and sorted it this was roughly 1995 and Excel at that time didn't automatically highlight the entire worksheet before sorting some I saw just sorted the last name the rest of the data did not sort with it HR person didn't sports check any data created the mailer and sent it out 10000 retirees received someone else's data including all of the sensitive information above as soon as I heard about what happened I backtracked all of my steps and figured out what I had done I first happened was reprimanded pretty hard as soon as they needed to trim staff I was the first to be let go that was maybe 2-3 months later I deserved it and I hate ms-excel to this day I was service rep at the business office of Verizon Bell Atlantic at the time a customer who owned a limo service was moving from one side of an airport to another opposite side of the airstrip new facility I did the order as a disconnect new connect since there were new facilities being installed facilities as in copper a few weeks later I get a call from the owner of the limo company apparently I had forgotten to contact the directory services Department coincidentally the new books yellow pages were huge money back then were printed around the same time the ads he placed in several books did not get printed 99% of his business was referred to him by the yellow pages he sued us for big dollar sign dollar sign TL DR I managed to delete a limo company s yellow page ads in several large regional books he sued so training a new technician in the field we needed to install some wire for a client in their new rental home went inside located the rooms we needed to do so and got my drill ready to go got about six inches into the wall when a flicker of the lights and a bright spark through the hole informed us this is not the way to do this pull the drill bit back out to see about five inches of bright red glowing fun and almost immediately the fireworks outside began yep drilled into the main power line for the home fire department first then The Electric Company to cut all power from the pole being the middle of the city and early evening the whole block of residents gathered across the street to watch the spectacle of lights in the end the line arced and burned back about 18 inches of the main feed client was without power and couldn't move in for nearly four weeks and the trainee never succeeded worked for less than a month following [Music]

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Id: khepb0u3hkw

Length: 30min 30sec (1830 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 17 2019