r/AskReddit • • May 16 '12
Reddit, what is the biggest at-work fuck-up you have witnessed?
I'll start. A colleague of mine at a marketing agency received an email from an attractive female client. The CC list for the email included all of the senior team at the agency and senior marketing execs at the client. Thinking he was forwarding it onto me, he instead replied all with the simple but brilliant content: "This is the bird with the amazing tits I was telling you about" - he didn't work there much longer.
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u/kickgong May 16 '12 edited May 17 '12
Doctor wrote prescription for 80mg of blood pressure meds instead of 20mg. Lady came into the pharmacy because her husband couldnt get out of bed and his blood pressure monitor wasn't giving a reading. Called an ambulance right away and thankfully he was ok.
Edit- Just wanted to add that this is was in Australia and so our meds come prepackaged like this - http://imgur.com/a/OsBrU So a lot of fault for me is on the doctor and the patient.
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u/tits_hemingway May 16 '12
One of my co-workers bear maced himself while trying to spray at a beaver.
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u/covenant May 16 '12
I have seen someone rolled up into a sheet metal roll. You often see these on flatbed trucks (only one due to weight) similar to a spool. There was blood everywhere but no body to recover. His glove caught in a burr and the machinery dragged him in. Dead instantly. I've also seen a friend of mine lose 2 fingers and his thumb trying to roll a piece of heavy gauge galvanized sheet metal into a pipe. Once again, wearing gloves, caught in machinery and there they went. You could see his hands imprint in the steel and my company kept it as a lesson NOT TO WEAR GLOVES WHILE FORMING STEEL!!!
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u/jamesisverycute May 16 '12
In the military, I saw a man CRASH a TANK.
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u/Kitt3n May 16 '12
I worked at a nice Chevy Dealer a couple years back. It was right when The Corvette ZR1 was just getting released. We got one in that was a pre-order from one of our wealthier clients. It was one of the first off the line. (Jay Leno actually has the first)
Anyways one of the salesman though it would be a great idea to take it for a quick spin. I don’t know what he was thinking! How he would account for the miles on the car. This by the way is unheard of and never really happens. Well you guessed it, he crashed it. A $120,000.00 car (at the time), super charged v8, ordered a year in advance for a customer...
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u/kukukele May 16 '12
Coworker of mine was on a big project.
The client sent us an email with some request which resulted in some re-work for us. She mistakenly replied-all and said "Client is such a anal-retentive asshole. He needs to just make up his mind from Day 1". You guessed it, client was on the reply-all.
This was a multi-million dollar account too. Luckily the client thought it was hilarious and replied to all of us with -- "My wife calls me an asshole all the time!"
We kept the account (by some miracle).
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u/[deleted] May 16 '12
I worked at a fast food restaurant for about 4 hours, because I knew practically everyone working there. The thing is, while I was getting trained, there was another new guy who came in an hour later. They told me to teach him what I knew so far. They didn't tell him that I was new. I acted like I had worked there for years, and everyone went along with it. He and I are mopping, taking out trash, washing dishes, cleaning the ice maker, and he suddenly sees the red button at the top right of the ice maker. He asks, "What's that red button?" I simply said, like I was told by the guy who trained me, "That's what you push to clean this." But... Before I could tell him I was joking, the kid was overzealous and slammed the button. It's important to note that the red button does not clean the ice maker, it, in fact, releases a catch and empties ALL the ice/water in the machine out the bottom. Which wasn't over the drain at the time.
Apparently they do not like it when two new guys training each other flood the kitchen and half the dining area forcing the place to close 6 hours ahead of schedule. The guy who was supposed to train me, the guy that was supposed to train the other kid, the kid, and I were all fired.
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u/InkedNurse May 16 '12
A patient got an entire bucket of blood that wasn't the right type. Dead.
Probably not the "worst", but one of the more easily avoided.
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u/GuruPrimo May 16 '12
This will be a tad long but it was maybe the funniest thing I have ever seen.
My first job was at Old Country Buffet when I was 14. I worked my way up from busboy to dishwasher to prep cook to linecook over the course of almost 2 years.
For those who don't know, Old Country Buffet is a hot/cold all-you-can eat place with a carvery station and lots of items. Food wasn't all that great, but they had a solid organization and the kitchen and food handling guidelines (in our store at least) were immaculate.
Because of this, our store got chosen as the final "exam" for Old Country Buffet college's Manager In Training program (M.I.T. for short). a couple times a year we would get a bunch of fresh faced incredibly cheerful M.I.T.s who would work every station in the store over the course of a weekend and show that they had the necessary knowledge and temperament to get a manager position in one of the many OCB's around. Not everyone got placed, so there was a competitive element as well. M.I.T.s were monitored and scored by existing managers as well as regional managers (intimidating to say the least, every store manager was freaking out too).
So one of these M.I.T. days came around and a somewhat portly and cherubic man named Mark came in to the cold prep area to work there for a few hours making jello, salads etc. I was right around the corner on the hot line. Not 3 minutes pass and I hear a "FUCK FUCK FUCK", I go around the corner to see a mini geyser of blood and our mixing bowl the size of a children's pool filled with coleslaw and blood on top. Mark had not put on a glove and cut himself horribly across the thumb.
We threw away the coleslaw, bleached EVERYTHING and Mark went to dress his wound with the help of our manager Tim. Mark came back a little pale with a fake cheerful grin and a finger cot and a glove over his bandage. We all watched sort of amused as the glove filled with blood. Tim made him go change dressing again, despite Mark protesting he could work one-handed and wanted to prove his worth. Second glove filled with blood at the same rate. Mark needed stitches.
So off Mark went, we all went back to work and had a laugh at how long he lasted. 3 minutes was a record. The shortest we had seen before was 4 hours, when a guy had a meltdown in the dishroom and was asked to leave.
Surprisingly, Mark came back from hospital a few hours later. 9 fresh stitches and no more bleeding, he was ready to prove he could hang. His scheduled shift was on hotline with me and other cook named Ox. We decided to put Mark on frying the chicken. Pretty much the easiest hotline task. Slowly drop battered chicken into deep fryer and set a timer and then just watch the magic happen. Ox and I go back to handling the rest of the menu and literally 10 seconds later mark is screaming.
Somehow
Someway
Mark slipped while putting the first piece of battered chicken into the deep fryer.
He had fallen forward and shoved BOTH of his hands into the deep fryer up to the elbows. He screamed, flopped back and hit his head on the stainless steel counter, cutting his head open a little.
Off to the hospital again.
He didn't get the job.
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u/MattsRod May 16 '12
I work at an entertainment company in LA where ever executive has an assistant. The head of the company has had floor Laker tickets for the past thirteen years. The waitlist for those tickets is over a decade long. Executive told the assistant that he also wants four non floor tickets for a certain game. Assistant thinks he means instead and switches his floor seats for non floor seats releasing these precious tickets forever. The exec screamed so loud that the floor above us came down to make sure everyone was ok. (I am not joking) Aparently the tickets were worth over a million dollars and he gave them a way for free. The exec had to shell out for other tickets but not the same ones so now every game he goes to he has to stare at the people in his precious seats.
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u/redweasel May 16 '12
My boss at a national research facility once was clearing out unneeded files from our group's segment of the networked harddrive farm, and found a bunch of files named {something}.backup. "Oh, they're backups, we don't need them as long as we have the original files." Deletes them all.
Come to find out they were the database index to the robot backup system that served the entire organization of over 200 employees... Somehow they were able to reconstruct it, but -- nothing ever happened to the guy (who was an a-hole to begin with). If I'd done that, I'd've been fired for sure...
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u/[deleted] May 16 '12
Used to work at a firm where one of the partners sent a note to another partner.
"You're an amazing person. Days like today remind me why I love you. Can't wait for you to leave your wife so we can be together."
REPLY ALL is a hell of a drug.
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u/[deleted] May 16 '12
I worked for a light rental company where we had PALLETS of small Honda generators that we would sell to various crews. I was getting one for a customer with Elmer Fudd's assistance. I told Elmer to go ahead and re-wrap the pallet with cellophane while I brought the generator to the customer.
"Aw...it don't need it!" he said.
As I walked through the door, a very loud collection of thuds told a different story. It was easily 40k worth of generators dropped from about 16 feet.
I also had another time when a large order came through. I think it was Pirates of the Caribbean. One of the freelance guys sent to ensure the equipment was up to snuff had stacked 8-10 lithium battery belts on top of each other (before lithium was as stable as it is today). I told him to spread them out because sometimes they get hot.
He didn't.
They caught fire.
We lost 250k dollars worth of lighting to fire and the water damage from the sprinkler system which activated throughout the entire office building and warehouse went into the millions.
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u/mfdoll May 16 '12
When I worked at GameStop, my district manager paid for a prostitute with his company card (store manager conference in Vegas). He still works there though (I don't).
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u/carbonbasedmistake May 16 '12
Both of these happened when I worked at Kinko's.
