That sickening feeling

Borrowed a works van to move the contents of the garage ahead of our house move next week. All went fine until I dropped it back at the depot. I thought I would park it up rather than thoughtlessly dump it in front of the office.

Crunch. 😳

Sizeable dent on the van and a cracked bumper on another, both 64 plate VW’s. Help me feel a little better by sharing your brick in the pit of the stomach moments.

Had a hire car in France. Somehow didn’t notice the high kerb at a petrol station and dented the cill under the doors for about 2 ft as I turned across it. Ouch. £500.

Working on a unix system down Swindon (I was at home in Manchester), I’d be chosen as the administrator to do this work because of my seniority and it was a single server providing a critical service for a very large and well known oil company.

I completed the configuration work and had to reboot the server to fix the changes, we agreed a 5 minute outage with the oil bods, they put a holding page up to avoid losing any payments, I issue the reboot command, shutdown -h now. Bang. Should of typed -r. Now the server is shutdown and isn’t coming back up. Massive sinking feeling. I phone the data centre guys and talk them through the manual restart procedure but they refuse to do it…..

Cue a 170 mile drive to press a button with very regular contact calls from an increasingly irate customer who keeps shouting how much money they’ve lost at me.

Installing fire detecting equipment in a test cell jointly run by the MoD, Rolls Royce and Westinghouse. Attaching it to an RSJ roof support. Using a mag base drill with 10mm drill bit. All going well until ‘pop’. I have a look behind and have gone through a nitrogen charged 100 core data cable at £60,000 each. Only 6 existed in the world and they were all in this building. Collecting data from an RB 211 attached to a marine gearbox.

Collecting data from an RB 211

*nods sagely and winces on your behalf whilst secretly having no clue what this means*

Miscalculating the annual offtake volume for a key ingredient. It was a convoluted contract in which forecasts are issued several months in advance, with those numbers becoming binding +/- a certain fluff factor the closer they get to fruition, until finally they are binding orders.

Our annual offtake was floating in at close to the 1000 tonne level that would enable us to get a price rebate on our total volume. So i was instructed to increase orders to pass that threshold. Only – I’d fluffed the previous forecast to the extent that increasing the month offtake by the maximum % allowed didn’t quite get us over the line. i begged my counterpart at the supplier, but they weren’t having it, so I had to fess up to my boss. Who after a short period of expletive laden ranting was very good about it.

We bought 996 tonnes that year, and because we missed the rebate level, we paid precisely €0.1/kg more for every single one of those kg than we needed to.

Yep, that is just short of €100,000

[company t/o was about $8.3 Billion, so they could just about afford it]

Ran into a concrete bollard in my estate. I must have driven round it 500 times but that morning as I turned the corner my front end cleared it but the back end hit it just at the rear passenger door.

£500 body shop bill

Worst thing was the wife had previously warned me on a couple of occasions that I was quite close to it. “Don’t be silly Dear!, I’m nowhere near it”

A smudge of red paint was there to remind be of my abject stupidity for about a year before the bollards were repainted.

I once drove a forklift into a brick wall that my boss has spent all day building. WHOOPS!

Once hired a high-roof van for a house move. After I got used to it I forgot it was a van as it felt like driving my usual car… until I tried to enter a multi-story car park. Crunch!

Luckily, when I took it back they didn’t check the roof 😀

On picking up a 4×4 from Christchurch airport in New Zealand, I went full on Fast Show and shouted LETS OFF ROAD!!! and charged off down the first dirt track I saw. The ford didn’t look that deep. But it was just deep enough to conceal a gert big **** off rock which I slammed the front of it straight into!! 😳

Luckily I’d taken out the additional insurance, and there didn’t seem to be any clause in it about being a complete and utter nobhead 😀

@wwaswas

Sorry, I thought there would be enough nerds on here that further description would have been deemed patronising.

RB 211 is the Rolls Royce engine that 747 jumbo jets use. Someone thought it would be an idea to bolt one to a gearbox with a propeller and use in US minesweeper boats. We had over a 1 million lines of instrumentation coming off the engine. Fortunately there were enough intact cores left in the cable to do the job.

