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The culture of the company is also important here, how are staff treated when raising issues
I’d also say that there’s only a certain amount of responsibility that a single person should own and if the company is that reliant on that person then they are actually not helping that person or being much good as a company,good companies make sure that processes and reviews are followed to capture oopsies early.
I’ve seen the odd manager go loopy(actually sectioned) in a bad company and off sick in others never to return quite the same.
Or maybe I’m the worst ever employee to manage 🙂
The cracker I owned up too was getting a million squid stuck in our system,was an automatic authorisation of life assurance payments to customers and I’d not set a flag correctly and the money was in no man’s land which was better than the bloke who debited the wrong payments from customer accounts that was a cracker but he survived another day although It took months to sort out.
One time (at band camp) I also a inadvertently triggered a purchase of 2O grands worth of shares but we made a profit on that so no pain.
OP,hope you are feeling better than you were at 1am. Some good replies in this thread,we are all human.👍
**** ups happen
It’s how you own them that’s important
^^ that needs to be on a T-shirt. 😀
Thanks all 🙂
Pretty low key compared to some people but the sinking feeling when I realised I was reformatting the hard drive containing loads of client tv shows instead of the internal hard drive containing something I didn’t need was something else. Instantly put my hand up though, and spent the next little while re-capturing a bunch of US reality shows from tape.
Lesson learned there, if reformatting a hard drive unplug all the other ones!
It wasn’t your design or quote, but you *did* find the problem in it. @wbo called it right.
That feeling when you wake up at 3am under a bush in someones garden in San Diego while on a work trip after getting roofied in a bar!
That worst feeling when you get back to hotel (thank you uber) and your boss starts messaging at 8am needing to desperately talk to you.
Then feeling of relief when you talk to the boss and find out your colleague got incredibly drunk, started a fight then spewed on the CFO of the company. Your slightly dishevelled and confused state forgotten about by all!
@codybrennan have a read of this:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_culture
Anyone who works in aviation will immediately recognise it and why I am sharing.
Everyone makes mistakes - this will never, ever change, its human nature and is actually what makes us 'better' than AI or robots or software.
What we need to do, is learn from then, and we do that by being honest, opening up, and fixing the issue, and any decent human being will also understand that.
Oddly enough I'm on the other end as I'm the customer and one of our IT support suppliers has changed and configured a connection incorrectly. Not my job as we outsource but I found the issue. This affects all our reporting.
What is making mad is they are not telling me how it happened and being evasive. I just want it fixed but now I'm worried about their integrity, and may ditch them, not for the mistake but for not being honest about it.
Causally hold a claw hammer when informing the boss. It will soften his reply on the subject 😉
I once made a mistake that almost delayed the production start of a program by 12 weeks, a test wasn't completed correctly and had to be repeated for certification. (The vehicle weight changed late in the program and i missed it, in my defense there had been a dozen weight changes in the preceding 6 months).
I admitted the mistake and managed the whole thing, pulled it back to about 6 weeks in the end. Cost about 20 million quid in lost production and a few percent off the stock market value of the company. Ended up with a promotion.
On the other hand a colleague missed something major, tried to cover it up, failed miserably and caused a fairly major issue. Had to examine and rework about 6000 cars. About 1/2 had to be scrapped. (None had actually been delivered at that point).
He's no longer able to work in the industry as he's been blacklisted.
One time when I worked for a bank, we lost a load of money. Not the usual way a bank loses money, ie fraud or betting on the wrong imaginary dog. No, this was a bag of physical cash, there was no way we should have lost it. It basically looked like a member of staff had nicked it, and it all was pretty fraught and depressing.
Til my colleague Helen was visited in a dream by her long-dead father, who said basically, "Lo, Helen, I have returned from heaven with this important message for you- you accidentally gave that bag of cash to a particular customer, in place of a different bag of cash". Next day, she phones that guy up and he checks and yup, he had a bag of about five grand which should have been a bag of £500 in pound coins.