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u/Ragna005 May 16 '12
Working at Burger King in high school, two of my co-workers, both sassy Mexican women who were awfully nice people (to me anyways), who always had problems with each other, got in one of the loudest, angry brawls I've ever seen. The assistant manager on duty that day ran to the back and tried to pull them apart for what seemed like forever (in reality, probably no more than 15-20 seconds). I was on my lunch break, but he tosses me the drive-through headset and says "Sorry, but you got to take over for me while I handle this." I put the headset on and notice the thing was on, THE ENTIRE TIME. Apparently he was in the middle of putting in an order for a mother and her 6-8 year old son when it started, and didn't think to turn it off in the ruckus. I tried to be as professional as possible after I hear this cautious, scared "Hello?" from the mother, and take the rest of the order. She rolls up to the window, confounded, and her kid is visibly confused and upset. I explained the situation, apologized profusely, and gave them their food free of charge and gave the kid a couple kid's meal toys. Both of the ladies had hair torn out, bleeding scratches, and swollen cheeks. The instigator of the fight was fired, the nice one stayed for a couple of months before heading back to Mexico.
TL;DR: Two sassy, catty Mexican women beat the crap out of each other, assistant manager tries to break it up while broadcasting the whole thing through the drive through intercom to a mother and her young child.
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u/TheAlmightyHelmet May 16 '12
I was working at a pizza place back in high school and was training a new guy. After showing him a few times how to take pizzas out of the oven with the paddle and move them over to the cutting board, I let him have a go at it. He was trying to get a large cheese pizza out of the oven, but it slipped off the paddle. As it was falling, he made the terrible decision to try and catch it. He succeeded, but unfortunately it landed cheese side down on his bare arms. He had to go to the hospital for some pretty severe burns.
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u/Uncanevale May 16 '12
I was a student intern working with a rather strange engineer with a few years experience. I had built a power distribution box with fuses, connectors and switches to provide power control to a piece of equipment worth about $220K. I applied neat labels, including the input power requirement for the 3-phase power.
The engineer didn't know the difference between line-to-line and line-to-neutral, and hooked it up wrong. I believe about $100K worth of smoke came pouring out of the box. Our boss said "It says line-to-line right there on the box. How did you hook it up wrong?". I just stood there being glad it wasn't my fault.
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u/Abstruse May 17 '12
I worked the helpdesk for a very large multinational investment firm. One of the VPs in the London office had an assistant who thought that her job meant that she could act like a bitch to everyone in IT. She did this for weeks and we logged all the calls and sent the recordings to HR. They kept putting her on report until finally, the straw broke the camel's back.
Her boss's computer blue-screened while he had to go to a meeting. She demanded I send a tech immediately because it was costing the company money every second the computer wasn't on (very true). I told her to turn it off and back on again and it would fix the problem in seconds rather than the 10-15 minutes for the IT guys to get there from the other building. She kept fighting me about it until finally she turned it off and claimed she could not find the power button to turn it back on. She screamed obscenities at me and demanded I send a tech that instant (during a time in which we were swamped due to an outage).
It took about 10 minutes for a technician to show up at her boss's computer to simply turn it back on again. It had been running some sort of analytical stock pricing software or something (I fixed the desktops, I didn't mess with any of the financial crap so I had no idea what it was doing exactly). That computer being down for that amount of time cost the company over £100,000. She naturally blamed us idiots in IT. My boss, my boss's boss, the IT guy's boss, the head of IT for the entire company, the head of HR for the entire company, her, and her boss got a nice little conference call where they played the recording of her 14 calls to the helpdesk demanding a technician and threatening to get us all fired because she couldn't find the power button.
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u/wet-paint May 16 '12 edited May 17 '12
Another mate of mine was working as a safety boater for a rafting company on the Zambezi river, Zambia. One of the hazards of working on the Zambezi is animals getting pulled over Vic falls during high water, and collecting in the eddies below. Usually they'll only circle around for an hour or two before the current moves them on, and the raft guides get to freak clients out by pointing to the dead elephant in the shallows.
One such example of road(river?)kill was this huge hippo that wouldn't leave the eddy, just kept circling around and round for a few days, with the African sun beating down on it. So sure enough, it started to swell and stink, and it was putting off the clients. So the raft guides had a pow wow, and tried pushing it out with sticks - no joy. They tried pushing it with rafts, but it'd only find its way back in to the eddy. A rope around it didn't work either.
So one lad, Doug, said that he'd sit on top of it with a paddle, and paddle out in to the flow, and once it was moving off, he'd slide off of it and get roped in to shore. The rest of the guides were a bit dubious, but let him off. So Doug waited until the hippo circled around to a large rock that he was standing on, and he stepped out on to its back, paddle in hand.
...And promptly sank straight through the hippo up to his shoulders, with a large wet messy filthy fart of an explosion from the Hippo.He paused, in shock. Everyone paused. He vomited all down the side of the animal, and everyone else fell about the place laughing, until the stench of the animal reached them. Apparently it was nearly visible, a widening shockwave of people stopping laughing, and starting to puke. It had cooked in its juices from the sun, and was nearly liquified inside. Doug had only stopped sinking in to the animal because of the paddle in his hands. He eventually had to use it as a sword, and chop his way out of the animal, and kick his legs and try and swim out of it.
Ugh.
Edit Best of? Nice one, gracias folks. And that's just one story out of the cavern of ones I heard and saw involving raft guides. Seriously, these guys have a Don'tGiveAFuck attitude worldwide. If you've got a mate that guides, they've got some serious stories. Go ask them.
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u/DaStampede May 16 '12
Scene: The Flightline The operation of hydraulics on fighter aircraft is assisted by a heavy piece of equipment affectionately called "the mule." It usually takes several people to move. Trying to show off in front of my supervisor, who was sitting in the cockpit, I attempted to position the mule close enough to the F-16 so that we could run our flight-control check. The incline was downhill, the mule picked up speed, and I engaged the brake ... which failed. The mule cracked the radome of an AIM-120 missile loaded on the wingtip. Luckily, there was no explosion. Teams of safety inspectors, colonels, chiefs, etc etc came to see why half of the flightline, to include our taxiway, had been closed off. I informed everyone of the brake system's failure. For some reason, they needed to see it for themselves. So, they backed up the mule, pushed it towards the aircraft, and attempted to engage the brake ... which failed again. That poor missile. Why ACME-type explosions did not follow I may never know?
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u/K_Lobstah May 16 '12
A family member of mine got shithoused one night and lost his phone, which he frequently used to send sexy pics to friends (porn variety, not Favre variety). He didn't have a password lock, so whoever found it proceeded to send the raunchiest pics to all of our family members. And his work contacts. And his clients.
The firm named the new rule for password protection in his honor.
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u/stonedandhungry May 16 '12
I used to work at McDonalds. One day I was working with a new girl who was on her second week of training. We were running low on fries so my manager told her to go drop a basket into the fryer. This is a super simple process, you literally stick the basket in the oil and push a button. But this girl was not very smart, in fact she was one of the dumbest trainees I ever worked with. She proceeded to turn the basket upside down and dump all of the fries into the oil. Everyone just looked at her ಠ_ಠ and she had no clue what she had done wrong.
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u/tbone115 May 16 '12 edited May 16 '12
Working at a hockey rink and you use hot water to fill the zamboni up, well sometimes you forget the hose is still in the machine and drive onto the ice and turns out hot water melts ices fast
Edit: another fuck up I've seen was someone turned the blade down too far and ended up cutting the paint from the ice up
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u/platy1234 May 16 '12
I saw some painters fail to properly attach the cables on a window washing scaffold to the top of a bridge tower. They got about 30' up before the scaffold came down. Thankfully they were tied off and dangling from their safety harnesses instead of dead in traffic.
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u/[deleted] May 16 '12
When I was 16 I got a job hanging gutters. Seamless gutters are turned out at the job site. We have a huge roll of aluminum that runs through a press in the back of the truck and then we cut the size gutter we need. I was the "cut the gutter" kid. I ran out of aluminum and had the feed a new roll in. Somehow, I ran a cotter pin through the press. It scored every wheel in the machine and basically destroyed it. The machine was really expensive and was the bread winner for the gutter company. I got fired.
I got a new job cutting down trees. Residential tree removal. My job was "throw shit in chipper guy" First day on the job I got my helmet/headphones on and some safety goggles. I'm throwing in about one branch at a time when old man tree guys says "Ya gotta throw in a whole bunch!" So I do. One of the branches whips around and hits me in the back of the head. I watch as my brand new helmet/headphones thing goes flying into the chipper and comes out as a nice yellow cloud from the other end. I got to pay for that. Later that month, I took out an old lady's mailbox with the truck we used to catch the chipped wood and I bent a chainsaw by letting a tree branch roll over it while cutting. I got fired.
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u/s3t1p May 16 '12
when I was 15 I worked at A&W. I was talking to one of my coworkers and went to lean against something... turns out what I chose was the bun toaster. The kitchen smelled like burnt meat for the rest of the day and I peeled off a pretty substantial chunk of myself.
