mema,

you sound like a student in my lab 🙂

Whilst on site constructing a petrol station, we were digging the tank farm (about a 4m deep excavation). The machine bucket goes through a small plastic pipe at about 2m deep, 110mm diameter. I climb in the hole and have a look, and decide its a piece of scrap pipe or redundant water pipe and tell the lads to continue digging. At about 3.5m down I send 2 lads into the hole to start compacting the bottom. Just about then, a fountain of sh!t and p!ss comes spurting out of the plastic pipe at an unbelievable rate of knotts, covering the two guys in human waste. By the time the fountain had stopped, the whole excavation was about 1m deep with raw sewage.

Turns out the pipe was the upstream pressure main from an underground sewerage pumping station.

I was not the most popular of people that day.

To be honest I have loads of stories along those lines. Construction sites always seem to be a cock up rich environment.

not me but a hapless guy who used to work with me at a landscaping firm. Appropriately his nickname was “f*ck it Farley” as he had a unique talent in being able to break almost anything he touched. One notable occasion he was loading tools into an astravan and getting steadily more pissed off with everyone slagging his latest mishap. In a fit of pique he told everyone where to go before horsing a fencing mel into the rear cabin. Unfortunately he threw it with such gusto that it went straight through the windscreen and made several large dents on the bonnet. We fell about laughing, he picked up his cards later that day.

On another occasion at the same firm the mechanic was tasked with giving a standlone chipper a safety test. This thing was a beast that could devour 4″ tree trunks like they were breadsticks and featured a safety cut out that meant the machine wouldn’t start unless the hopper feed was in place. Now, any normal person would have reasoned that if the hopper feed was up and the engine didn’t start then the safety switch was doing its job. This poor chap, however, tried to put his hand on the safety switch (right in front of the grizzly feed rollers) whilst struggling to reach the start switch, purposely sited miles away so you can’t do what this guy was doing. Needless to say when the engine turned over the machine jolted and the poor guys hand was planted into the feed rollers, breaking every bone in his hand and scalping the back of it. not nice at all.

Was working on a site as banksman (second pair of eyes due to the awkward nature of the dig) when we went through a major fibre optics telecoms cable. In our defense the telecoms company hadn’t bothered to tell the land owner they had taken the cable across his land or flagged it up in the search which we had to pay them a fee for.

90 KG of bonbons all stuck together.
had t chuck them all out (by ‘digging’ them with a scoop), right in front of the factory boss and some visitors.

felt like a plumb.

many moons ago i worked for a financial firm in Dublin, i was a very new system admin geek…. they had a dealing desk of about 6 dealers and one day doing my ‘routine checks’COUGH i started to mess about with one of the servers that was connected to the main feed of reuters and another bespoke financial software live feed….

10 minutes later blue screen of death, no idea what i had done, no idea how to fix, 6 irrate dealers screaming at me to get the system back up, to this day i still don’t know what happened but the company lost a load of money and we had to call out the cavalry to fix it.

when i was 18 i worked for a small brewery, they used to let me use the forktrucks even though i didnt have a license, one day the main guy was ill so we have a a few lorries from brains turn up for unloading, truck one easy, truck two easy, truck 3…. unloading 2 pallets of 22gal kegs i reversed back hit a pothole the fork truck and the pallets fell over, if this wasnt bad enough it was right infront of the main offices and one of the kegs smashed through the back window of the MD’s 3 weeks old Rover 800.

do i win?

I reversed a JCB off a 30 foot sheer drop and landed on a railway line 😳

ac282: It got so bad that when there was a power cut in the uni I was bombarded with emails afterwards asking what I had done this time!

@boarding – jeezus, hard landing!

Was building a gearbox to go out to the next test and was waiting for the 1 off test differential hub (4ks worth) to turn up that was being machined/inspected over (a friday) night by some poor bleeders, received the hub at 7 am on the saturday morning, built the diff and was walking to rig to fit to the gearbox, on lifting it to the gearbox to fit it I dropped the fooker!!! Yep and the only damaged part was the one off hub!!! Opps….