I nominated helen's dead dad for employee of the month but apparently that was not ok
You'll be respected for explaining the situation to your boss, giving you both the opportunity to work through it, figure out how to fix... We've all been there in our working life, monkey mind waking us up in the early hours to tell us about the error in calculations, why expensive bits of kit don't fit into a process operating in 2022 because the drawings haven't been as-builted since 1990..... Fortunately, the managers I've worked for have been suitably stressed by errors being identified, but equally appreciative that there's the chance to resolve....that's what the senior managers are paid for! I once worked on a project a few years after someone had been killed - the court case was in its final stages at that time, the ongoing stress for the project manager during that period and trauma the team suffered was horrendous - always think of the lads family, that he never got home from work that day. Not a great comparison, appreciate that, but when I do make a mistake at work, I balance it by saying everyone, including myself, got home safe to see their family at the end of the working day. Go easy on yourself, you inherited a mistake a spotted it. Good on you!
If it's any help OP i woke up in the night once in a panic just like you...
I'd left a tray of (mildly) radioactive biological samples with a research value of about £150k on the counter of a bank on campus when I was a PhD student. Luckily they were clearly labeled as such.
I did that on the morning of September the 12th 2001.
Neither the police or the bank found it very funny, although the police did kindly return them.
I occasionally still wake up thinking about it but look back at the responsities that were given to a clueless 21 year old as a good lesson for what happens when an organisation wings it.
As per many others I have buggered up from time to time costing companies a reasonable amount of cash and I have also spent time tidying up after others buggering up. In all the latter cases I have been asked to provide review and feedback about what should be done in response. Only time I suggested firing someone was a good idea was due to them trying to cover it up which turned it from a few hours to fix to taking about 5 days including the weekend. Aside from that its generally we need to fix processes and get proper cross reviews in place.
From what you have wrote my immediate response would be its a failing in management not to have kept a few hours a week/month (depending on complexity/length of project) from the promoted expert to review your work whilst you settled into the role.
Any good manager takes Watson Snr's advice.
“Recently, I was asked if I was going to fire an employee who made a mistake that cost the company $600,000. No, I replied, I just spent $600,000 training him. Why would I want somebody to hire his experience?”
Things to remember:
1. Everyone who is a builder, who does something, as opposed to sitting around watching others, makes mistakes. Everyone.
2. At the end of a project when it's bedded in and running, no-one remembers the mistakes, they just think about the value it's giving, not any bumps in the road to get there.
Don't beat yourself up mate! And don't think about it anymore until Monday.
You are exactly the kind of guy that employers love - you will own this and fix it :)}
Have a great Sunday!
I still wake up with a start/feeling of dread thinking I haven't done my homework. I left school 31 years ago 😂
That project I inherited? I've checked it and found this problem. Don't worry though, I've thought of these three possible fixes, these are the costs and benefits of each option, which should we do?
.
That kind of thing tends to be fairly well received🤷♂️
One time when I worked for a bank, we lost a load of money. Not the usual way a bank loses money, ie fraud or betting on the wrong imaginary dog. No, this was a bag of physical cash, there was no way we should have lost it. It basically looked like a member of staff had nicked it, and it all was pretty fraught and depressing.
Til my colleague Helen was visited in a dream by her long-dead father, who said basically, “Lo, Helen, I have returned from heaven with this important message for you- you accidentally gave that bag of cash to a particular customer, in place of a different bag of cash”. Next day, she phones that guy up and he checks and yup, he had a bag of about five grand which should have been a bag of £500 in pound coins.
I nominated helen’s dead dad for employee of the month but apparently that was not ok
This is a great story!
Try waking up and wondering if you put the correct solvent in the specimen processing machine and the 150 patients who the specimens belong to might have to be called back and re-biopsied 😳🤦
I love you guys/gals. So many points above that made me chuckle/wince/nod along to sagely. In terms of the impact of this thread- I slept well and deeply last night.
x
Been there before. As long as you own it and fix it, itll be forgotten about within a month at most even if it's really bad.