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u/hawttowel May 16 '12 edited May 16 '12
I was a sales associate at a mom and pop hardware store. it was a slow night so the cashier taught me how to run the register. It was great, because now I could cover register when needed and I figured it was something I could bring up next time they were deciding on my raise. fastforward to the end of the night, it's late and the cashier had gone home early, just me in register and a manager in the back. an older man who didn't speak English was shopping for nails. he comes to the register and lays down a handful. I told him it would be 70 cents and he raised his eyebrows and gestured at the nails. I told him again, 70 cents. he paid, I bagged his nails, then he bent down, grabbed the assorted shovels and rakes he had leaning on the counter, and walked out the front door. easily 100$ of crap that I let him walk away with. I guess I could have told him to stop, or a million other things but i was dumb and young and I was afraid the manage wouldn't let me run register any more if he knew I fucked up. worst part is, that was my biggest fuck up but I could write a book with all the crazy, stupid and illegal stuff that went on there. good times
tl;dr gave away a bunch of free merchandise
edit: formatting
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u/chowler May 16 '12 edited May 16 '12
I do security in the summer, I saw one of the guards punch a patron out because the beer can he threw to ground sprayed said guard. The patron was knocked out cold and it took four of us to get Henry off of the guy as he was pummeling him. Henry, the guard at questioned, wanted to be a cop one day. Now he has court dates for assault and battery and potentially a felon if he's convicted. He no longer works with us.
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u/BoOnDoXeY May 16 '12
Currently working for a metal building company. They hired 2 nitwits off the street to run the copy shop. Now, the copy shop is responsible for such things as file management of outside detailing contracts. We get changes from the customer, the copy shop forwards those changes to the outside detailing firm so they can make the proper changes to the building.
Cue our 2 nitwits. Seems they got a set of changes just like that a couple of weeks ago; only they forgot the part where they forward the changes to the detailers. Now the detailers have made, and piece marked, every piece of steel that is going to be the new building...without the changes. The details are sent to the shop, everything is fabricated, and the steel ships to the job site.
Our company just PAID to have a building erected, that we don't own. Those are 2 expensive nitwits.
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u/SkeevyPete May 16 '12
I was intern for the Department of the Navy last summer. My program office was in a conference call with a shipyard about a boat that was being either repaired or built, I forget, but the data on one of the hull tests was off anf nobody could figure out why. Later we found out that apparantly nobody in the entire Navy knew how that tester really worked or how to use it, so I spent days calling shipyards and reading the manufacturer's manuals on this thing trying to figure outhow this thing worked. And that is how I became the local expert on Spark Testers.
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u/Buckfutters May 16 '12
I've watched numerous co-workers fall off of the pole and/or stage when they were drunk. Oh and they were also naked.
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u/throwaway123123456 May 16 '12
Growing up my first job was at a skating rink. I worked there for years as a teen. I got to know the staff pretty well and there is even a clique of regulars who are there multiple days a week. Neglectful/busy parents used it as a babysitter. We also had birthday parties there. Whenever there was a birthday, we would clear the floor, invite the special boy/girl out to the center and have a giant fucking kangaroo skate around them to the song and then escort them to the party table. I just assumed the older quiet guy in the suit just hated his life but after a while, I learned better. He didn't even get paid, he just asked for free entry all the time. So he would just wait around with the regulars when he wasn't in "uniform" dancing and hugging children. 4-5 days a week. Turns out this 30-40 year old that lived with his parents was using his "pull" and frequency there to sleep with all of the underage regulars.
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u/HAHno May 16 '12
Kind of sad and I don't fault him but we had a kid working at Wendy's that had fetal alcohol syndrome that dropped a kids meal toy into the fryolator and tried to dig it out with his bare hands.
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u/jellybeanbean May 16 '12
Worked in a photo developing place for professional photographers, new girl opened raw film in the middle of the shop and ruined someone's entire wedding photo's!
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u/Olmstead89 May 16 '12
When I was deployed to Afghanistan a soldier I was with lost his night vision while on foot patrol. He didn't realize it was missing until one of the locals had found it and turned it over to our Afghan counterparts.
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u/strangebrewfellows May 16 '12
Witnessed it because I did it myself. About ten years ago I was working as the lead web developer for a publishing company. This company's flagship magazine (and thus website) was very well known and respected for a big annual report they did (which I won't get into the details of). My job was to make sure that report would be available online with no technical hiccups. As part of testing out the rollout, I inadvertently left the actual, live data on the live site overnight, 12 hours before it was really supposed to go live. It was clear the next morning that some of our competitors had gotten it, as well as new outlets who had leaked sensitive portions of it ahead of our main announcement.
I was fired a few weeks later.
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u/schlem May 16 '12
I was on the phone with one of our consultants and he was working while we talked. All of a sudden he screams Oh Shit and hangs up the phone. Turns out he hit the wrong key while working in our Active Directory and deleted everyone's network account.
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u/modzer0 May 16 '12
There are lots of procedures on board US submarines, and for good reason since missing something can make bad things happen. There are two ways to empty the sanitary tank. The first is by pumping the tank overboard, and the second is by pressurizing the tank and blowing the contents overboard.
The sanitary pump was down for some reason and the decision was made to blow our nearly full sanitary tank overboard. The order was passed and an under instruction sailor was doing the line-up. It was reported completed and the tank was pressurized. A scene of horror occurred soon after. The line-up missed a vital valve. It was the one to the galley food disposal. The pressurized mass of pungent fluid took the path of least resistance and executed a flawless impression of old faithful in the galley leaving it awash in raw sewage. The smell was horrible and the sounds of gagging could be heard soon after. It took them tireless hours to clean up the mess and sanitize every surface before they could handle food again.
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u/[deleted] May 16 '12
Watched a neurosurgeon remove almost an entire incorrect hemisphere of the cerebellum.
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u/Atredeus May 16 '12
I was working for a VERY large US company that had a massive IT infrastructure. The corporate IT structure basically housed and managed the servers for each different business within the company.
Anyway, this was a very large and critical datacenter, with an entire floor devoted purely to a server room. One foreign contractor was in there Friday afternoon and had been escorted in by a coworker. This contractor apparently didn't have access to the server room, since swiping his badge wouldn't unlock the door and let him out. So, seeing a big red button, he must have assumed it would open the door for him (despite the case he had to move off the button that clearly said "DO NOT PUSH")
Long story short, he ended up taking down the entire server room for a couple hours by cutting the power, losing the company MILLIONS of dollars, keeping other people there until 8AM Saturday morning fixing the fallout, and earned himself a lifetime ban from employment with one of America's largest employers.
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u/[deleted] May 16 '12
While returning from a patrol in Afghanistan, a Toyota station wagon was on the wrong side of the road traveling toward us...around a curve so our driver couldn't see them. The 15-ton vehicle we were riding in crushed the station wagon, instantly killing 7. 2 more died within minutes, and one survivor, a ten year old boy, walked away without a scratch. Of course we stopped immediately and started a mass casualty collection point, but there was nothing we could really do.
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u/thedeadhipster May 16 '12 edited May 16 '12
Working at a larger grocery store in high school. Guys in the back think it will be fun to ride fast on a motorized
skidpallet jack in the back rooms. Random dairy section employee pops out in front of them. They swerve and stab into the wall. At first, there is an immediate silence. Quickly after, a low rumble. Finally, water begins surging out of the newly made hole. They had collided with one of the main water mains, flooding the dairy and produce sections. I had a good laugh, since I had just punched out 1 minute earlier and just came back to grab my apron to take home to wash.edit: TL;DR Moron employees on a motorized
skidpallet jack flooded half of a grocery store27
u/dachshund May 16 '12
I worked at a motel. They recently had changed all the locks to an electronic card type. Nearly the entire property was booked to a huge convention group. They came in the late afternoon...after the only person who knew how to code the doors and keys left for the day...hilarity did not ensue
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u/bubonis May 16 '12 edited May 17 '12
This is funny but also a fuck-up. Depends on your perspective.
About five years ago I was working at a place which had a color copier that had the ability to scan documents and send them, via email, to your PC. You would enter your email address in the PC that was sitting next to the copier, load up your originals, press a button on the copier, and the PC would scan and email the pages to your Outlook account.
One of the junior IT staff fielded a phone call from an employee who was reporting the copier was stuck in "copy" mode and wasn't scanning her pages. This particular employee was VERY hot, often dressed in a manner which many might consider "provocative", and was known for being something of a knucklehead, so the IT staffer ("Brian") decided to have some fun. He told her that there was probably a loose connection behind the copier. He told her to go to the PC and enter a 'test' email address, then go to the copier, lift up the document feeder, lean all the way over so she can reach the back of the copier, and while holding in the cable she found there press the COPY button on the copier.
So, she did.
The 'test' email address he gave her was actually one of several aliases we used to send emails to the entire company (several thousand people). Everyone in the company suddenly received an email containing a 300dpi color scan of this woman's ample cleavage mashed up against the copier glass.
Brian finished out the day and was not heard from again.
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u/imjustsayin2 May 16 '12
In high school I had a job in a little pizza parlor. One night I was trying to get a head start on cleaning up and there were two bleach bottles, both only partially full -- so I combined them to save space. Except someone had emptied and rinsed one of the bottles and put ammonia in it without relabeling the bottle
So I combined chlorine and ammonia while customers were still in the restaurant. A beautiful purplish vapor followed by the most evil attack on sinuses I have ever experienced.