Boss didn’t see the funny side, in fact called me a c@*t. He had a point!

A while ago I was working in air traffic control research and we were doing a project for the folks at West Drayton. We set up a meeting with one of the chief controllers there but it had to be about 3 weeks off as he was away at the time.

Anyhow, we roll up to the meeting and in the chit-chat before we got down to work I asked mr air traffic controller where he’d been – ‘I’ve spent 10 days in Hong Kong watching the planes take off & land at the airport’ he said. So I replied ‘Well at least that’s part of your job and you’re not some sad plane spotter with an anorak and thermos flask’. Guess what – he’d been there on holiday, not with work, and he was a card carrying plane spotter.

The client relationship was always a little strained after that.

@boarding – jeezus, hard landing!

Scariest thing ever 😆

17 years old, never driven one before and I was handed the keys and asked to bring it up to the workshop. Jumped in, started it up, pulled a lever that I thought was the window wiper which actually turned out to be the forward/ reverse gear, blipped the throttle and it started moving backwards. I started to panic and went to slam on the brakes but the ground was rough and the thing was bouncing about and I hit the throttle instead 😳

I remember sailing off the edge and the thing tipping backwards. Luckily at the bottom there was a slight transition to the flat so it managed to stay the right way up 😆

On another occasion I managed to tip one of these on it’s side

just two, drove a ten tonne forklift into a newly refurbished rollformer, Only clipped it, but it was messy.

And dropped a 15Tonne coil of steel from 6ft it landed 3ft from my feet… I went home that day…

Best i have heard is a 10-15 Tonne coil jummped off a trailer on a bridge over the M4 at Port Talbot straight through the fence and Landed in the middle of the carriage way below. Apparently there was a Motorbike that narrowly got missed.

I left a motor running over night, which cooked the oil, which worked the jiggers, that moved bits, that made the show look good.
I got shit for it. We spent the day replacing several of gallons of hydraulic fluid. It all worked fine. It was a simple mistake which anyone could have made.
I’m not even sure if it was me.
Quite good to look back on it and compare with others experiences though.
Ooh the pain.

Becoming a lawyer.

Thought mine was bad but after reading some previous posts makes mine seem rubbish…

My first project in my current job created an interactive CD (I know in these internet days!), CD relied on drawing in other files on the CD, by referring to their exact file names, burned the CD, CD software truncated the file names to make it compatible with older machines 500 cd’s wasted.

Had a bit of a faux pas last week. Our team’s split across two offices at the moment. Last week a guy from the other office called me and asked if I was going to join a conference call. He said it was about one of my clients but I knew nothing about it at all. He said a colleague was supposed to be on it but she was off ill so would I mind joining in. I said yes and asked when it started and he said it was supposed to be 12 minutes ago but they hadn’t started and they were waiting for me. Various senior management folk were supposed to be on the call.

It all sounded very strange as I knew nothing about a call regarding one of my clients. Anyway I dialled in, entered the passcode, joined the call and said hello. At that point there was a massive uproar of laughter and I immediately thought this was a big practical joke from my team and they’d got me to dial in to a non existent call. Therefore I shouted

“FANNIES”

down the phone and went to hang up. As I was just about to replace the receiver I heard the strong Geordie accent of someone that wasn’t in my team and was supposed to be on the call. 😳

I left it a few minutes before dialling back in again 😆

I was asked to get something from my regional managers car. I was distracted by his payslip stuffed in the boot and forgot the keys were in the car when i slammed the boot. Then it dawned on me that i had no keys.

A very awkward two hour drive to his house to get the spare keys and drive him back again! 😳

how much more than you did he earn though?

I once went away for a business trip to the States. I had a bit of work that I wanted to do, so I found I could dial up the office network from the hotel. International calls aren’t THAT expensive, I thought. Well I spent a fair bit of time online, working and doing some er chatting also.. Came to check out, and the phone bill alone was $3,500. Oops!

