Had the assistant drop something off at Ashford. As we worked in Croydon, and we regularly took stuff there, assumed he would go to the Ashford down the road instead of the one in Kent. OK, we all make mistakes, yet somehow heading off into Kent towards Dover must have dawned on him at some point, but no. He phoned the office to admit fault, and ask where to go? "head back, turn left onto M25." Naturally he turned right. He left work at 9am, and we forgot about him and closed up at 5pm. Next morning we looked at the mileage log - over 200. Bless him.
A friend of mine told me about how he and his mates did some Zoom pub quizzes to stay in touch during the early days of covid. He lost an argument about one of the answers, where the correct answer was Free Range Chickens. He was quite animated about this and protested the answer strongly. So much so that when he joined the following weeks quiz, he changed his name on Zoom to "Free Range Chickens are C**ts".
The following day his wife was joining a management team meeting to meet her new colleagues, having recently secured a new job as a senior manager with the local health board. She hadn't actually started the job, this was her first meet and greet with the wider senior team. The meeting was on Zoom, and it was still logged in to his account with his chicken based name...
Back in my pit days i put a flow meter in the wrong way round n blew the hydraulic pump up,luckily there was another machine round the corner that the headers wouldn't use. Got the broken pump off and the spare from the other machine was being fitted to the original machine when my engineer and the pit manager came in. "Old pump ****ed?" Yep.
Most expensive n lots of legal fallout was at a coal power station years later. 2 new uprated n more efficient High Pressure turbines were fitted. Made in Poland and Mexico by a very large engineering company, 1st one started and got up to 330MW and ran its thrust pads. Big panic, opened up all the oilways and pipes on the 2nd one as it was all assembled, nothing untoward found so it was run up and it failed at 330MW.
Luckily the original HP turbines hadnt been scrapped. so new ones out n old ones back in. A very long shut down.
Turned out that somehow the Maximum Thrust became the Normal Working Thrust. New ones went back to the manufacturers for re-engineering and were fitted 12months later and were still running great when the station closed
Hmmm, one of mine but not 'mine'...
I was PMing a Datacentre build in a new office block. ~5000 staff over many floors and the Datacentre was (unusually) on the top floor for 'reasons'...
The build was going well and the working floors were being fitted out; Electrac and CAT6 to floor boxes (it was the olden days) etc. The chillers and dehumids were installed in the Datacentre and then everyone knocked off as it was a Friday afternoon.
Cue the call over the weekend. The installers had commissioned the kit (not planned) ahead of the water detection systems. There'd been a rather large leak and it found its way to the basement via all the floors inbetween.
A sans coffee meeting between all (guilty) parties, the MD and the insurers was held on the Monday morning to errrm, plan the recovery...
Several £m later and a few weeks delay, the staff moved into their nice new home 😬
The meeting was on Zoom, and it was still logged in to his account with his chicken based name...
Oo, this reminds me of when I built a PC for a chum. I was setting everything up and set the Windows screensaver password (temporarily - as a joke to myself...) as: '<insert friends wife's name> c*** smells of old fish'. Finished the setup, delivered the PC then received 'that' phone call a few hours later. Yep, I'd forgotten to change the password to something sensible. 😳
Not me, 1st job after marketing degree. Mate put full page ad in national press for a client. Only problem she d put the wrong phone number as a contact. It wasn't a call centre it was a granny in Walsall.
Re fork lift, I had a summer job at bookers. Initiation was a circuit round the warehouse flat out. I didn't realise they rear wheel steer and wrote off a pallet of stock. Everyone scarpered, I was there all night cleaning up.
Mate at a big FTSE head office had v similar name to another staff member. She got a few emails by accident from other staff members, it was an intranet. One had photos of a naked golf holiday.
Sure there's loads more, I can't believe I ve never been sacked.
Biggest Cock Up!! - Going into the family business straight from school at nearly 16 (in 1985).
I pissed about at school knowing I'd got guaranteed job and came out with two CSEs.
Great at first as I had cash, but then realising in my mid twenties with wife, mortgage and company financial commitments that the business had me trapped. Eventually got out at 40 when we went bankrupt.
But wasted 25 years of my working life when in hindsight I could have achieved so much more.