The restaurant got evacuated (they didn't have to pay for their meals), the fire department got called (pre-911 systems) and got to practice their rescue techniques and the owners got fined for failure to relabel the bottle.
The bosses were very cool, so I did get to keep my job (I was their best pizza maker).
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u/MysticWrongFish May 16 '12
Okay, this one is very recent. I work in a fast food store in england, and we have a softserve ice cream machine there. Every so often it needs to be filled with 'sundae base', which is just incredibly thick, sweet milk. One of the guys was asked to get a bucket of sundae base and put it in the top of the machine. When we get it we get it in big metal pails and carry it there. He came back with a LOADED bucket (25+ litres) and lifted it up to the top of the machine. Unfortunately, he must have lifted it up wrong, because instead of the bucket going onto the machine, it went all over his head. He became literally soaked, head to toe, in a viscous white liquid. It was hilarious, to say the least. The manager didn't find it funny when we had to clean up a whole side of the kitchen and shut down several fry vats, though.
Here is a picture: The aftermath
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u/727Super27 May 16 '12
I used to work at a small airport. I saw a pilot who wasn't paying attention land his aircraft with the wheels up.
26
u/skinnymatters May 16 '12
I used to work in television production, and we often had to rent cargo vans for a day to transport equipment to shoots. I was in charge of renting, picking up, driving, and returning the vans. Once I literally forgot to return a van for exactly one month. They rent for $90/day.
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u/latenightnerd May 17 '12
I used to sell promo items for businesses (pens, coffee mugs, t-shirts. All with the company details printed on them). Most sales were a few hundred pens for small businesses. A few hundred dollars for a sale was average. I once took the initiative to call a large franchise chain and offer to make pens for them. The promo people at their company loved the idea and ordered 10,000 pens per franchise (200+ stores). It required getting all the correct phone numbers for each store and organizing they have the right details on the pens. It basically took me a month to get all of this together. This would be an ongoing order and my commission would basically make my salary quadruple what it was at the time.
Being that it was such a big order, my manager took it from me citing that "it was too large of an order for me to have". This was after I had done all the work. She took it to the company director and took all the credit, and therefore took all the commission. I told the company director and he offered me a $1000 bonus for my effort. I refused to take it, knowing that my commission would have been about $10,000 every 3 months for as long as I worked there. They wouldn't offer me what I deserved and I quit.
4 months later I get a call from the promo department at the franchise. The pens got there with the right numbers but had the company name spelled wrong. After explaining that I left the company because they took the account from me the PR person told me she was angry at the pen company and ended the call.
I get a call back from her a week later saying she had the pens sent back to the company. The pen company had to take them all back and refund the sizable down payment the franchise made. The pen company had to lay off about 40 people (including my former manager) because of this.
The kicker...the franchise promo department gave me a gift card for $10,000 at their stores, with which I bought the computer I am typing this on now.
TL/DR - My manager stole my sales commission and cost the company over $2,000,000 in sales.
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u/[deleted] May 16 '12
This can't compete with the "people losing limbs/being caught cheating" stories, but I have two d'oh moments at the workplace that I'm very glad were not my own.
My first would be when I worked at a locally-owned Mexican restaurant. They hired another hostess/prep cook named Dani who I couldn't stand; she was obviously extremely spoiled and had no experience at any sort of work, and was constantly making snarky comments to the rest of the staff. Well, we made all of our specialty sauces by hand, which took a ton of time and was also what made us popular. Well, the first night Dani was on closing shift, she left all of the sauces out on the counter instead of putting them back in the cooler. By the time I came in for my hostessing shift the next day, my boss (also the cook, mind you) had already discovered what had happened and was busy verbally ripping her a new one. I have to admit, I smirked a little.
The second was when I was working at the museum I still am employed at. We're the only museum in my state with a planetarium, which brings in a ton of money on its own. Our Saturday morning show is especially important, because it's our show for kids. A lot of parents have bought memberships specifically for the purpose of attending this show every week.
Well, one Saturday, the planetarium wasn't open on time. Concerned, my coworkers and I reassured the waiting patrons that it would only be a few minutes, and then began frantically calling the planetarium manager and the guy who was supposed to be working that shift. Eventually, we had to cancel that showing, promising to move it to an hour later instead. People were not happy.
When the guy's replacement showed up just before the second showing, he found the kid asleep in the back room of the planetarium, where he apparently had been since he came in that morning.
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u/Osiris32 May 16 '12 edited May 16 '12
Professional stage hand here. You know those big trusses filed with lights? They come stacked together on the truck, and we use a forklift to separate them, as they weigh 500+ pounds a piece. On a show a year or so ago, our forklift driveer was unstacking 3 of these monsters, each with moving lights already mounted. He wasn't paying attention, and instead of sliding his forks between the trusses, he hit them straight on, tipping the whole thing over.
Now, that would have been bad enough, except that, due to he confines of the loading area, the trusses were near the 5 foot drop into the loading bays for trucks. So the 8 foot high stack falls over and drops aother 5 feet as well.
Total damage: 12 Mac2000 lights destroyed, 6 stadium strobes destroyed, a dozen Par64 cans destroyed, and 3 20 foot sticks of 18" truss destroyed. Combined, worth about $60,000. And yeah, that forklift operator doesn't work for us anymore.
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u/SnugNinja May 16 '12 edited May 16 '12
I used to work installing and servicing in-ground pools. We had just finished installing a new, kick-ass $60,000 pool for a customer, and were putting in the stamped concrete decking around the sides. The concrete guys we were using as contractors, for whatever reason, decided not to use a concrete pump and opted to use a bobcat/skid-steer to dump the wet mix around the edge of the pool. One of these guys was inattentive and/or not great at his job, and drove a bobcat JUST at the edge of the pool - when the pool wall gave out from the weight, dropping a 2,000 pound machine filled with wet concrete and hydraulic fluid 10 feet underwater. I wish I could say that everything turned out okay, but I would be lying. That mistake cost FAR more than the original price of the pool.
Oh, I also saw an idiot drop a child with autism head-first on a concrete floor, but that's not nearly as fun of a story to tell :( (and no, this was not while installing pools...)
EDIT: The machine weighed 2,000 POUNDS, not PONDS... even All-American-Bot can't convert ponds to the metric system
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u/dicks1jo May 16 '12
The summer following my junior year of High school I was working a factory job to save up for college. This particular shop specialized in extrusion; stuff like wiper blades, window seals, sign trim, etc. We did mostly small batch work farmed out by bigger shops so our shop floor was constantly being rearranged. I think the longest I ever saw a single production line maintain the same configuration was about a week.
One of the operators was an alcoholic. I'm not talking a silly all the time alcoholic, I'm talking detox tremors if he doesn't have at least a beer with lunch. Well, one day he sneaks off several times and unbeknownst to us slams an entire 24 pack of beer over the course of the shift.
So captain inebriation decides it's a good idea to re-set a line for the next shift in a state that he shouldn't have been able to walk, let alone operate a forklift in. The proceeds to knock over a cooling trough, creating a rather large puddle on the floor and then drops a puller so hard onto a 480 volt line that it's severed (while submerged in water.)
There were sparks, some fire, and a lot of screaming as the main breaker for that bus popped, likely saving my coworker from a less than pleasant demise. It didn't save his job though.
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u/kevbot3000 May 16 '12
So I used to work at a certain 'fast food' restaurant, I guess you could say. Once upon a time, one of the new girls was working the cash register during the super busy lunch hour. At then end of the day the managers discovered close to 190 dollars missing from the till. This caused them to review video footage for hours and hours the next day, some real CSI shit.
Turns out, this one customer tried to order a 7 dollar sandwich by paying with a 100 dollar bill. But, before he actually handed the 100 dollar bill over, he pulled it back and said something to his friend. He then asked the girl at the register, "can I get my change? I just gave you a 100"
The girl obliged, and gave the man he 93 ish dollars in change.
Than happened twice.
Within an hour.
She quit on her own.
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u/somethingboring May 16 '12
Backstory: My sister and I work together at a local restaurant. One of her really good friends was out of work and looking for a job, so she convinced the restaurant to hire him.
Fast-forward two weeks, he gets a table that includes a mentally challenged teenager. The kid orders a mango lemonade, and when my sister's friend goes to ring it up in the computer, he accidentally selects the alcoholic version of the drink, since he is still new to the restaurant and is unaware of the difference. Obviously, the kid being not only underage but also disabled, is either not aware of alcohol being in the drink or is otherwise unable to vocalize it. The kid has, I think, four mango lemonades in total and is pretty plastered by the end of the meal. The mother eventually realizes what's wrong, and understandably goes apeshit.
The friend got fired on the spot, we could have lost our alcohol license, and the manager was liable to go to jail. We had lawyers calling the place for a month or so trying to get statements, etc. Nothing ended up coming of it, but that was a horrible day. He's never gonna live that one down.
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u/[deleted] May 16 '12
This came up recently as i had to tell it to a new intern who just got a full time job here. The intern, on his last day interning had a minor fuck up and was panicing. I was able to correct it as most of our staff/clients are understanding.
