Made my best one today!

I work in software development, and forgot that I was looking at a remote console of one of our build machines.

Andyhow at some point I downloaded a tool to monitor database queries (honestly it wasn’t porn!) and the barsterward seems to have over written a whole load of key DLLs and messed up references in the Windows registry.

Long story short, after 3 days of wasted time for all the devs + downtime for one of our customers whose bug we were fixing, I now have to pray that the backups for that machine are in order (also my responsibility…) SHITE!

Somebody must have done better than that – cheer me up with colossal errors please! I’m dreading tomorrow 😳

I was doing some QA on some software we were about to release. Worked a succession of 18+ hour days to get it done on time. One thing I forgot to test though was the installer.

We made 15,000 CDs with the useless installer on.

First ever day at work I took the whole of Boston (Lincs) telephone exchange out of action for a day by cutting through a live cable. My boss saw the funny side though, I just shat myself.

A nightshift some years back a lamp blew on the control panel at work. I attempted to stuff 30 tonnes of flour into space for 5! The top of the bin house was filled to a depth of 5 feet and then the fire escape door opened and it snowed on the dock in mid-summer! Then the delivery blowline filled up and I was late home as I fixed the plant for the next shift while they were in.
Happy days 😕

Well, retro, can’t comment as to whether you are an imbecile or not as I haven’t a clue what you are on about! 8) (Oh, and I’m quite happy in my ignorance!!)

I forgot an O-ring while working at NASA. We laughed that night!

as a 15 yr old on work experience i was given the task of choosing images for an ad campaign ok’d a list with the bossman, wrote down the codes for all of these. international print and web exclusive licence £15K each.

misread a code and ordered 1 extra: they really weren’t bothered but 15K was more money than i had ever had at that point in life!!

missed the minus sign out of the reflector calculation on the hubble telescope years ago, didn’t cost that many millions to put right 😆

Went for a wee while working at Three Mile Island. Chuckle? I’ll say matey….

I was marshalling on a corporate team challenge, I had been moved at a couple of minutes notice from finish to key turning in the MTB race section (up on top of Shatton Moor). I *assumed* that the race carried straight on and down Bradwell Edge (cos thats where I had always ridden…) but in fact they should have turned and gone via the gliding club and descended on the road… 😳

Covered the dials up with tinsel and balloons for someones birthday. Chernobyl was a really dull place to work til I livened it up!

During my apprenticeship one of the lads swapped a 5V and 24V feed to a sensor array for a helicopter. The head was worth £25k before, and nothing afterwards….. Same guy also deleted ALL of the test records for an entire programme, years worth. He didn’t own up to that one.

I, of course have never made a mistake……

Ok, there was the time when I threw a customers cherished piece of music making equipment at the wall. Not deliberately of course, he’d just handed to to me after I’d booked it in for service. I tripped going through into the workshop and in full view of him inadvertently lobbed it full pelt. Have never apologised so profusely, or been so embarassed!

Quite recently, miss-read some work details and chopped down a national fibre circuit. Fault process didn’t work as it was supposed to so customer was offline for rather longer than they should have been, and I got bollocked 🙂 (If the fault process had worked normally it would have been back up and running in no time and it would just be ‘one of those things’)

Not mine but still a cracker I think.

I worked at a travel firm years back and one of our ‘senior’ agents booked a chap on his flight to Luxembourg only she didn’t. Having guessed at the airport code she actually ended up sending him to Luxor in Egypt. What amazed us what that a) He didn’t pick up on it when he saw his itinerary, b) he didn’t pick up on it at check in, c) He didn’t think it was a surprisingly long flight to Luxembourg and d) he didn’t cotton on when the price was significantly higher than it should have been. That cost the company close to £3k to put right.

We had another agent who booked a couple on a flight to San Jose in California. Simple enough, right? Well they ended up in San Jose Costa Rica as the agent never bothered to check which one they wanted. £7k to put that one right.

My worst mistake was pulling an unexpected double shift (18 hours) in the Factory I was employed at. I had 500 collet blanks that I had to perform a (pretty straightforward) machining operation on. Well, I took a break at the end of my first shift and neglected to check the settings when I got back and proceeded to do my thing before dropping them off at QC before the next stage.

They ALL failed QC. Gulp. Lesson learned.

Two things;

In my youth I drove a truck and trailer through the wall of a parcel delivery depot in Gatwick. On Christmas Eve.

And, in an attempt to prove how cool I am to the kids (I’m a PE Teacher) I attempted to bunnyhop one of them. I was successful the first three times, but ran out of bounce for the fourth and landed square on Jaasat’s nether regions.

That one took some explaining…

Not me, but the copy boy on the first newspaper I worked on, a regional daily tabloid with a devoted following.