As a very new developper, I accidentally deleted a whole table from our ERP system db.

Luckily it was on the DEV system and I was able to take a copy of the live one and write a programme to write the data back into the table that I had to recreate. No one ever realised except a couple of people did notice that the table in the DEV system seemed to have more up to date records than it should have, somehow 😳

Oh, another good one. I noticed that the time on our main ERP was wrong – it was about five mins fast. I still had access to the server at that point so quickly went and corrected the time. Two minutes later the calls started to come in as update errors started and then the server crashed. Turns out it didn’t like going back in time and writing records that were earlier than other records already existing…

shutdown -h now. Bang. Should of typed -r. Now the server is shutdown and isn’t coming back up

Thank god for IPMI

Burnt my department down. Miraculously kept my job.

Sent an email to a work colleague slagging off my boss. A millisecond after pressing the send button I realised I’d addressed it to the wrong person. Guess who?

I think you need to expand on that convert

Finger went through the paper…..

It’s only metal and plastic

No one was hurt

But it will cost …. think of it as idiot tax 😀

I did something along the lines of this:

sed -i "s/something/something_else/g" *

Accidentally in a directory I really shouldn’t have containing many binaries that people used frequently.

The git log now says something like “Reverted due to andy sed mangling willy nilly” to my eternal shame.

Driving the works van packed with a collection of ladders on, down a hill (see where this is going?) approaching a T-junction with a car already waiting to turn onto the main A road.

Colleague had failed to secure one of the ladders. At all.

Ladder cleared the bonnet completely and proceeded at some pace directly under the car in front and into the main road.

The ‘oh **** **** **** **** someone’s going to die” feeling was pretty sickening, but by some miracle, folk managed to stop.

The shame when retrieving was nearly just as bad.

On a particularly boring night shift one we ended up playing indoor cricket. A magnificent hok shot looped over and landed squarely on the emergency shutdown button for the mainframe…

Reversing out of a ‘car park’* having bought tree before christmas….. bang – lune reversed into the side of me.
Not my fault but not fun either.

Hang on! There was 2 bikes on that rack when we set off! Where’s yours gone? 😳

Built a new checkout for a company then uploaded it and went home only to come in the next day to realise I’d left it in debug mode all night and no one could access it. 20k or so of orders down the drain. That would have got me into more trouble if my boss hadn’t done the same thing a couple of years before.

taking out a frozen (apparently) fish in the freezer, uses a knife instead of a spoon to scrape it out …hit that tube thingy that has gas thingy.. freezer died 🙁

We had a hired a big Ford SUV in Canada for 4 weeks.
A few hours before handing it in at the airport ,we thought we would do some last minute shopping in town.
Parked up on a baking hot day in a dusty car park.
On return I thought it would be a good idea to clean the screen. 🙄
As soon as the spray hit it there was a massive cracking noise 😯 .

There goes $300 (I think a new screen was $1500) of your card sir 😥

It was probably a stone chip ,just in the right place to split the screen.

When I was a youngster, not long been in HM Forces, our unit replaced a load of old lightweight landrovers with spanky new 110&90’s, one of which was a V8.
First drive out and I managed to roll it 😳

bearnecessities – I was walking across a cross roads on crutches after breaking my hip when a Land Rover stopped suddenly at the road opposite having misjudged some traffic with priority coming from his left.

He had a 2×4 sheet of 15mm mdf on the roof rack unsecured – it shot straight across 2 lanes of road and went past me at waist height and only about 3ft in front of where I was walking.

I was so shocked I didn’t even swear at him as he changed his mind and shot off in the opposite direction.

The thought of what it would have done to my recently pinned broken hip if it had hit me still makes me come out in a cold sweat.

wolfenstein – a guy I used to work with has recurring bouts of chronic pneumonia linked to a similar thing which he managed to do with an iceaxe – count yourself lucky!

A sickening feeling that lasted a bit longer, a 15 mile drive to be exact.

Email exchanges with someone at work, a bit fruity-like.

Somehow I clicked print.

When the icon popped up in the tray, it was printing out at my home office.

I was not at my home office.

EDIT: wwaswas, that doesn’t bare thinking about. 😳 That said, MDF or triple stage ladders?!