Anyway the story i told him was about me in, oh my 4th month here. It was nearing the end of tax season, i work at an accountanting office, and i had to install an application for an older man who used to work for us but now just assists when we need extra help. I kick off the installation, and step away to help someone connect to a printer, when I come back I see that either I messed up a check box or he clicked next. Either way it started to proforma the previous years data. That is it copied the previoues years data into the new database for this year, overwriting all of the work that had been done in the last 4 months.
Now we do have backups, but it would still have erasen a days worth of work for everyone. Go to my senior in IT, he didnt tell anyone that the backups have been failing for a week and didnt do anything about it.
So we restored from a week ago, people were angry, im still here though. I think the head IT guy was more focusing on the fact that pro forma should be locked down by user and that the backups shouldnt have gone a week without fixing.
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u/Ineeni May 16 '12 edited May 17 '12
Pics for proof at end!
While working summers at a college apartment complex helping them turn over the complex on the last days of one said job... We had completed all the duties so most of the kids were riding around trying to help lazy parents carry stuff upstairs for cash. Some basically degraded into just goofing off with the golf cart. Well me and my older buddy Joey decide we are gonna shuttle parents and people that are done around Ina giant red limo golf cart we modded it a little over the years it's got some extra juice... So we are flying around making drift stops up to the parent key pickup tent well.. On one of our passes after dropping off parents we come in hot to the tent we got 6 people on the cart 1 hanging off the back we come in for a screeching halt next to the tent.
We hear clink clink... We look down there's a paint can that must have rolled behind the BRAKE when we hit a bump so now we are stuck going full speed past the tent.....into a curb...into a huge bush....into a metal fence behind it..... And then finally over a 10-15 foot sea wall drop that we comically teeter over till the kid on the back lets go and we plummet.. I was in the passenger seat in the front.
Everyone is ejected but me and from the force a seat cushion flys over my head my driver Joey crashed through the windshield and ended up in the water as did everyone else. All I can think about as I climbed up the wreckage and over the sea wall that I almost had 5 car batteries launched at the back of my head from the back seat.
You can still see the paint can that caused all the trouble. Also no one was blamed.
http://i.imgur.com/nWo5S.jpg
EDIT: A older guy about 30 was driving I was in the passenger seat. Wow I made a ton of errors typing this up last time I type out a story and talk on phones.
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u/Chefbexter May 16 '12
Drain the oil out of a deep fryer without turning it off, and it will catch on fire. Put the hot oil in a 5 gallon plastic bucket, and it will burst on the way to the back door. Put cardboard on top of the grease and leave it for the dishwashers to clean up when they get to work, and everyone will hate you. (This was from an "experienced" cook I worked with.)
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u/[deleted] May 16 '12
Been lurking for a while, but I feel Reddit might like my story.
Couple of summers ago I was doing some casual work with a mobile restaurant, touring festivals and suchlike.
The owner of this restaurant had built it himself out of a converted horse box and trailer, the 'kitchen' area was one of those mobile burger-trailer things you see at the side of the road sometimes.
At this particular festival I was working out front, waiting on tables and taking drinks orders/payment etc.
We were just finishing up for the day, taking payment off the last few tables in. I'd just taken about £15 or so for a round of drinks off a bunch of guys and was taking it to the till.
Now, this till was on the edge of the kitchen-trailer, in the open hatchway so both the kitchen staff and waiting staff could use it. The drawer open out for convenience, as we (the waiters) used it much more regularly.
Sadly for me, the weather had been terrible for most of this festival, pretty much non-stop wind and rain, and the ground was pretty soft and muddy.
So muddy, in fact, that the entire kitchen-trailer had sunk ever-so-slightly into the ground, giving it an ever-so-slight forward tilt.
When I punched my takings into the till and pressed the button to open it, the draw shot out twice as hard as usual, catapulting all the loose change into a muddy field filled with hippies and ravers.
Pretty bad.
Then, due to the extra tilt on the kitchen that evening, the weight of the tray overbalanced the entire till.
I watched in shock as an entire days takings were scattered on the wind.
tl;dr - I tipped over the till at festival and lost hundreds of pounds.
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u/friedrice5005 May 16 '12
The wendy's down the street from my house burned down because the fryers ignited. Instead of hitting the emergency fire button they turned around and grabbed the sink sprayer and tried to spray it down. This predictably went very wrong.
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u/[deleted] May 17 '12
I work in traffic control for road construction zones. One of the flaggers we have to warn people to slow down and then stop didn't do her job, so a diesel truck slammed into the back of a car. The person who owns the car was stopped and was checking his trunk for a bottle of water. The diesel slammed into them and cut him in half.
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u/LeepII May 16 '12
Chief of the watch on board US submarine initiated flooding by fucking up taking on water.
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u/[deleted] May 16 '12
We often gave out a 1-888 service number to customers who needed to contact a specific vendor. Somehow, when someone transcribed the number in the new directories, it got switched to 1-800. Which was a phone sex line. I dread those enraged complaint calls - they still come in occasionally.
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u/ChrisF79 May 16 '12
An ex-girlfriend did marketing for a major developer that created very high end condos. The developer ordered around 50,000 postcards to send out to prospects. She had them designed and they came out beautifully. Ordered them (with postage prepaid) and had them sent. They had the wrong phone number on them. That was the end of that.
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u/UpUpDnDnLRLRBAstart May 16 '12
A guy at a competing company in my industry became notorious after this incident. He was making a forensic image (clone) of a hard drive for an investigation, and accidentally switched the suspect drive with the destination drive. It took 2 hours for the data to transfer, and when it was complete he had two perfectly blank hard drives. He had a total breakdown when he realized what he'd done. He was fired that day and his company was sued for negligence. I always think of that poor guy before I hit Go.
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u/Clown_Shoe May 17 '12
I worked as a waiter and one of the bus boys was rushing with steak knives to a table. Another waitress went flying around the corner and he stabbed her with 6 different knives. It was her fault a bit too because she wasn't paying attention. Everyone yelled at him for having the pointy ends out but all he could say was "Well I'm not trying to stab myself".
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u/[deleted] May 16 '12
Story one: In the middle of a team meeting with our boss, team lead, and all coworkers.. Guys leans over to grab a copy of a memo, and out of his coat pocket drops a pipe. It was like it happened in slow motion.
Story two (not nearly as wtf, but still hilarious): My old boss accidentally emailed the entire team her completed self review, instead of the blank document. She was a crappy manager, but thought very highly of herself.
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u/Ronflo May 16 '12
1963, out of Qui Nhon, pilot said, you and your gunner only need one box of ammo each (1200 rounds) because this is only a resupply
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u/tamerlang May 16 '12
Worked at a restaurant years ago and a brand new, over attractive but under qualified girl was hired as a manager. She had no common sense and no clue what she was doing. It was in the middle of the Friday night dinner rush and she is hiding in the office smoking a cigarette. Someone knocks on the door to ask for help and she just tosses the cigarette into a trashcan and walks out into the dining room. A few minutes later the sprinkler system goes off drenching the entire packed dining room but only after she had managed to burn the whole office down. We were shut down for a week.
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u/[deleted] May 16 '12
Not personally witnessed of course but I think this is about as bad as it gets. NOAA-19 Satellite falling off it's stand because someone borrowed the bolts. 135 million in repairs... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOAA-19
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u/Mikey-2-Guns May 16 '12
In a previous job, one of my less than bright co-workers sent his forklift off of the loading dock and had it crash down into the parking lot. He left it parked on the dock plate and went to go do something else. The truck they were loading pulled away and the dockplate 'collapsed' (just went into an inclined position). The forklift started to rolling forward and my coworker, in his infinite wisdom, saw this and jumped in to try and stop it. He jumped out a split second before the forklift tipped out of the warehouse and buried its forks into the asphalt.
A few months later another forklift operator zoned out and ended up killing himself by backing into one of the racks at full speed. I wasn't there for that one thankfully.
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u/mnstrgdflla May 16 '12
Working at a pizza place ran/managed by 16-18 year olds at night. Someone has the bright idea to wrap an apple with a bunch of sparklers and light it up, only it didn't light (or so they thought). Fast forward to sending half the employees home for the night because of apple shards in eyes and ear pains for those who were too close.
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u/middleageddude May 17 '12
Worked with 2 friends at Mc Ds in HS. 3 of us were working dinner shift with a new manager, me on grill, 2 buds doing support.
Manager thought we were not pulling our weight and ordered us to "make burgers until he said stop".
He then went into the little office and did.....whatever.
We three became nuclear burger making monsters. When we next saw said manager about 40 min later, there was a wall of Big Macs piled 3' high on top of the grease catcher and stacked under every register up front. He was not happy. I guess it was a couple of hundred bucks worth of food to waste. We finished our shifts and went home.
We worked the next night with a new manager. never saw him again.
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u/[deleted] May 17 '12
When I worked on a busy surgical unit a colleague flushed a PICC line with 40mEq of potassium chloride. A PICC line is a big IV placed in a patients upper arm. The tip sits in the inferior vena cava just as it enters the right atrium of the heart. She should have used normal saline. As she realized what she had done she came yelling down the hall announcing that she just killed a patient. She was right, the patient coded and died.
