This Reddit Thread Of Workplace Screwups Will Make Your Worst Day On The Job Look Like A Cakewalk
Everyone makes mistakes, but some errors are ones for the ages.
u/sspecZ posed a question to r/AskReddit about times people "massively fucked up" at their job and what happened. Dozens of Redditors obliged to share their nightmare work stories. While many of the mistakes are admittedly soul-crushing, the general overarching moral to many of these tales of woe is that mistakes happen, and the best course of action is to always be honest with your boss and fess up when you goof up.
The One Where They Dumped French Onion Soup On The Chef
The One Where They Were Caught Eating Olives On Surveillance Camera
The One Where They Left A Sharpie In The Oven
My first day working at a coffee shop, I left my Sharpie in the oven. I finally found it while trying to warm a sandwich and had to shut the whole thing down to be cleaned. It smelled like a chemical weapon. —anexistentialpeanut
The One Where They Crashed A Forklift Into A Camaro
The One Where They Made The Worst Copy/Paste Error
I'm a controls engineer and made a copy/paste error while programming and a 2 was a 3, so one machine tagged at 3 was waiting for conditions of 2. So naturally the lift moved when it thought it should and crashed into another machine. Of course, I'm having to stand there figuring out the issue while maintenance is up there replacing busted parts. But because I'd made a thousand changes, it didn't click fast enough and well… it happened again. —OfTheAtom
The One Where They Didn't Keep Apart Dangerous Inmates
I work at a jail. We have things called "keep aparts" to keep people away from each other since they may have conflicts on the street or otherwise. I accidentally let these two guys go into the same room together. Guy #1 is FUCKING massive. Guy #2 is small and allegedly killed Guy #1's friend. Guy #2 doesn't know Guy #1, but Guy #1 knows who he is and what he allegedly did. So, they go into this room with about 30 other people and after about 20 minutes Guy #1 casually walks over to Guy #2 and beats the shit out of him. He easily could've killed him. Luckily, we stopped it before it got worse. But I still fucked up massively. —Stewapalooza
The One Where They Sent The Wrong Email To A Customer
The One Where They Dropped An Entire Pallet Of Pepsi Off A Forklift
The One Where They Erased Five Entire Minutes Of Animation
The One Where They Dropped A Screw Inside An Engine
I dropped a screw inside the motor of a TGV train. Oh god. We spent half an hour trying to catch it by moving a magnetic stick inside the crankshaft, with oil spilling everywhere. The engine was new and about to be mounted on a train that was supposed to run later in the day. I was so terrified I would possibly cause quite a lot of trouble since no other train or engine was available. Shout out to my manager who finally got that screw and definitely deserved his croissants the next morning. —JPDLD
The One Where They Forgot To Email A Postal Order
The One Where They Locked Out Their Entire Pharma Company's Drug Database
This was my first real job out of university, so I was early twenties. I had been working at a pharma company for a few months and a guy, Andy, set me up on a system that the whole company (100k+) used to catalogue documents and updates on drugs we sold. My only job was to go though and find old drugs that we didn't sell anymore and change their settings to that they were invisible to everyone, just to make everything a bit tidier.
I had been doing this for two days when, somehow, I managed to set it so that everyone in the company — except me — was locked out of the entire database.
Within minutes, I was getting calls from people all over the world, all very polite. They basically went something like, "Hi there, I'm trying to add a record to Drug A and I can't make changes. I can see you're the admin. Can you give me access rights?"
I was frantically trying to add people on, one by one, whilst screening my calls and watching as emails started flooding my inbox. I was panicking so hard, and just as I realized this was not going to work, I was added to a meeting about the system. It was literally me, Andy, and three senior managers.
I was FREAKING OUT.
I decided to just ignore the call. Stupid, I know, but I was like 21 and terrified. About three minutes in, Andy arrived at my desk. "Grey, we're in a call! Did you see my invite?" I played dumb and told him I was just dialing in, but he was very chipper, which made me suspicious.
Anyway, I dialed in, and the head of tech was monologuing about how he had been saying for months that this software was overloaded, and how any minute it was going to implode on itself. Andy agreed with them that this was the very reason he had asked me to remove the listings in the first place. I listened quietly, and it turned out that they were all convinced that the software did this to itself, and the only people who still had access rights were the people who were logged in at the time it "freaked out" (as opposed to it being just me and the people I had manually added in).
As time went on, it became apparent that they all thought I was some kind of specialist on the system. Andy kept mentioning that I was working on a project for him, and they kept saying, "Grey, can take care of this bit?", "We'll flag this for Grey," etc. Fortunately for me, I knew what they meant each time; it was like I was listening to a foreign language, and then just when they spoke English they assigned that "bit" to me.
Three days later, they had fixed the system, and in that time I had removed old users and finished removing the unused drugs, which they were still convinced was the reason it shut down to begin with. As a result, I got a BONUS, I got a mention on the CEO email for assisting on the crisis, and at my end-of-year meeting they added the fact that I was an "expert" in this system to my job description.
Not bad for a 21-year-old who was too dumb to process that clicking "yes" on a box marked "Do you want to remove all access rights for 100k+ users?" was a terrible idea. —LadyGrey44