My Dad’s got loads of stories. Working as a mining electrician, one time him and a mate were trying to fix some machine above the ground. They fixed it up, switched it on and bang – lights out, machine off. Whilst they are faffing about looking for torches to try and fix matters, the mate taps my Dad on the shoulder and points out of the window. The entire village and half the valley is in darkness…

It’s a miracle that UK Plc hasnt gone to the dogs with all these f***-ups! oh.. wait…. 🙂

Not me, but I got the blame for some bloody reason…

I was driving corn-cart (13 tonne twin axle trailer on the back of a tractor for taking wheat back to the yard and the dryer from the field) and we had some cockmonkey flying the combine harvester that year. The rules are you DO NOT drive your corncart behind the combine. So I was parked up at the end of a 30 acre field, well out of the way of cockjockey in the combine. Feet up on the dash having a kip for a few minutes, there’s a godalmighty crash, and denzel has only gone and backed the combine halfway across the field into my long time stationary trailer.

One very fecked back end (where the straw choppers are) of a £200k+ combine.

Since there was no market for bailed straw that year we had been chopping and ploughing in. Since it was my fault apparently, I had to “mow” each field with the topper after the combine had been through for the rest of the season to make the straw small enough for ploughing.

A few weeks later wurzel-gummage was sacked after the manager finally realised he was a cock and been flying the combine like one all season when he wasnt looking – the drums which do a lot of the work inside were all bent and banged to crap because he’d been charging through the crop too quickly for them to keep up.

In my first job as an estate agent i took the side of an old Lambourghini which was parked next to me in my company car space. The owner hated the estate agents and assumed it was the boss who he had had a disagreement with. He smashed his windscreen in.

I put a book down on top of a computer keyboard attached to a Lighting desk Back up unit. It was on a shelf up above my head so I couldn’t actually see what was there.

The unit took control, Ran a cue and plunged Charles Kennedy and the liberal Democrat conference into near darkness during a Live TV broadcast by the BBC.

I unplug all keyboards attached to lighting desks and put them in another room when shows are on now!!

One that still wakes me up at night…

Working as GM in a boatyard which stored, on hardstanding, some very expensive racing yachts. Most of these yachts are kept ashore all winter, with dehumidifiers to dry them out – less weight, faster boat. The output from the dehumidifiers is via a hose usually poked through a seacock – in this case the toilet one (about 1.25in diameter). Anyway, this boat (a £250k one) boat gets launched in the slings, I start the motor and pop her on the moorings and wait for the launch to to pick us up. The launch arrives and the driver mentions that the yacht is pretty low in the bows, I respond saying that its high water and the anchor strop was probably pulling her down a bit, nothing to worry about. How wrong was I.

Hop on the launch and have a quick look back, the bow is REALLY low, I ask the launch driver to turn around and I’ll have another look. Unlock the boards and look in – water halfway up the companionway ladder! I dived in and swam/waded forward and see the sea gusing through the open seacock. Manage to get my hand on it (and keep my head just above water) and find a cap…

Four hours it took to bail her out – I never did own up to the owner when he mentioned that the bloody dehumidifiers didn’t seem to have made much difference that winter!

Ripped the side out of a brand new transit with a dumper. 17 years old didn’t know how to drive, they told me to get in and try. oops.

Fell out of a skip into a drainage ditch (don’t ask).

Reversed works van into mums car on drive, half asleep, didn’t see it 2 ft behind me. Wheelspinning on spot for 30 seconds wondering why i wasn’t moving.

I once spent a night-shift spinning the fork-lift truck around the car park, wheelspinning and seeing how tight it would turn. Boss turns up in the morning and sees the resulting rubber mess on the pale concrete. ooops.

then there was the time I sent an email slagging the HR manager off to my mate. Except I managed to send it to the HR manager.