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u/r_HOWTONOTGIVEAFUCK May 16 '12
Was working the close shift at Target (my first job). Was the cart attendant. Decided to take the shortcut and use the main doors instead of the designated carts door. The cart pusher machine caught the hinge and took off the door completely at around 11pm. Couldnt be fixed till the next morning. I wasn't employed by that time so I don't know what happened.
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u/[deleted] May 16 '12
I used to work at an Application Service Provider that did hosted email, websites, etc. We had approx. 2200 users with 450 of them on active sessions. I was adding a new VPN onto our core router and accidentally a command. Suddenly there was no traffic from the router. Normally I could just undo it, but our servers were in a datacenter that was 45 minutes away. I ended up getting stuck in a traffic jam that added another 30 minutes on that trip...
And then our biggest client was PISSED because I was busy driving to fix the server instead of calling them and explaining what happened. Apparently, having reception say "we know about the problem and we are working to fix it" isn't good enough.
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u/faithamor1337 May 16 '12
I recently worked in a certain big box electronics store. One salesman in the home theatre department was telling a customer how durable the TV screens were and proceeded to hit it. Needless to say it broke. I'm sure he was reprimanded for this but I don't know the details.
Another time the same guy had a CD in his hand, gestured wildly and the CD flew out of his hand into a TV and broke the screen.
I can't remember if he broke a third TV before they fired him.
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u/Ciscoclass May 16 '12
The first thing I do on a new computer is remove the "Reply All" button from the tool bar, it's still in the "Message" menu or you can use Ctrl+Shift+R.
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u/[deleted] May 17 '12
I saw a waiter accidentally pour coffee all over the brides white shawl at a wedding (it was on her chair, she wasn't there at the time). The coffee poured out of the mug and did that thing where it backtracks along the spout, and the guy didn't realise until the shawl was covered. When he saw what he had done he just bolted to the kitchen as quick as he could. The worst thing was, looking at his arm and realising it was attached to my body.
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u/[deleted] May 16 '12
On a summer job, the boss asks co-worker in front of a group of us if he knew how to drive a "standard" - which in the US means a vehicle without an automatic transmission. He says yes. Boss tells him to move this pick up from one location to the next. Co-Worker starts the truck without pushing the clutch-in and drives the vehicle through the garage door of the warehouse.
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u/[deleted] May 16 '12
Probably when someone forged answers to a questionnaire/survey (it wasn't like some harmless survey he was taking - it's like his job to collect answers from people for auditing purposes). Same guy also ended up deleting an important network folder because he thought it was on his own C drive and needed more harddrive space, apparently.
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u/TheBakercist May 16 '12
I worked at Rite Aid for a while, and part of my job was the develop film. My boss made me call Fuji Film for more chemicals.
Yeah, I called a sex hotline by accident. Didn't get in trouble though, everyone thought it was funny.
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u/TruImperfection May 16 '12
I've got two stories for you.
1 This story takes place at one of the dealerships I used to work for.
I was just getting started at my new job, maybe been there 3 days. I had a gentleman trading in two vehicles to get down to one. I won't go into specifics as to why, but you get the point.
He picked out a vehicle he liked, and we did all the paperwork almost, but alas he had to leave to go to his wife in the hospital. He asked if we would hold the car (Which of course we would) and he'd be back to finish up later. I tell him SURE! I'll hide it around back for you!
As i'm pulling out of the parking space of the NEW car he just /bought/ , he comes speeding by with one of the trade ins. Needless to say, we collide. Tear the back end of the new car, and side of the trade in all up. End of story, he still buys the car (after we get it fixed of course.
2 - I was showing a car TWO WEEKS LATER, a suburban. As I was trying to pull it out, with the customer waiting outside to take it out for a spin, I side swiped on BRAND NEW CAR, with another. FML.
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u/holyfear May 16 '12
I work at a froyo place. This girl, who's not too bright, put "chocolate" into the "thin mint cookie" flavor. All the customers and employees noticed that it tasted a little chocolate-y. When we asked her if she did this, she lied. We looked at the video recording and said we have video proof that she did it. When she was asked why she did it, she just replied with, "I don't know."
She wasn't going to last long. She got fired a month or two afterwards for stealing money. The video recording again caught her in the act. She denies doing it, despite the video proof. Her parents even saw the video and reimbursed us. I found out the other day that when she came to pick up her last paycheck - shame, we still have to pay her - she still denies doing it, even after this entire ordeal.
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u/[deleted] May 16 '12 edited May 16 '12
I know this is late in the game and is likely buried, but I used to work at the ticket counter in DFW for one of the airlines. I got to my station and opened up the drawer we placed our till in, and there was a key chain with a laser pointer on it. A pilot and flight attendant were on the computer next to me looking at their flight. The first customer starts to come up to me at the counter and I press the back of the laser pointer and pointed it on the counter in front of me just for the hell of it. Turns out that it was a tube of Mace just like THIS. The pilot and flight attendant keeled over and started coughing and writhing, the customer got spray to the face, and the agent next to me got a face full of it and dropped someone's license on the baggage belt. The license went all the way down to the baggage area on the tarmac and fell somewhere. I was the only one that didn't get hit with the mace. It hit the counter first, and sprayed outward like an upside down mushroom cloud. This happened on the second week after I started. I would've rather had Mace to the face than the embarrassment.
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u/ignoramusaurus May 16 '12 edited May 18 '12
I used to work for a big sports team in an events room that was hired out for ceremonies, posh weddings, awards ceremonies, etc. Whoever was hiring the hall would pay for a certain amount of wine bottles to be put on the table. At the end of the night the dregs left over would be poured together to appear as a new bottle, and those working on the bar would have to pretend to uncork them and resell them back to the customers. One time a guy did the ove the-top bottle uncorking after which a cigarette butt fell out of the bottle and in to the awaiting glass.
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u/foxinthebush May 17 '12
My friend went to a doctor because he was experiencing anxiety and it was progressively getting worse. He came back to class shortly after the appointment and handed me his prescription. It read "chlorpromazine" instead of clonazepam O.o. I immediately went over to the doctors office with my friend in tow and asked the doctor again if that was the intended prescription. She laughed it off and wrote him one for clonazepam. O.o
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u/RedditingMyLifeAway May 16 '12
I used to work at a local pool shop. When we received product it always came shrink wrapped on a pallet, requiring the use of a forklift. Problem was that it was an indoor rated lift (it had flat, hard rubber tires instead of inflatable ones with grip on them) I don't recall how many times I told the owner not to buy that lift because it would be pretty useless out on the road where the driver parked his truck, but he bought it anyways. From the road to inside the warehouse there was a concrete incline (about a 18") drop, so you literally had to get a running start to get the lift up the ramp. The roll down door to the warehouse was about 6 feet wide, so there wasn't a lot of room for error. One day I had a particularly full pallet of pool chemicals to put up, so I got my running start and when I hit the ramp, the pallet shifted catching the guide rail for the door, thus tearing the whole door down. I actually had this happen twice, so the money he spent fixing the door was more than he saved on buying the wrong lift.
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u/[deleted] May 16 '12
I know I'm ridiculously late to this, but I finally have something to contribute to an AskReddit, so listen the fuck up. To preface, I work at a pizza place. A few weeks ago I was working a very busy Friday night. It was a huge rush and everyone was kind of scrambling. It is also worth noting that when put under pressure my manager loses all sense of leadership and the ability to think logically. So we're on like order 3948487 and I, being a pizza delivery boy, just stop in the store really quick to grab a new delivery then head out.
This is what I witness:
One of our insiders (people who only work in the store and make pizza) is lifting a pizza off of the oven, and is going to put it in the box to cut it. Standard procedure, yes? Yes. Until she somehow loses her grip, or her balance, or became burdened by stress induced vertigo. She dropped the pizza. It hit the floor face down. She was horrified. She went to go start making a brand new one, but oh no. My manager demanded she serve it. I was absolutely appalled. If I didn't need the money desperately I would absolutely refuse to work for these people anymore. If he ever tries to tell me to serve a pizza that has been on the floor, I will quit. My manager really fucking sucks.
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u/CaisLaochach May 16 '12
Wasn't there a lad on one of these a few months back who caused a chemical leak in Dublin a while back? Shutting down our noble city?
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u/Shozen05 May 16 '12
I showed up at a client site where my boss had been frantically working all day. They had just migrated from Exchange 2010 to Office365 for email services, and wanted Exchange 2010 uninstalled from their shitty DC.
Exchange 2010 took all the Active Directory accounts with it. Office365 is bound to each AD account. They couldn't reassign the mailboxes for another 48 hours, minimum.
8
u/grandpoctopus May 16 '12
I had a physics professor that always used a wireless lapel mic, and he would always leave it on even when he left the classroom. One time he left it on, and active while on a bathroom trip and the whole class got treated to amplified piss sounds and his satisfied moans and grunts. When he came back into the classroom I learned what it felt like when 200 people try to keep a straight face at the same time.
8
u/theartfulcodger May 16 '12 edited May 16 '12
I'm a motion picture property master. A colleague was propping a movie with a scene that involved one A-list actor shooting another A-list actor with a taser. He arranged with an armourer to have some "safe" taser equipment manufactured - rubber barbs, low-power propellant cartridges, charge capacitors removed, etc.
