That sickening feeling

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.
Did similar once; I was using my dad’s Volvo 244 at the time, and it was very easy to just click the lock button on the inside of the door and shut it, on this occasion I decided to swap jackets as it was a cold day and chucked my light jacket into the car, clicked the lock button and shut the door, simultaneously realising the car keys were in the pocket.
Trouble was I was on a byway near Uffington White Horse, with my G/F.
Tried all sorts of things to get back in, even breaking off a piece of fence wire to try to hook the lock through the door edge.
Eventually someone turned up with a new-fangled carphone, so I called my G/F’s dad, near Malmesbury, and asked him to drive to my house, get the spare key, and drive up to Uffington.
He had a slight accident in his Saab on the way as well. 😳

Visiting a care home, little old granny walks out slowly gets into car and reverses back straight over the ramp of an ambulance picking up her husband, and destroyed it, she missed the ambulance, flashing lights and hi viz reflective tapes.

16 years ago I took a group of 6 students away for a weekend event in the College minibus As the only member of staff ended up driving back in pouring rain for four hours after a full on couple of days. Got back in the dark with the windows fully steamed up, reversed the bus into it’s usual parking slot-bang! Someone had put a skip there. Doh.
What made it worse is that I had spent the weekend using the students to back up use of mirrors when reversing by looking out of the back window, but forgot at the last moment on the last occasion.

And before you ask, no I didn’t see a very large yellow steel object when I drove into the carpark before reversing.

And yes, I got a lot of stick from students and staff for months about this.

Was on a pilgrimage to Lourdes when i was 18. Job entailed pushing the wounded holy to various places to have the Lord/Mary make them better.

One day my usual guy took a fit during mass and was taken to the hospital (i was outside playing football at the time so didn’t know). At collection time i was given a very frail looking old in a wheelchair instead and had to push her down the long cobblestone road back to her hotel. It was bumpy and she kept slipping down the seat so i had to stop and, carefully placing my hands under her armpits, eased her back to a seated position. It felt as if i was hurting her by lifting her in this way so after a few goes i decided the next time it happened i’d to try to fix her from the front. I put my hands on her thighs and gently pushed her back up. She let out an almighty yelp so i stopped. I though i’d done some damage and i think the look on my face told a similar story. She just said ‘it’s alright son’ and pulled back the blanket that was on her lap to reveal..not legs, but a big colostomy bag, the contents of which i’d squirted all over her.

^ Winner!

I think you need to expand on that convert

School workshop – I setup a CNC router doing a 3D job in plywood. Once I’d set it off (about 9pm) I was stupid busy and left the machine unattended in an otherwise deserted building and went off to another part of the site to do some other work. An hour later a very frazzled facilities lad finds me and tells me my department is on fire. Plywood is very abrasive and I had been a bit ambitious with the feed speed – tool had blunted, plywood got hot, embers into the extraction system, lots of fire. I arrived back at the building just as 8 fire engines, an incident control vehicle,one of those mega ladder vehicles and 50+ firefighters rocked up. The next 6 hours were some of the worst of my career!

Typing that I’m even less sure how I kept my job!

Hired a truck to move house. It was virtually identical to my dad’s which I had driven hundreds of times. I set the mirrors, got in and reversed it straight back into a brand new car. Crushed both doors, shattered windows, caved in the door pillar – thing was a right off. I still remember that sinking feeling.

Driving back from undergrad mapping trip in South of France, decided to go via the Vercors. However, car had a hissy fit and blows up gearbox. Get towed to local garage in Grenoble where it is apparent it cannot be fixed in France (being a Datsun and having never been imported to France). So arrange to be collected and taken home by AA 5 star in 2 days time. Meanwhile wife of garage owner books us into a friends hotel 3 miles away and drives us there for the night. Go to check the insurance documents and realise that I had left the folder with all my documents, including my passport, on the roof of her car as we had got into it at the garage.
Cue a sleepless night and a long walk back in the morning only to find that someone had found it on the road and had handed it in to the garage office.
Phew

many years ago i was on holiday with my wife in Dunoon, tried parking the car on the quayside and whilst reversing didnt take care to see where the edge was, reversed straight off so the car was seesawing, wife went to get out and screamed at her to stay put, luckily the tide was out and lots of passers by ran down to push the car up.

I spread a pre production test VX220 Turbo over about 150m of the A325 a few years ago.

That didn’t go down well at work. At all.

Hired a motorhome in italy.

Scraped it down the side of a lorry within an hour of picking it up.

€1500 deposit.

Ouch.

@BoardinBob :-))

Used to be an air defence engineer in RAF.

Was servicing a surface to air missile system in a hangar.

Ended up putting the generator unit outside the hangar doors, whilst working on the main launcher unit inside the hangar and feeding the cable between the two through a gap in the closed hangar doors.

A few hours went by and I needed to open the hangar doors in a hurry, but forgot about the generator outside and cable through the doors.

Hangar doors weigh quite a bit and a generator on the end of a cable wasn’t going to stop them trying to open

…..the resulting mess was rather embarrassing and expensive

Quoted a very big and important customer for £100k worth of kit for a big contract they had, which they subsequently ordered.

My buy price from the manufacturer for all that kit, it later transpired, was £125k.