My ones often aren't revealed to me until I see them going wrong on TV to a global audience, never much fun when that happens. Layers and layers of checks but there's always a chance something will slip all the way through. Fessing up with a clear "this happened, this is why it happened, this is what we're doing to fix it and this is how we'll ensure it doesn't happen again" is the best I can do. I've still had clients who responded to my first proactive mention of it by CCing my boss in an arsey complaint back but I just think less of them for it and move on now. And hold a grudge forever, of course.
How did the morning meeting go Cody?
Yeah man update needed
Waking up in the bath sounds terrifying
It's ok, he was with his friendly cousin...
Big national bank. Got mortgage rate wrong on an ad. ££.
Oh and not my story to tell, but I know someone who loaded a cash machine wrong, to the benefit of the public of Bristol.
As an aside doesn’t anyone review your work / cast a second pair of eyes over it? Seems like a poor process if not
This x100. Any high level designs for IT projects we do are reviewed by at least two other people (senior architects) and often sections are reviewed by technical architects for each technology involved (e.g. a network architect and a DBA). Before costs are provided to the client they go through a whole other review process. It's mental that one person can submit a design with costs to a client without peer reviews for what sounds like a fairly big project!
I once worked for a company that provided software that made satellite television work, in this case for a popular provider named after the stuff that is above us, let's call them "Cloud" or "Air" or something like that for now.
Anyway. I worked on hard disk backup code in this software. At one point, I very nearly delivered an update to the entire customer base that would have caused the hard disk emergency recovery process to be triggered (whether it was needed or not).
Emergency recovery would (give or take) reformat the disk in the customer's unit.
"Oops."
I set back a €2m project (and by extension a much larger €8bn project) by almost two months
Sounds like it was still quicker than most industry projects of that size.
Update: all is well. I followed the advice given, saw the boss first. He couldn't have been any more helpful, but was keen to point out that I'd overstepped the role I have. He was right. He was keen to get the customer the solution, as was I, but pointed out that others had been failing to pick things up properly. We followed up in an email a bit later.
By the time I'd sent this, he'd managed to get a lot of assistance involved, which was great. And although I'll still be advising, I've to step back from the coalface on this one and let others own their issues.
I couldn't be more grateful for everyone's advice. I've known for a while that I'm not great at pushing back where others are slacking off, and I need to work on that I think- for the good of physical and mental health, if nothing else.
Best regards to you all!
Result, good response from the boss.
Great update, OP.
Pleased it worked out well - I bet that is a load off your shoulders!
Good news! Remember that outcome the next time you start to feel stressy about something. It usually turns out to be a lot easier to deal with than when it's racing through your mind in the middle of the night.
Excellent news OP,it's a great thing when the needle swings back to the positives 👍, and now you have 'that story' 😀
I was working on a multi-million pound residential development in south west London, we were setting out the stud walls for the internal partitions and I told my assistant to round the dims to the nearest 5mm (which was simply a setting in CAD) assuming she knew what I meant. She didn't and she proceeded to make it all up and I mean make it up - some of the dims she put down didn't even relate to the CAD model, I didn't check the drawings properly due to some excuse about being too busy and deadlines too tight and off they went to site. It got spotted reasonably quickly but the furore was immense. Errors like that are hugely costly. My boss got called to a meeting and promptly disappeared off to the pub the moment he got out. I was completely mortified and had no idea what to do. So I decided the best course of action was to put my hand up, admit the error and come up with a solution. Took myself off to the site office, apologised profusely and promised corrected drawings as soon as I could possibly manage it. The site foreman sat me down, told me I had royally screwed up yes, but I'd admitted it and I was fixing it which was more than my boss had managed. We got on like a house on fire after that. And I always double check everything before it goes out the door now. I hate making mistakes, I get very anxious when I realise I have.
Glad to hear you've straightened things out OP - the wave of relief must be immense!
Glad it worked out OP.
Seeing as this is a 'nightmare at work' thread I thought I'd share the pinnacle of my work f*** ups (there have been lots)..