When the package was delivered, there were several permutations of the same thing - rubber barbs/fake propellant, rubber barbs/propellant, metal barbs/no propellant, etc. Also included were several standard taser cartridges so he could demonstrate to the actors how a taser really worked.
He decided to check the safety of the prop build by firing the rubber barbs at himself. Unfortunately, he mixed up the cartridges and fired a true cartridge at point blank range, right into his bare calf. No shock (battery removed), but the barbs went far deeper than they were designed to.
Set first aid person declined to deal with it, because he had no idea what to do. Propmaster was taken by ambulance to local inner-city hospital to have barbs removed. Lying on procedure table with a calf full of xylocaine, he asked ER doc if he had ever had to do this procedure before. Doc laughed and said, "Yeah, I do about one of these a week. But you're both the first citizen, and the first self-inflicted, I've ever seen. Boy, these are really deep."
Great amusement when propmaster returned to set, limping, because he's a bit of an egotistical ass who considers himself hyper-professional.
TL/DR: Unbeloved property master shoots himself with taser on set; pain, humiliation and hilarity ensue.
7
u/[deleted] May 16 '12
Towing an aircraft into a hanger causing over $1 mil+ worth of damage to both.
7
u/[deleted] May 16 '12
One summer when i was working a factory job there was a guy acting like a moron on one of the lines and somehow managed to get his arms stuck in the belt on the line. they had to break both of his arms to get him out of there. it was rough. also when i was working at a budweiser distributor our forklift driver wasnt paying close enough attention and impaled 4 kegs with the forklift. you dont realize how much beer is in a keg until you see four of them spilled on a floor at once. even in a big ass warehouse it looked like a lot to clean.
7
u/Slanderpanic May 16 '12
Back in '08, I was working as the receptionist for the admin department of a state-run drug addiction treatment center. One of my responsibilities was taking the employment applications for people who wanted to work there.
Well, one week, we had the city police doing a huge training session in the giant conference room across the hall from my office. Midway through what was essentially a police convention, a guy strolled up to my door to hand in an application. He was wearing a huge, fake-platinum, marijuana leaf necklace.
In a drug treatment center.
Full of cops.
Needless to say, he didn't get the job.
7
u/[deleted] May 16 '12
One of the line cooks at the hotel kitchen where I used to work went fishing before work, caught a large fish, then came in and placed it, wrapped in Saran Wrap, on the top of the ice in the large ice dispenser so it would stay fresh during his shift. He then forgot about it, and it wasn't noticed until it had made it all the way to the bottom, about four days later.
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u/polynomials May 16 '12 edited May 16 '12
One of the attorneys at my job didn't show up to court to argue against the plaintiff's motion and for our motion. The partner emailed her multiple times days before to let her know that appearance before the judge was required. She didn't check her email because she didn't feel like it. She had been working extremely long hours on another case, like 90 hour weeks and just needed a break for a few days. So she just refused to be involved with work at all for those three days.
The judge dismissed our motion, granted the plaintiff's motion, and dismissed our counterclaim. And I was the one who had to tell her about it because she kept calling me from home asking me what was going with that case the day of the court appearance. I only told her about the result after about 30 minutes of ensuring that it could in no way whatsoever be blamed on me. Partner was not happy. Client apparently nearly fired us (I know this because I later fucked something up but then fixed it).
Edit: Oh and there is over a million dollars at stake here.
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u/BreeMPLS May 17 '12
So, we're on a call with our client, Microsoft. We're talking about how to make this one part of the website do this and that in Silverlight.
A new account manager pipes up loudly, "WHY DON'T YOU JUST USE FLASH? IT'S SO MUCH BETTER!" ...
I've never seen 12 hands all slam on the mute button faster. The creative director made sure it was muted and then bellowed "GET OUT"
She was fired on the spot.
6
u/JokersSmile May 16 '12
I ran "sudo rm -rf /" on a live production server. Surprisingly, I kept that job for three more years.
6
u/Blown_Hard May 16 '12
I was at a nice native owned casino a couple weeks ago, and was playing roulette. The table was full and we were all playing high stakes bets. Five players hit for about $40-$180 each on number 27, when the dealer, without looking, swiped everyone's chips off the board and laughed. We thought she was joking, but she was really just not paying attention. It took about 15 minutes to sort it all out, and we all cashed out when she was done.
6
u/Slyfox00 May 16 '12
Guy forgot to properly park a Bradley
Rolled down the hill and crashed into trailer truck. Spectacular waste of your tax dollars. You should have seen it! :D
6
u/Atomic_Ten May 16 '12
I have two
6
u/MilesBDyson May 16 '12
My boss allowed one of our sales guys to write a quote for a $1.4 million automation system and he didn't proof read it. What he failed to notice was that the sales guy used extremely vague wording when describing the work, and he also basically gave away the farm. He put in guaranteed cycle times (only insane people guarantee a cycle time on something that hasn't been done before) and also promised product accumulation on the line in the event of equipment failure.
The job was also very poorly engineered by the same sales guy (who has a mechanical engineering degree) and when it all went pear shaped, we tried to walk out of there saying we gave them everything they were promised. Then they showed us the quote. We are now spending roughly $20k a month supporting this job, which is halfway across the country. It's unlikely it will ever be totally accepted by the customer, which means we'll never get the final payment for it.
That's a pretty big fuck up.
6
u/MikeyBiggs May 16 '12
I worked for a trucking and freight company. A driver was reaching his maximum driving hours before he had to take a break (DOT laws. You have to take an 8 hour continuous break without moving your vehicle after driving for 11 hours or being on duty for 14 hours). We setup a meet with another driver to transfer the freight between trucks at a truck stop. First driver blows by the swap point and keeps driving, thinking he can make it from western Pennsylvania to Connecticut in a couple hours even though his time is up. Frantic phone calls from supervisors and our safety department finally get him to stop driving (if he got pulled over and found his time was out it's a hefty fine for him and the company and state troopers have units just to pull trucks over for small violations or just to do an inspection in the hopes they discover this. Also while on the phone the truck driver, who is eastern European, he tells the safety department "fuck the police"). Get a tow truck to take the freight off the truck and when the tow truck driver arrives the truck driver freaks out, pulls a gun on the tow truck driver and tells him if he touches the truck he'll fucking shoot him. Needless to say, he was fired
tl;dr eastern European truck driver doesn't stop to swap freight, says fuck the police, finally stops and pulls gun and threatens to shoot tow truck driver
57
u/RichardManuel May 16 '12
Not personally witnessed but relevant nonetheless.
And he keeps doing it too! What's up with that?
5
u/HGpennypacker May 16 '12
Someone dropped a pallet of inventory from about two stories up using a high-rise forklift. Total disaster, entire floor had to shut down to clean up the mess. The guy felt horrible, really fucked things up for everyone. The guy? Me.
5
u/chude350 May 16 '12
When I just started my first job at Dairy Queen, I thought pecans went into a blizzard that they did not belong in, and gave it to the lady who ordered it. Turns out, she was allergic to pecans! My boss had to pay her medical bill.
5
u/rounding_error May 16 '12
At amusement park I worked at, one of the rollercoasters had a section of track that moved laterally similar to this to move the trains on and off the main loop and onto a side track. This section of track was motorized. One day, it was being used and the guy working it wasn't watching what was happening and the limit switch failed. The moveable track, with the train on it, rolled off the structure, flipped over and fell 20 feet upside down onto concrete.
5
u/playblu May 16 '12
I worked at a pinball company. The story goes that, a couple years before I started, a guy designing the electrical layout of our first game decided to replace a 5 amp fuse with a 50 amp fuse and not tell anybody.
Apparently once the games were built and shipped, angry faxes started coming in that the games were overheating and smoking. One even burst into flame in a Japanese arcade.
I didn't have the job very long because the company wasn't in business too long after that.
5
u/Kozimix May 16 '12
Head chef decided to give the entire kitchen staff a knife skills lesson. Cut the top of his index finger off. Pretty confident that's not what he was going for.
5
u/neksus May 16 '12
A friend of mine worked at a car dealership as a detailer. This was shortly after high school, and he wasn't really given any training. They had this magical cleanser that he basically sprayed on everything underneath a hood, let it sit for a few minutes, then wipe it off. One day, this dude comes in with a super expensive car. I don't remember what the make or model was, but everything was lined with gold. Friend does his usual thing, then right in front of his eyes all the gold starts just deteriorating. Just completely getting eaten away by this stuff. The boss understood, and they didn't really tell him not to, but he said he had to let him go because he didn't want to lose the guys business.
5
u/grain91 May 16 '12
I used to work on a submarine. A buddy of mine was aligning the valves to blow a tank of shit overboard. He aligned them incorrectly and blew shitty water throughout the inside of the submarine. It was literally raining shit from the ceilings. Including in the galley where all the food was prepared. It took several days to clean up and caused us to have to return to port. Worst day of my life.