Isolator switch failed (or more likely was never wired up correctly) on a machine
I put my hand in the machine
My burnt hand came out of the machine with significantly less skin on the palm than it went in with
Being young and stupid I went to the co-op, bought a large tube of savlon burn cream, plastered that over my hand, hand into a latex glove, into a bucket of iced water. Once it was sufficiently numb I could grip the bars enough to ride into town and go to the BMX track. By all logic and common sense I really should have gone to A&E with it 🤔
Ohh, burned hands reminds me of one...
I was working in a chippy as a fish frier. One of the pans had got too hot, so I was bailing cool oil (from the adjoining pan that wasn't switched on) into the hot pan and vice versa (as I didn't want to overfill the hot pan so I was bailing back and forth). Someone behind distracted me, I turned around, and somehow contrived to tip a pan full of hot oil onto my hand when I wasn't concentrating. Fortunately it was the much cooler oil that I was bailing into the hot pan and not the other way around, otherwise I would have ended up in hospital having skin grafts. As it was I went home to bed, and slept with my hand in a bucket of cold water.
We closed down the Arc de Triomphe roundabout, destroyed tens of thousands of pounds' worth of bikes and made the French national news one morning. Well, not strictly me...
I worked for a few years on charity bike rides as a tour manager. London to Paris was my most common tour; we'd typically have 50-100 cyclists riding out of London(ish) on a Friday morning, getting the ferry on Friday night, cycling to somewhere like Gournay-en-Bray on the Saturday and then rolling happily into Paris on Sunday afternoon to celebrate. They'd go for a meal somewhere, we'd carefully pack all their bikes into Luton vans and early on the Monday morning some staff members would drive those vans back up to Calais while the participants had a morning to themselves in Paris and then got the Eurostar back to London, where the van drivers would reunite them with their bikes and we'd all go home.
I got a phone call early on the Monday morning from one of the drivers telling me he'd had a crash and there were broken bikes all over the road. I thought he was joking, until I heard approaching sirens in the background of his call. It turned out that he'd set his sat nav and followed its instructions to get out of Paris. What the sat nav didn't know, and that he forgot, is that the tunnel from the Champs Elysées that goes under the Arc de Triomphe has a 2.5m high ceiling. And the height of a Luton van is around 3.5m...
(the story in our department when I did my degree was that) a post-grad organic chem student dumped some of his waste material down a lab sink. He filled a large part of the neighbouring uni library (John Rylands, I believe was the biggest in Europe at the time) with fumes that smelt "quite a lot" like a gas leak and the place was evacuated for a long while
Ohh, burned hands reminds me of one...
I was working in a chippy as a fish frier. One of the pans had got too hot,
A place I worked at had a Diner. One time a lass dropped something into the chip fryer - a finger ring if memory serves - and unthinkingly plunged her hand in to grab it...
... Or, she would have done, had a colleague next to her seen this unfold and pretty much rugby tackle her across the kitchen. 👀
No mine, but in the mid 80's I did work experience in a car mechanics garage, some bright spark decided to degrease the engine bay by paint brushing it with petrol. And then start the engine 🔥
a post-grad organic chem student dumped some of his waste material down a lab sink
I used to work for a photobooth business. We had to change the chemicals in them every 4 weeks. We were given coloured containers, one for each type of chemical waste. They weighed around 10kg each, and there were 3 or 4.One guy couldnt be bothered with carrying them back to his van, so poured it all down the Staff sink in Woolworths (Warrington iirc). The sulphur dioxide gas given off caused them to shut the store for the day and a chemical incident ensued. He was sacked the next day.
Ashford down the road instead of the one in Kent. OK, we all make mistakes, yet somehow heading off into Kent towards Dover must have dawned on him at some point,
Mate had a job installing some cabinets for a client in Frankfurt (Oder).
Being the way he is he set off, drove for four hours and only decided to enter the company's address when on the outskirts of Frankfurt. He couldn't find the location so he phoned me in the workshop. Thought it odd him saying he was in Frankfurt after only four hours as the company was the other side of Berlin on the Polish border, about 7 hours away. He had headed to Frankfurt am Main rather than Frankfurt (Oder).