In those far off days, the copy boy was a vital part of the team. Apart from fetching cuppas now and again, his main job was to pick up cuttings from the cuttings library and deliver them to journalists’ desks. This was back before the internets (I’d just started using something called NCSA Mosaic at University).

Now, the copy boy didn’t have a hugely demanding job, and for this reason, the hiring policy was to hire from the local special needs school. The copy boys were as a result always happy souls who brightened up the place no end.

The printing presses (Big, two-storey tall Heidelbergs, I seem to remember) were in the same building, right by the news room. When the first edition rolled off, the building shook, and didn’t stop ’til home time. These were big, big machines knocking out tens of thousands of issues of two seperate dailies and the weekend papers too.

Naturally, things like this have lots of fast moving machinery that can cause death and mutilation, and as a result, there are lots of big red buttons everywhere.

Our chap had a slight ‘Father Dougal’ moment when passing through the print hall one day.

The inkies swore in the pub later that a glazed expression had come over his mug the moment he read the ‘Emergency stop’ sign above one of them.

That cost about fourteen grand, and something like 40,000 copies had to be chucked in the end.

No one had the heart to so much tell the poor chap off. As far as I know, he was there right up until the clippings library was culled.

A couple

I still chuckle at hitting “reply all” to an email by accident and copying 1200 people.

80 odd out of office responses the following day.
And then all the Wags start replying resulting in a Director playing moderator.
The email was advertising places on a course on….”effective use of email”.

Or the time I screeched out of a car park with a one-in-the-country prototype Casio printer on the roof of my car.

We have a Vertical platform lift. It can be tipped over to fit through doors BUT it needs to be placed on its lowering arm first. This requires humans to plan ahead and attach the arm.

My Boss has dropped it
I have dropped it
Contractors have dropped it twice.

I have tried to drive through a roller shutter too. But cant beat my pals who took a Luton Van to….. a McDonalds drive through. They got their burgers, but did bring a bit of the height restriction barrier home with them.

First day of job. Chatting to new boss in car park at end of day, drove away and mowed down a cyclist (stay off the pavement kids!). Day two and the police are waiting for me in reception. At least everyone new my name.

Drilled into the dry riser of a block of flats on the 11th floor when installing cable tv. Hit a water main and flooded the riser from there down.
Oh, in an attempt to stop the flow (we eventually had to wait for the tank at the top to drain, I hit the “right” pipe) we shut every stopcock off.
No heating, no hot water, for a tower block, from about 4.00 pm to 8.30 pm, on the 23rd of December.
Honestly, some people get so touchy about heat in winter, or having a shower before going out for Christmas drinks!

I was very happy when Kenninghall Mount flats got demolished.

A neighbour drove a loading forklift into a bowing 747, righting off the plane.

He was fired for that one.

Writing off a 747? You have to be kidding!! They cost tens (hundreds?) of millions!!

I once reversed quite hard into my Boss’s car whilst driving my Supervisors van in a car park in Bracknell. In my defence he pulled out behind me, your honour…

🙂

Cut the phone cable to the office, had already taken a poll aorund everyone else who all thought it looked redundant so cut it, couple of hours later someone pointed out the phones didn’t work, when BT came round the next day they pointed out the mistake.

“Stupid Bird!”

Whilst working in my first job as a Honeywell main frame operator I loaded the system disk on all disk drives with the bosses permission. The disk had crashed all 12 heads on each disk drive and resulted in a £65,000 bill and about a days downtime.

I went on to work there for another 7 years before becoming an IT Manager!!

Had to scrap some classified parts that had a fault which were used on some radars the RAF used , they were basically big valves but cost about £800,000 a piece.

We were sent a list of serial numbers which we were informed were the ones requiring scarping, valves were then dragged out into scrap yard and put beyond use.

Later informed that someone at the other end had made a mistake with the covering letter and those serial numbers were for the valves that were ok.

RAF suddenly has zero stock of serviceable valves for one of its main ground-based air defence radars.

Not strictly my fault though.

I dropped 1000 metres of armoured cable on my bosses Lotus.

I crashed £250,000-worth of hovercraft into a groyne on the beach at Aberystwyth. I made quite a mess of the bow, split the front fuel tank.
Deisel and glass fibre everywhere.

One of these:

I was working for the company that built them at the time.
The owner, who was sitting next to me, was none too pleased, I can tell you.

Not really a cock up but lately I have been touching things and they seem to blow up, things like lasers and power supplies and it isn’t really helping me finish my phd.

Commented on a contractor’s curtain wall drawing crossing out the correct level of the head of the curtain wall and putting in an incorrect one (that obviously I believed was right at the time), that I never found the origin of. Only about £16K to rectify once it was on site!