But the best is the time I accidentaly hit “set as wallpaper” instead of “save as” on a certain, ahem, adult image. I had Active desktop turned on, so couldn’t see it. Until I plugged my laptop into a customer’s projector and put it on the 10′ screen in his boardroom. Oops…

But the best is the time I accidentaly hit “set as wallpaper” instead of “save as” on a certain, ahem, adult image. I had Active desktop turned on, so couldn’t see it. Until I plugged my laptop into a customer’s projector and put it on the 10′ screen in his boardroom. Oops…

priceless!

Back in the late 80’s my uncle was a director for a small, Indian family owned shipping company based in London. One of their 8 cargo ships was supposed to be sailing from Pourtsmouth to St Petersberg in Russia.

Apparently the cock up occured as a result of slight langauge difficulties between the Indian brokers and the Spanish crew, but after 3 days of motoring towards St Petersberg, the crew admitted that they were a 3rd of the way across the Atlantic, as they had been heading for St Petersburg in Florida!

went for a job interview, arrived early, and got out spoke to the security guard, went back and sat in the car for 10 minutes and then went in for the interview – thought that went ok.
Came out of the interview room and the office lad, asks “do I have a peugoet car?”
Out in the car park it had rolled down into an empolyee’s car!
I can’t explain why, the handbrake was on, I’d sat in the car for 10minutes, why did it move? (handbrake was fine)

Got the job, I work 3 days a week not 10ft from the woman who’s car, my car dented.

Not my ****-up personally, but a colleague did this in the car dealership where we used to work:

He was driving a new Hyundai Sonata 3.0 V6 Auto in through the open rear doors of the showroom, all nicely polished to go on display. On the passanger seat were his desk diary and parker pen.

As he entered the showroom and drove past his desk the phone rang. It was Sunday and only he and one other salesman were in the dealership. He clocked that the other salesman was outside on the forecourt with a customer so he stopped the car and put it in park, then got out of the car to answer the phone.

Realising he didn’t have his pen on him he quickly leaned back into the car, knocking it back into drive by accident. The car took off at a brisk walking pace across the showroom, with him spread headfirst across the front seats, feet sticking out the open driver’s door. The car then ploughed through the luckily empty customer seating area. On it’s way it semi-flattened the seats and caused the coffee table to half fold and make a small ramp. This ramp was just enough to lift the front of the car up and bring it to a halt, but not before it just managed to shatter one of the main showroom windows with it’s front bumber. Apparently the saleman outside thought old Beadle was going to step out.

All true I swear. The dealership was the old Stonehouse Motors on Barnes Hill, Birmingham (now All Electric Garages, or a housing plot probably!) and the salesman was a guy named Tony Power (he now sells property in Florida, so won’t mind me mentioning his name).

It was easily done in this model Hyundai too. Just 4 Months later a young trainee mechanic in our workshop, was in a V6 Sonata on a 4 poster ramp at ground leven and knocked the car into reverse during a PDI. That car shot backwards and bent all 4 doors forward!

Nothing this exciting ever happens now that I work in a bike shop you know!

Ive bent & broken a fair bit of machinery down the years but compared to some of you lot Im a complete amateur – Well Done to you all!

When I was an apprentice at a rather large international chemical company, we (thats the guy I was working with and me) had a maintenance/inspection routine to do on the tepmerature probes opn the front firing wall fo a High Pressure Oil fired Steam boiler, duly unscrewed the first one, checked it all was fine.

Unscrewed the next one, fne put it back in and cross threaded the fecker to the point where it had stripped the thread on the boiler wall, **** **** ****, this thing was due back online in 2 hours. Cue chemical metal, mixed it up, bunged it in the hole and screwed the temp probe in, bobs yer auntie it lasted 4 years until the plat was de-commissioned!!