He did admit he thought it odd that we kept saying "du musst nach Frankfurt, oder."
"Oder" being German for "or" or "right", but it's also a river.
He then had another seven hour drive across Germany.
The same guy, job at Munich airport putting in a stud wall. Needed an extra length of timber. Goes down, grabs the wood and uses the escalator to come back up. Except he's stood this 5m length of 4x2 on its end and as he's got towards the top the timber pierces the ceiling above as the escalator keeps pushing it further. Left a gaping hole.
Same job.... We've got one of these mini electric scissor lifts. The thing is slow so the guy decided he would speed things up and use the travelator. He got about four meters before the steps started collapsing. Rather than turn back he continued the length of this thing.....
Both the escalators (due to ceiling repair) and travelator were out of use for a good while.
What the sat nav didn't know, and that he forgot, is that the tunnel from the Champs Elysées that goes under the Arc de Triomphe has a 2.5m high ceiling. And the height of a Luton van is around 3.5m...
Bloody hell.... Reminds me.
Same guy with Frankfurt and the escalator..... We had the start of a job revamping all the Bet3000 shops in Germany.
We're in away Nürnberg. Two of us start ripping out the old furniture/deco. Matey starts his for hour round trip in the (newly liveried Fitness First 7.5t truck with a sleeper cabin over the cab ready for a nationwide roadshow the following week) back to Munich to collect the stuff we had spent the last month preparing for Bet3000. On the outskirts of Nürnberg he's on the phone to us and I hear this almighty crack and then lots of expletives....
He's gone under a low bridge which the cab just cleared. The rest of the truck wasn't so lucky. Destroyed. I've a picture somewhere where the truck and its contents are strewn across the road.
There's a reason his nickname for a while was "Scheißmagnet".... Although, TBF, he has quite a few nicknames.
One time a lass dropped something into the chip fryer - a finger ring if memory serves - and unthinkingly plunged her hand in to grab it...
My first job, aged 16, was at IKEA. Big staff catering area. One great things about the morning shift was the fried breakfasts. They had a self service toaster with the metal conveyor belt thing so you could decide how toasted your toast was. A piece of toast got stuck and the girl used a knife to dislodge it.
She went flying backwards across the room like in a cartoon. Canteen was closed all weekend and the toaster was removed.
She survived.
and you still haven't bloody opened it!I once closed the A66 Eastbound from Penrith 12 hours too early. I still have flashbacks about that after 12 years.....
Current workplace, about 2-3 years ago. We had some work, tender was up (teaching contract), bid put together, loads of work, more or less guaranteed the work as we'd been doing it for a few years, business development manager didn't check he'd submitted it correctly via an on-line portal. We discovered it too late, couldn't submit a late bid, so lost out on £750k bid. Rules were rules. He 'got away' with it some how - I'd have sacked him.
With regards family businesses. My wife worked for her parents business after school/college. Paid peanuts, worked hard, but I was doing OK earnings wise when we got married mid 20's. It eventually went to pot when they got taken over and then made redundant. Really set her career back supporting her parents TBH.
Not me, but generally speaking, when you have to calculate a clinical score for patients in your pivotal trials, which is the primary endpoint of the multi-$100mn trial, you might want to double and treble check the sum is correct before 1) reporting the trial results and 2) submitting the drug dossier to the regulatory agencies for approval. That’s a meeting with no tea and biscuits I wouldn’t want to attend.
More embarrassing than catastrophic.
Reversed a school minibus with 15 sixth formers on board into a full sized skip. They found it much more amusing than me. Or the College principal.
in my defence the skip wasn’t there when I left with the students, it was pissing with rain, the bus was fugged up and I was knackered after a full weekend away and driving home for five hours. But that didn’t cut it much with my colleagues who never let me forget about it.
I’ve cost employers 10s of thousands by providing quotes to customers that were less than I’ve been quoted by suppliers. The vast majority by accident.
Thankfully I’ve made those employers millions prior and since.
I crashed an (empty) minibus with loaded trailer on a wet day into an elderly local's elderly Mini. The Mini had a rear end shaped like a Transit front end... Totally my fault, too fast in the wet.