Preparing a brand new, fresh out of the packet, 19 ft Maxum 350 ci V8 powered speed boat.
Final sea trial prior to customer collecting the next day and I drag the prop through a load of submerged concrete.
Prop totalled (very specific) and the bottom of the leg badly damaged.
Arse.

“Good judgement comes from experience, which comes from bad judgement.”
Jason Statham.
Though not normally known for his insight and wisdom this did strike a chord with me.

Parked outside the bank in Antibes on holiday

Ran to cash machine, back to car

Gap in traffic, went for it, so did a bright pink van

Looked horrendous at first, bumper goosed, pink paint and scratches everywhere

Friendly hells angel type fettling his Harley up the street from where we were staying, I managed in broken french to ask him about polish

He walked towards me brandishing a crow bar 😯 then used it to pop the bumper back out and polished all the pink paint off. Bought him a couple of packs of Marlboros

It still cost me £400 for a couple of paint chips on the plastic bumper that were about 1cm square

Taking a box of change to the bank. All bagged up and been collecting for a few years so totalled £170. Pull out of the drive onto the road and accelerate.

Yep, left the money on the roof of the car. The sound as it slid off on the road and exploded on impact was most upsetting. Was collecting it for a while and only lost a few quid, phew!

I issue the reboot command, shutdown -h now. Bang. Should of typed -r.

I’ve done that to shutdown my laptop, only in a remote shell on a China Mobile server rather than a local window. Luckily I was in China at the time, but still had to drive to a random tower block at 3am, get my interpreter to blag her way in, find the server and restart it….

Part of my job is to every month upload the Direct Debit amounts to be taken from customers accounts. Guess what I forgot to do once?
Cue £40k shortfall in company finances that month….. 😳
Just as well Im normally good at my job, otherwise I could have been gone!

Was the grandparent taxi at sister in laws wedding. Using wife’s car. She told me not to use the ‘boot unlock’ button on the key fob as I could ‘easily lock the car keys in’, because it auto locks after a few seconds.

Just before leaving for the reception / photos I go to put camera and jackets in boot and get phone call from work. Finish call and come to horrible realisation I’ve just done exactly what my wife said I shouldn’t.

Had to run around to find an alternative lift for the grandparents, called the AA and waited 4 hours for them to break in (luckily they could) and missed all of the family wedding photos. Wife not best pleased.

Work related one – was asked to transfer a number of staff in HR system, moved them to a new cost centre, but didn’t known their roles didn’t exist against that cost centre. Stupid system allowed me to do this without warning. First I knew was a phone call from HR telling me none of my staff were on this months payroll. Luckily paid them all by emergency BACs and sorted for the following month. For a short period I thought I was going to have to explain why people weren’t going to get paid that month….

Oh God, so many…

I had to sub a report from a freelance at a Crown Court to go into a news bulletin. It ran to 3 pages of dense print and I had about 10 minutes. Somehow an important piece of information got distorted in the process.
Next morning I was up before the judge with my employers’ lawyers explaining what had gone wrong. Luckily he believed it was a genuine mistake and none of the jury had head the report anyway…

I reversed a JCB off a 30 foot drop and landed on a railway line. Pat my shants.

Right…. where shall we start

Reversed into wife’s car on the drive and stoved the side in. (she was sat next to me at the time 😳 )

Locked keys in boot of car (a soft top so no way in without the keys) whilst on holiday in France – The French garage guys had to dismantle the whole of the back of the car to get in. Still, I know the French for the keys are in the boot now.

Ran over own foot with a petrol hover mower – that one stung a bit

Drilled through alarm cable, whilst fixing up a wine rack – sorry neighbours

For someone who prides himself on ‘attention to detail’ there seem to have been rather a lot of er incidents.

In a queue to use the local amenity recycling site new transit van one car in front of me, he drove straight into the scalping bar above entrance, smashed in top of van, then promptly reversed into car behind and luckily in front of me. New van he just bought as well.

Working in a buisness cnetre, opened lift door and pushed trolley in, no lift there, trolley fell onto roof of lift, just jumped down onto roof retrieved trolley and shut door,and put sign on door lift broke.