This one’s not by me, the lead installer on the telecomms section I was Commissioning Eng for, decided to take it upon himself ot install the main card in a Marconi MSH64 Admux unit, these things weighed summit like 9kgs, and had abou 600odd 24carat gold pins on the back, they had a special winding/installation handle on the front and guide rails, oh yeah they were worth just under 100k. He decided as I wasn’t there to “Bang one in himself” properly against the rules as he wasn’t trained to do so. cue about 500 bent pins and a written off card.

I was set to comission the loop on the afternoon and put it on test over the weekend, but surprisingly couldn’t as we didn’t have the main card, suffice to say he wasn;t flavour of the month.

@ Baordin Bob, I’ve seen the aftermath of when a flipped RRV isn’t so lucky, wedged between platforms and the driver off work for a month. Took 2 65t road cranes to lift the fecker out!!

I once got caught racing and skidding mountain bikes round the warehouse with some colleagues whilst doing some weekend working – nobody else on site but forgot about the CCtv!

We hired a courier once to send a cd urgently to the other end of the country. he carried an empty cd case all the way there because the cd was still in my pc.

I’ve also talked an engineer through rebooting a server over the phone and told him to set the switch the wrong way. The server died and after the local engineer refused to work on it anymore I had to drive from Manchester to Hemel Hempstead immediately to reboot the server. When i got there I flicked the switch to ‘don’t halt bootup’ and pressed the power switch to fix it. That sounds like nothing but it was costing BP about 5000 pounds an hour. I drove fast.

Oh, and I know a chap who arrived on site for some scheduled work, hung his coat on the main data centre emergency cut off switch, did his work and went home. The switch had tripped and the data centre was runnig on UPS when he left. It took a dozen engineers the next 12 hours to fix everything when the UPS ran out of battery while he was tucked up in bed.

started work for a local chippy firm here in germany. arbeitskollege asks if i’d take the truck back to the yard as he had to be somewhere.

reversed the truck into someones driveway to turn around. pulled out and took the whole front picket fence with me. jumped out and saw that the stakes had been ripped out, lifting the block paving. collected the fence and tried to stand it up as best i could.

jumped in the truck and went back to the yard. everyone, inc bosses, were busy. thought i’d tell them next morning. never really got a chance. three days later one boss turns up on site and asks if we’d seen what had happened to the fence. he assumed the fork lift we had on-site had done it. left it so….

same firm. done a job about 1.5 hours away. there were load of tools sitting there. got told to clear everything away as we were leaving. i did ask about the tools and the gaffer said “alles” so i picked up the tools thinking they were ours. got back to the yard and realised that they weren’t ours. bugger.

the german guys ended up calling me “sh!t” and they said it was the word i used most often. not sure if that is a complement…..

had a shitty summer job at Aldi picking orders. the best thing about it was 8.50/hour and we got to drive around on these mini stand-on forklifts. myself and another guy used to smoke a fair bit before work and then get a bit carried away playing ‘bumper cars’. we managed to crash into the bosses little workstand/desk thing ripping the wire out of the ground and then matey boy ran into a stack of loose peppers. we tried to put everything back as best we could. thought we got away with it when just as we were jumping back onto our trucks the boss walks into the warehouse clapping his hands. he’d been watching it all on CCTV.

we lost our jobs.

another time, although this wasn’t my fault but still cost me my job, i was working at the local car auction. simple enough job. drive car through auction hall, park up get another car, drive through.
picked up this shitheap of a car, can’t remeber what. drove it down toward the entrance. there was no queue and there had to always be another car ready to go through after the last one to maximise sale time. so i gave the accelrator a boot then coasted toward the hall. put my foot on the brake and nothing……. quue brace position as i rammed the back of an old mercedez. got out of car, all eyes on me. thought i’d take the pressure off a little so gave a bow. the auctioneer was the bosses son. he said over the tannoy “office, now!”

yeah, lost that job.

tooslow: was that the one which used to run trips from Aber to Borth/Aberdovey and back? Whatever happened to that? Are you responsible for it’s demise?