Lack of WHERE clause on a SQL update query. Been there, done that. Soon learnt it was a good idea to wrap it in a no-commit transaction and check the data before committing.
Same - Standard practice for me these days,
I missed the last couple of lines because there was blank line in the query and I'd not scrolled down far enough. It also instilled into me that lacklustre sql formatting can have consequences.
One of the others I was involved in fixing but someone else caused. First up a number a new member of the team followed the wrong operating procedure and deleted some AWS virtual machines which were quite important. They took down a service gateway which served 6m customers and even after restoring from a backup image required use to go to two different data centres around the UK to re-authenticate the new servers with the hardware security modules.
Turns out the person who configured this system should have turned deletion protection on.
Looking back I have been involved in fixing a few cock ups in my career!
I used to work for a photobooth business.
I had no idea there was actually anyone inside those machines
A mate is rather proud of the time he was working in the local creamery on the line producing rice pudding when he somehow managed to make 500kg of blue Ambrosia.
When I was not long out of uni, I once sent the wrong files to print and had to get a print run of a few thousand catalogues pulped and reprinted. Since them, I've been extra careful about flight-checking jobs before I send anything to print.
I used to proofread everything I sent to print, then go through it again from proofs of everything I was involved with just before the plates were made, or flight-checking as you called it. I remember one job that had gone through a number of proofings, then the printer came wandering in with a sheet he’d just put through the machine, he’d just been checking for any ink or plate issues and spotted a spelling error! It was quite a long print run, so well spotted by him, it had been missed by me and my studio manager, the client… 🤷🏼♂️
No mine, but in the mid 80's I did work experience in a car mechanics garage, some bright spark decided to degrease the engine bay by paint brushing it with petrol. And then start the engine 🔥
An external combustion engine!
the tunnel from the Champs Elysées that goes under the Arc de Triomphe has a 2.5m high ceiling. And the height of a Luton van is around 3.5m...
This was a recent local cock-up. I'm almost certain the excavator came from a depot just a few km north of the bridge. Guessing the truck driver was looking for a new job that afternoon.
In a previous job I won a job with a new (to the firm) government client to provide technical support and editing of an important report to maintain world heritage status of a globally significant environment. Said government had recently made some departmental changes, which included sacking a lot of the experts that they really needed to write the report (it's all a bit Yes Minister tbh). Instead, a wholly unqualified department were taking carriage of the process. I had a team of ecologists (some very senior) on hand to review the technical side of things, my job was to then edit things so that everything joined up, made sense and was easy to read. A reasonably simple task, but 1,000 or so pages so time consuming.
Fairly soon into the process we worked out that the people writing the document were a) technically deficient for the task, and b) incapable of making decisions. The ecologists had to do a lot of writing to correct inaccuracies and poor work (way beyond scope), and when I sent back the draft chapters having massaged the writing of half a dozen people into something consistent they'd change their minds and **** around with it, so I was having to redo things over and over again.
We explained there was a massive variation to the contract required (something like triple the original value), and they agreed, realising they were way out of their depth. When we finally got to the point of layout they were still making changes and because of the political nature of the work and the firm's insistence that we wanted repeat work, we were incapable of stopping them. Eventually they burnt our subbied designers who refused to make any more changes, so I had ecologists working on publishing software all weekend until 2am Monday morning to finish the report. The client had the gall to call me at 8am asking for more and I told them everyone had gone to bed exhausted. The report was a dog's breakfast which was very disappointing to me. But it got them over the line so they thought it was a wonderful success.
At this point I should have refused to do any work with them... but I won another contract to run the public consultation phase of the same project. Great, I thought, an oppportunity to get back some of the lost profit from the first debacle.
I ended up working something like 36 of 48 hours at the end of that project trying to get their consultation report completed in time for the deadline. Unsurprisingly it was riddled with errors.
The only major one in all my years working was taking a car down to Autoglass at Cribbs Causeway in Bristol, to get to their actual location, it was necessary to drive around a narrow access lane around the car park, but there were several big blackthorn trees that had been allowed to spread out, and trying to avoid scratches all down the side of the car,I clipped a large concrete bollard on the opposite side! When I got back I parked the car and fessed up to the boss, who came and took a look, he shrugged, and said, well it’s not as bad as I was expecting, and at least you work for the right company! We repaired and refurbished ex-fleet cars, so just a minor scrape on top of the other work needed, like the new heated screen and sensor recalibration I’d taken it to Bristol for. A big sigh of relief on my part.