Summer job at Uni after 1st year, getting some practical engineering experience. Doing some work on water pumps for a block of flats and at the same time providing some technical support to guys cleaning the water tanks. Sparky I’m working with has gone off to do something. Cleaning guy asks if it’s possible to get some water into the tanks. I check out the fuse panel, realise that there aren’t enough fuses, but hey, there’s two pumps and I only need to power up one. So turn things on with only half the fuses in place. Mucho sparks, all fuses blown, no water for the building for 24hrs. Why is it that they don’t teach you about 3-phase electric until SECOND year?

Also, same summer (and not my fault although I got the blame for it). Working at a navy base, tasked with replacing the pump which delivered hot water to the whole dock – “a nice wee job for a student.” Old pump very big, new pump very small, no problem, I re-drilled the mountings etc., got the old pump out, new one installed, no problem. But because of the size difference, the old pipework didn’t quite reach. So I go find the guy who’s supposed to be supervising me to see if we can sort out an extra bit of pipe to bridge the gap. He comes round, checks it out, says something like “Feckit, it’ll go”, grabs the old pipe and tries to bend it over to reach. Pipe snaps off, water everywhere, have to just bung it up. No hot water (and hence no post-shift showers) for the whole dock full of navy boys. I was popular.

I worked for a small Leasing brokerage about 10 years ago, I was the new boy in sales, and I brought in a new customer, a Printing guy who kept bringing in £25K printer deals with 5 massive london based charities.

This went on for 3 months, £250K later the first repayments started for the charities and on the same day I get 5 calls, 1 from each of the charities advising that he had ripped each of them off, no printing equipment.

He was nowhere to be found.

As we were the Brokerage, the banks in question held us liable, and i had to sit my boss down and tell him that he had to find the £250K to pay the banks back.

He called the banks with me sat there, confirmed everything, then just looked at me sadly and then was quietly sick into his little waste paper basket.

I did my nine months work experience from Uni in a cider brewery in Ireland – the one where they brew Magners (it’s Bulmers for the Irish market). One of the tasks was to take a litre sample of the final blend of cider (which would be a very pale yellow colour), analyse it in a colorimeter, add a mix of red and orange colourant till it was in spec, then multiply this amount up for an 8000 gallon bulk tank which would then be sent through to the bottling plant.

I was on an overtime shift and added an extra zero to the weight of red colourant, and despite the plant operator Christy saying “that seems like an awful lot of red there don’t you think”, insisted that my calculations were correct. Anyway, 8000 gallons of Bulmers were coloured to look like, well, all I have to say is that it took me a while to shake off the nickname “Lucozade Kid” and two further 8000 gallon tanks had to be made up to dilute it down. The plant was bottling Bulmers for around two weeks!!!

Loads in life but few at work

I was on a customer site many years ago. They had employee a load of temps for 3 weeks to enter data into their new system as it was cheaper than writing and automated routine. The UNIX server started to run out of space.

I logged in as root
ls /temp (spotted a load of log files that could be deleted)
rm -rf (had fogotton that I was still in the root directory, not the temp directory)

Nothing was backed up as it was a new computer and the only data was the 40 peoples 3 weeks of work.

For the none UNIX among us, I basically forced the main computer running the business to remove all the data from the disc destrying itself in the process.

I ordered the shelling of a Serbian village. My boss forgave me though as the Serbians were the ‘enemy’ in the worlds eyes.

(I bet there were a few American and UK commanders who did just that).

I was in the meeting later with the customer and my boss when my boss tendered MY resignation to the customer!

I deleted the contents of a SAP table when I had just started out on development – something to do with forgetting to put a check in the select statement to pick up only some records.

Luckily a backup had been taken just before… phew! Quite a few pubs wouldn’t have had their taps working otherwise…

myself and the small test chamber have a hate-hate relationship, one summer I put my hand in to scoop some test dudt out, (everything switched off, what could go wrong?) unfortunately the thermostat had malfunctioned turning the heating elements onto full blast (22mm copper pipes with electrical elements inside). Hand goes in, scoops up dust, touches somethign hot, instinct reaction is to close fist and pull hand out. unfortunately it meant i grabbed onto seveal hundred degrees of hot pipe, tightly, and lost most fo the skin off my right palm. Being single at the time this was a big inconvenience.

cured that one my submergeing it in iced water which turned red.

Smothering it in salvol and putting a latex glove over it then submerging it in iced water.

Wen’t to the BMX track that night, blimey braking hurt!

Second incident involved re-routing some piping to turn the circulation pump into a giant hoover by attatchig its outlet to a big hoover bag with ductape.

What could posisbly go wrong?

Well the chambers windows imploded, all the glass was sucked down to the pump, chewed up into millions of small pices and ejected through the bottom of the hoover bag at warp speed and accross the workshop. Thank god there was no one stood behind me (imagine a shotgun, with a 6″ bore, filled with glass form a 1m square reinforced window).

managed to monitor, level and produce a 45 minute discussion with Radio 4s Sue MacGregor. It was to be used in training and discussion materials with a major client throughout the country.

Didn’t press record.