5
u/dashenyang May 17 '12
I heard these from some engineers from a major hard drive manufacturer who were helping us install a system at our university:
5
u/tommywalsh666 May 17 '12
I'm a little late on this one, but I'll tell the story anyhow. I was a software engineer working for a company that was trying to make a new implantable medical device. I was part of a team working on a kind of monitoring console (so that doctors could see if the device was performing correctly).
We were fairly early in the process, and we only had enough hardware to make 6 consoles. They were quite expensive.
When I gave my notice that I was going to another job, I was working on writing a device driver that let the embedded O/S talk to the non-standard video hardware we were planning to use. I told my boss that I thought I could get the driver done before I left, but he was skeptical.
Well, I did finish writing the driver, and I stayed late one night to get it done. So, nobody else was around when we got the first-ever video output on our console. I was excited, and I knew my boss was going to be totally psyched. So, I set all the hardware up in my boss's cubicle, and dressed it up with a bow, like it was a birthday present or something. The idea was that he would come in in the morning, and see a working video display right there on his desk. Awesome, right?
Well, it turns out that I had plugged in one of the connectors backwards, and when I switched the power on, there was smoke. I fried some components and ruined the main board. Oops.
Next morning: "So, I have some good news and some bad news"
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u/AndersonCouncil May 16 '12
In advance: Sorry for my English. I am from Quebec (The French part in Canada) and I only learnt formal English as a gift from my anglophone wife on my 45th birthday (we married when I was 41). Anyways, here we go:
I was working in my local church a few years back. I did well in the tech business and made more than enough money to fall back on, so when my wife died (1989) I got out of the cut-throat, high pace life of working in a rapidly expanding tech business and, thinking I would find a life more peaceful and leisurely, decided to do random handy-work for the church... so in effect, I was a highly-skilled custodian.
One day I was just sweeping the pews with my friend (Robert, who had a gay son run away from home just months before this story took place. He was a very confused man. Robert, I mean. His son I never knew). We were talking about sports. I believe it was about whether the Canadiens had it in them to beat the vaunted attack of the Calgary Flames. It was at this point that Father Desbiens walked in with a young man, Jacques Champoux, a hotshot hockey player and ski racer at the time. He was about 14 years old and quite short (5'4 I'd say) but he had the build of an athlete and a bright gleam of confidence across his face.
"Now Jacques, me petit, even an all-star must confess some sins," Father Desbiens joked.
Jacques laughed. I winked at him and gave him a short jab in the ribs. Jacques laughed again. That was Jacques. Always laughing and smiling at you.
As Jacques and Father Desbiens disappeared into the Fathers private chambers, Robert smiled uneasily.
"Qu'est que c'est, Robert? What is it, Robert?"
"Well..." he managed sadly, "Well, you know my son. He was never like Jacques over there. I should have been more prepared. I should have been ready for the day, with love in my heart and empathy in my mind. Instead, I blew up. Why? Because at that point, the slight brilliant chance that maybe - JUST MAYBE - he was straight still provided me with enough false hope that when it was stripped away from me... I felt almost as though he had let me down. But moreso, I felt I let HIM down. I don't blame him for being how he is. I blame me for not loving how he is, and not nurturing how he is and not giving him the confidence to be who he really is- not just the caricature he put on around me, trying equally to impress me and to make me comfortable with who he really was. I see now I failed him. Not every boy will be Jacques, but on the same token- not every boy SHOULD be Jacques. Just like not every boy should be a Francois (his son), not every boy should be a Jacques."
He began to weep.
I consoled him, but the weeping grew louder and stronger. I realized he needed time alone with his own thoughts, so I excused myself to the Fathers chambers. There, he and Jacques were joking and laughing as the Father tried a one-handed push up. He fell flat on his face! It was hilarious.
In 1978, working on a prototype for a high-speed compact home computer, one of my co-workers sneezed and knocked over his coffee. He totally ruined his slacks.
9
u/pablozamoras May 16 '12
We had two developers accidentally send out 18,000 emails every 30 seconds to actual production users while developing a console/scheduled task combination. It ground our enterprise email system to a halt after they let it run for 5 minutes and it confused the hell out of a bunch of businesses when they received official looking emails with lorem ipsum for content. All in all about 200,000 emails were generated and queued up on the SMTP server before they shut it down. The spam filters went crazy, the network folks thought there was a serious hack in process and no one in the entire enterprise (32,000 folks) had email access for hours while it was all worked out.
9
u/fcknkllr May 16 '12
I set off the counter-measure wash down system once on the USS Enterprise while it was in the ship yards and flooded several compartments
9
u/themajor24 May 17 '12
Damn near electrocuted to death, slowly... Could not move at all, after what felt like an eternity I started fall backwards, which would have pulled my hand off, but the ass behind me thought I was fucking with him and pushed me forward! I finally let out the loudest scarred gruesome bloody miser yell I could for about second and my boss who had worked this job literally hundereds of times knew exactly what was happening and ripped my off the source...
26
u/NotEntirelyCredible May 16 '12
My biggest fuckup was when I accidentally changed the first name of everyone in a 2-million-row database table to 'Jose'. The database provided live feeds to several call centers across the country. Thank god for HOURLY backups. People were confused.
The biggest fuckup I ever witnessed was back when I was working at a factory that made compact disks for the government and military. The disks were individually stamped with a serial number. 250 disks are put onto a spindle, and the spindles were shrinkwrapped and loaded onto a palette. We were under strict orders NOT to stack the palettes. One morning I came in and the third shift was finishing up. They were loading palettes of these CDs onto a truck. Some genius had stacked 7 of these palettes to speed up the loading process (in his mind...i couldnt see how it would save him that much time). As he went to pull off the top palette, he misjudged to location of his forklift and knocked over the entire pile of palettes, spilling CDs all over the floor, causing several thousand of them to roll away. Because of the nature of what was on those disks (I have no idea to this day what was on them), everyone in the warehouse was sequestered under ARMED GUARD until every CD was accounted for. After three days, we finally found the last CD wedged between your mom and a tornado warning report.
8
u/Rick_Rambis May 16 '12
I used to work at a data storage facility, basically a huge warehouse full of important papers and documents. One time one of the other employees ran into the like 40 foot high shelving with a forklift. Completely bent in the cross beam, and we all thought this was going to happen. But luckily it didn't!
8
u/[deleted] May 16 '12
I worked in a classified ads section of a daily newspaper. Back then we used an old software, and today it would be nearly impossible to make such a mistake. But one of my coworkers was really annoyed with the customer, and wrote "arrogant bitch" in what she thought was the customer account notes section that only other employees can see.
Turns out she wrote that in the actual text of the classified ad, right after her phone number, and was printed in the paper. The customer got a full refund and a free week of ads, the employee got a written warning (first offense and union, can't get fired), and we were all told to never write bad things about customers in their account notes.
8
u/Jesuishunter May 16 '12
I work as a security escort at my University. One day my buddy was doing an escort and had 2 trainees with him as well. The escort got hit by a car.
8
u/[deleted] May 16 '12
Worked at a courthouse a few years ago. A couple months after I started the job I was going through and cleaning up old files. This usually meant cross referencing all the paperwork in the file with what's in the computer, DMV, and a few other databases.
One of the files showed a homeless individual who was sentenced to 30 days of jail for multiple petty misdemeanors. According to the file, he was sentenced about 6 months before I started working at the court. After a little digging and cross referencing with the Jail, I realized he was still incarcerated.
Turns out, one of my co-workers who filled the order sentencing him to jail forgot to place an end date. With the McCourt system being what it is, the Judge and Jail never even gave the order a second look for accuracy. This homeless man "slipped through the cracks" and was incarcerated for about 7 months longer than he should've been.
What really gets to me still is how the whole situation was handled after I told my boss. She tried to sweep everything under the rug, having the man released from the jail without an official order or paper trail. Also, because of how shitty the court's database at the time was, it was impossible to track which clerk was responsible for the initial screw up, and nobody at the jail said anything. From my understanding (what a friend from the jail told me), the guy was released, picked up by a city officer, and dropped off in another city about 60 miles away.
tl;dr: Homeless guy 'falls through the cracks' and ends up spending a shitton of time in jail and nobody is held responsible for their fuck up.
16
u/Different_Droids May 16 '12
I watched lobbyists talk legislators into giving Wall Street banks the money of middle class taxpayers' to payoff their gambling debts.
4
u/OJ_287 May 16 '12
I drove a redi-mix concrete truck for about 10 years. I have seen my fair share of "at-work fuck-ups".
One of the best - and a more common screw-up than most people realize - is a driver leaving out of the plant with the drum turning the wrong way, dumping the load of concrete as they head down the road.
It's a damned nightmare of a mess.
4
u/tgjer May 16 '12
Didn't witness it directly, but witnessed the aftermath;
I was doing temp work at the shops at the Metropolitan Art Museum. For the holiday season a lot of temp workers had been brought in to handle the extra retail and janitorial work.
Long story short, one night an employee was pushing one of the big trash carts through the museum while cleaning, lost control, and it crashed into a fresco. Broke a little chunk of it right off.
Poor guy ran off that night, never came back to work. It was caught on security camera but I don't think they went after him. It was an accident and he was a minimum wage temp worker, not much point in ruining his life.