Especially compared to the incident involving one of my work colleagues, who drove a car out of the storage area down the road, with the screen fogged up, ran into the back of a van parked by the side of the road, punting it out into the road, where it hit a car being driven by another work colleague taking a car down to the same storage area, and so wrote off three vehicles, including the contractor’s van he’d hit. Sarah, who was driving the car hit by the van, was incredibly lucky to get away with only minor injuries, the van driver had seen what was about to happen and released the brake, so the van absorbed a lot of the impact. I was on holiday when it happened, but the cars were in the workshop; entire chassis on one was bent and twisted, it was estimated he hit the van at around 50, on an estate road with a 30 limit…
Several very, very lucky people that day got away with minor bruising, the consequences of one idiot could have been so much worse - Sarah refused to drive that stretch of road, there was a slightly longer alternative that she used after that, that avoided a long straight stretch.
I've never done anything huge and I'm good at patching up mistakes before other people notice, so my cock ups will mostly go with me to my grave. However, I did a lot of odd-jobbing on construction sites when I was young and there were a few.
We built an enormous conveyer belt to take wood chips to a hopper, it was probably 30 meters long and rose about 20 meters in the air. Except, when it was time to set it up on site, it was 10 cm too short. Some frantic gas axe and welding work to splice a new section in there.
Similar thing on a building site, building a fancy townhouse for a fairly wealthy guy. He was actually a decent enough guy, but very unamused when one side of the upstairs was a foot lower than the other side. Half the house had to be torn down and rebuilt, nearly sent my boss into bankruptcy, he lost a lot of money on that job.
In a previous life I used to work on papermaking machines (big buggers, some can be 400m long).
Anyway, we had sold a 1200 litre hydraulic tank as part of one specific bit of kit. The customer asked us to change the height of the access panels as they intended to build a small wall around it to prevent a clumsy fork lift driver spearing it (again).
A mate is rather proud of the time he was working in the local creamery on the line producing rice pudding when he somehow managed to make 500kg of blue Ambrosia.
Hmmm.
Ambrose says, "A mate...blue Ambrosia"
Had a resident engineer working with us for a few years. He'd been back to HQ for a few days (In Germany) landed at Stansted and turned the wrong way, ended up heading south. No biggy, we have two (almost) equal distance/time routes from Stansted to the Coventry area, ish. Except when he got to the M25 he turned left/clockwise. On a sunday night, when they were doing some *massive* road works. In multiple locations. Took him about 6-7 hours to clear all the diversions and suchlike and get onto the M40.
Instead of getting home to his digs south of Coventry about midnight, or just after. He decided to go straight to work. Getting there about 7.30, having had an hours sleep at some services somewhere on the M40. The second time he nodded off in the office, our manager and one of the other guys took him and his car home and told him not to come back until tuesday lunchtime. At least.
Also had a datacentre design cock up when we did a refurb/new IT supplier. They managed for some reason to put the exhaust and intakes from the AC vertically above each other on a 5 storey building (one server room per floor). So on hot days the top floor servers would shut down after lunch due to overheating. And the poor sod sat on the desk next to the server room would start to go deaf about 11...
Eventually ended up with these huge ducts being bolted to the outlets to blow the hot air as far away from the building as possible.
I've also broken millions of dollars worth of prototype cars, though that was expected, sort of, so not really a cock up.
The guy who drove a brand new F430 Scuderia (less than 100 km on the clock) into the back of a Fiesta, now that was a cock up...
A keen new IT admin arrived at a multinational company and wanted to clean things up and get things efficient. The first thing he did was remove all the redundant accounts. This was simple. He just checked which accounts hadn't logged in for the last six months and automatically deleted them along with all of their files.
This included accounts like Oracle which was their main operational database, plus a few similar major accounts so destroyed most of their IT infrastructure.