About 10 years ago I was tasked with building a monitoring system for a large construction site in the San Francisco financial district. They were digging a multi-story trench adjacent to some major skyscrapers and had rigged the entire site with sensors to monitor everything from ground vibration, subsidence, stresses on building foundations, inclination of retaining walls etc. The system I built allowed engineers to query and visualise the data and send alarms if certain limits were breached. After a couple of months of what I thought was successful operation, I got a phone call from the project director asking if I could fly to San Francisco immediately. One of the alarms our system was sending out was indicating the imminent collapse of a 60 storey office building. My boss assured the city authorities, building owners and site directors that this was anomalous and had the data to prove it, but we still came within hours of the entire financial district being evacuated. The problem was a single line bug in some code triggered by an outlying event which we didn't anticipate. We never built another monitoring system like that, it was way too stressful for all concerned.
We had a corker at a construction company I worked for. And it was one of the two Directors that cocked up. We quoted for digging a trench for a water irrigation project in Qatar. It was a few km long (under 10) and the Director went out to survey.
Quote given per metre dug - depth was something like 5m deep though, so we sent out a large 'trenching machine' - think of a big digger on caterpillar tracks and a large boom with cutting teeth - so can cut down about in a straight line.
Slight issue in that the Director didn't survey the land properly, and it was solid bedrock. The cost per meter was more in the wear and replacement of metal 'picks' (teeth) on the boom, than we got. Add in a couple of staff, hotels etc. The job went on for over 18 months and not a few months, and cost possibly £2m over and above the fee.
The boss did say he'd probably be sacked if it was anyone other than him that messed up.
Couple more to make someone smile.
I did a little project when fresh out of uni to provide a sectional heat jacketed pipeline and process plant. Heat jacket was a reverse flow fluid jacket filled with a special antifreeze. So i drew all the pipe sections up and locations for all the spigots, clipping points, support structure, lagging thicknesses, some drawings for the fairly high spec flexy hoses to go between sections of the jacket, the usual, ended up with about 15 component drawings, a parts list and 3 or 4 assembly drawings.
Everything made in house except for the flexies. The flexies that have their own fully dimensioned and specced out part drawings and about 4 lines on the parts list, with specifications and dimensions.
Anyway, week later the supplier turns up with a box of flexies, mentions that they might be a bit hard to bend, what with being so short and quite stiff...
Opens the box to show me the flexies, longest is about 250mm shortest about 100.
"Where the hell did you get the measurements from, these are the wrong length"
"No they aren't, i took the dimensions straight off your drawing"
"No you didn't, the long ones should be over 900mm."
Proceeds to get a frigging tape measure out and show me how he eyeballed the size from the ~1/4 scale assembly drawings, which are clearly labelled "Not to scale, for assembly guidance only".
Needless to say, my boss went absolutely ballistic and we had the right sized flexies 24 hours later.
And somewhere in a box in the attic i still have the shortest, stiffest "flexy" hose in the world.
The other one was a graduate engineer doing a cost reduction study on a component who decided that the extremely expensive profile being cut into an assembly on one of our legacy engines was far too expensive and time consuming. So he simplified it, saved a fortune. Sent the drawings out to get done (we were using some outside contractors to do legacy cost reduction stuff). Then did the whole check in, approve, issue, update stage drawings and then launch to manufacture.
First we knew was when the back of an engine almost fell off on test. when it cracked along the newly "designed" profile.
That hadn't been through FEA, or metallurgy, or proper approval process, or design review. Or anything.
There were 3 or 4 more in the build shop and a couple more in manufacturing. Took six of us three weeks full time to undo everything, find the parts, destroy the parts, up issue the drawings (can't un-issue a drawing, it's illegal) recertify with new part numbers, sort out all the orders and all the stage drawings, destroy the revised CNC programs and then explain it all to the authorities...
Then work out how to build a process that meant it couldn't happen again.
The guy who did it is (as far as i am aware) still there, 25 years later.