A keen new IT admin arrived at a multinational company and wanted to clean things up and get things efficient. The first thing he did was remove all the redundant accounts. This was simple. He just checked which accounts hadn't logged in for the last six months and automatically deleted them along with all of their files.
This included accounts like Oracle which was their main operational database, plus a few similar major accounts so destroyed most of their IT infrastructure.
As I was reading that I'd already started morning for the master accounts.
A keen new IT admin arrived at a multinational company and wanted to clean things up and get things efficient. The first thing he did was remove all the redundant accounts. This was simple. He just checked which accounts hadn't logged in for the last six months and automatically deleted them along with all of their files.
This included accounts like Oracle which was their main operational database, plus a few similar major accounts so destroyed most of their IT infrastructure.
As I was reading that I'd already started morning for the master accounts.
The same guy used 'rm -rf *' instead of 'rm *' When trying to clear directory at the top of a hierarchy of accounts. For those not familiar with Unix, `rm *` removes all the files in the directory. `rm -rf *` removes the files, the directories, the directory files, the subdirectories, the subdirectory files, reciprocating through and removing everything.
He was replaced very shortly after this.
Not one I did, but one I fixed. 20 years or so ago...I worked for a startup that had supplied an absolutely critical component of a mobile phone network to the state incumbent and then only mobile telco in a Middle Eastern country. Our on site support person managed to break the database access controls so badly that even the most privileged user couldn't reinstate them (not entirely his fault really, but he did have a test system to try it on but hadn't...), your humble correspondent getting on the VPN and going super low level to fix it. In the meantime of course the whole country's only mobile network went down for 20 mins. This being a Middle Eastern country just in case it was due to a terrorist attack/foreign invasion they scrambled the air force for good measure.
Post mortem for every single outage/issue we had after that usually began with, 'well, at least they didn't scramble the air force'.
I had a summer job with a friend's boyfriend's scaffolding firm. Being a new, small firm and a bit cheap they corrosion protected the shackles ( I forget the proper term) with diesel. Just dunked it in a bucket of the stuff and let it drip dry in the yard.
First use of a new load was on a roofing job somewhere near Worcester and it was raining. If the weather's dry the diesel is pretty stinky but otherwise benign, when it's wet the bl00dy things are like greased snot and slippery as hell. Suffice it to say that when throwing up one of the "shackles" to the 1st lift the thing ejected from my hand in a direction that wasn't quite as intended. First window I've ever smashed. Was quite surprised how easy it is to break double glazing. The thing just went straight through and landed on the landing carpet. I can't remember the consequences but I kept working for them for rest of the holidays.
Can't remember anything from any proper jobs.
I 'lost' a grain trailer racing across a field to get to a full combine. The old boy on the combine wasn't impressed, 'Good to see you, now go back and get the ****** trailer'.
The pin on the tow hitch had sheared, and the front of the trailer had nose dived in into the field. Needed a big jack to dig it out.
Being a new, small firm and a bit cheap they corrosion protected the shackles ( I forget the proper term)
Fittings. You're welcome 🙂
I got called out to a frozen food warehouse once that was being commissioned. They'd set up the sprinkler system but hadn't connected up the rest of the alarm system that notified the owner etc. The smoke detectors had malfunctioned on the Friday evening, setting off the sprinklers. They came in on the Monday morning to find the floor covered in several feet of solid ice 🙂
Not me but an ex-co-worker sent an F1 car out on track at the Red Bull Ring (in a test) with a "slightly" mis-parametrised brake balance in brake mode 4, in a way that if the driver selected it, they’d effectively handbrake the car at 180mph...
Final lap of the run, the driver wants to try brake mode 4 so selects before starting the lap and of course ends up pirouetting about 3 times before hitting the barriers very hard. Was an old car but estimates on the damage were £600k+ and they still are traumatised by it 5 years on!
At a different F1 team as a student design engineer I sent 5 hydraulic actuator bodies to manufacture with a designed wall thickness of 0.18mm in one place (was meant to be 3mm+ to hold the pressure) – estimated cost of in terms of machining time and materials was about £9k each.
I've done the petrol in a diesel van once. As far as excuses goes it was the week I found out my dad had terminal cancer. Still got a disciplinary meeting and a written warning though.