Last year during a visit to my parents we all went out for a trip. I was driving my parents car with some of my kids and their cousins and my parents were driving a hire car (cheaper that way on the insurance). We arrived back at my folk’s house and they have a drive running up the side of the house. I parked the car and everyone got out and I locked it and went to open the back door when one of the kids suddenly shouted ‘Look! The car!’ I turned round to see the car slowly rolling down the drive towards the road. At this moment my parents were arriving to see their car hurtling backwards onto the street with their son desperately hanging off the front bumper and hitting the wall of the neighbour who lives opposite’s wall. Still can’t fathom how I forgot to apply the handbrake. 😳

I may or may not have had a hand in the overheating of an engine, to destruction. To date the repairs (which are still ongoing) have cost the company I work for upwards of half a million quid. The thinking is another £8-900k will have us back in the position we were in prior to the “incident”.

*rolls over*
*cuddles girl*
“There there, Sarah, it’s OK”
(It wasn’t Sarah I was cuddling)

A work mate borrowed an extremely expensive mountain bike years ago (early 90s?) from his rich friend and offered me a spin on it. As the resident bike “expert”, I declared that the brake cables needed adjusting. How strange, I thought, that the adjuster needed a spanner rather than the knurled ones I was used to. But the cables were very well oiled…. Sinking feeling as a puddle of hydraulic fluid appeared on the floor. Had to go back to the shop for a bleed, who had no clue what to do with it either.

A few years ago I got the job of ply lining a new company van. I’d just finished and went to shut the rear door when something pricked my finger. I looked to see what it was, it was the end of a screw sticking out through the door. I think there was four on each door. One day old and in the body shop it went.

Just saw this one:

http://money.aol.co.uk/2015/01/29/spelling-mistake-by-companies-house-ruins-124-year-old-family-bu/?ncid=webmail2

A spelling mistake by Companies House has forced a family engineering business under. Taylor & Sons Ltd was a successful engineering firm in Cardiff, with 250 employees, when an administrative blunder by Companies House destroyed the business overnight.

The Metro reported that the problem arose when an administrative assistant was updating the details of a similar-sounding company that had been wound up. The real liquidated company was Taylor and Son Ltd in Manchester. The administrator confused the two firms, and mistakenly indicated that the Cardiff firm was in liquidation.

They corrected the mistake three days later, but by then the damage was already done. The details had been passed onto credit reference agencies, so their suppliers all believed that the company was going down the tubes.

The High Court ruled that the failure of the business was due to the mistake by Companies House, and they have been ordered to pay £8.8 million in damages.

Some Government employee mistypes a company name and it ends up with an £8.8 million bill. Glad i don’t have to carry that cost!

Oh, hang on……. 👿

The 3 worst for me during a big MTB off.

The quiet before the impact.
The sense of impending doom before the pain starts.
Not wanting to open eyes to see what not pointing the right way.

Off the bike the worst is when my Daughter either hurts herself or is scared – her face screws up and at first the scream/cry is so high pitched it’s not audible – then is sort of drops in tone until it’s deafening – honestly I’d ride through a plate glass window naked before I saw her bop her head on her cot – it kills me a bit inside.

As part of my degree I did a year’s placement at a very large chemical works.

One of my tasks was to oversee some contractors who were installing handrails in a tank farm. One freezing February night they left site without installing a section of rail on a walkway. They should have done it and I and another guy, as the signatories on the work permit, shouldn’t have let them leave it unfinished.

That evening a tanker came up the river to unload ethanol. One of the jetty crew had slipped earlier in the day on ice and broken his hip, so they were already in a “funny mood”. They came to my tank farm to open the valve for the unload and noticed that the handrail was missing. So they refused to do it.

The ship had to head out back to sea and wait 24 hours for the area to be made safe.

I was in trouble. A lot of trouble.

The area superintendent, who was also a signatory on the work permit and was already on a warning for other lapses, got fired.

Oh one that might be a bit more interesting for others.

I worked for one of the big banks in Cardiff for about 10 years – I’ll give you a clue, it starts with an ‘R’ ends in an ‘S’.
Anyway, in an effort to save costs they actually did away with strict admin staff in the 90’s so everyone – whatever their level was given a few ‘non-core’ roles to complete – mine was to take a tape from the local server out every day at 3pm, put it into a Peli case and “escort” it to a Securicor Guard in full riot gear – I enjoyed this greatly because we’d recently be relocated in a brand new shiny office and thrown in the mix with a half dozen other departments – no one really knew what they other did so me marching stony faced each day carrying an armoured case to an equally stony faced guard made me look pretty hardcore (relative to the rock and roll world of mid-level business banking).

The most important bit was though it meant that my pass-card gave me access to the server room and no one else. It gave me a nice big ice cool air-conditioned room to change from riding kit, or to just take 5 – I shared this room with a large menacing looking box which I used to put stuff on whilst I changed – I would later learn that this was a UPS, or a great big battery which ran the place in the even of a power cut giving enough time for the servers which recorded everything we did to back-up and it was sick.

It started with a flashing light – which I mentioned to the boss’s, boss’s boss’s PA who unfortunately considered herself to be second only to Triple B who told me to “leave it alone”.

The next week it started beeping… “leave it alone”.

The next week the beeping got louder, in fact very LOUD and very audible from our office it would sound every hour for 10 mins… “leave it alone”.

The next week it became constant – 8 hours a day of BEEP, BEEP, BEEP I had my Boss e-mailed Triple B but it was intercepted by his PA “leave it alone” finally I was told to let my Boss into the server room for a look-see – on the screen was a big symbol – “Silence” the Boss said “well, that’s golden press it” and sure enough it grew silent.

For an hour…

So I was sent into the room, every hour, on the hour to press the button.

Info back from Triple B’s PA was “leave it alone” but now our Boss was involved it came with a short note – “engineers have been called, they’ll be here soon”. It’s worth noting that Triple B and Hiss, his PA sat right at the other end of the office (about 100 people’s worth) and couldn’t hear the alarm.

This carried on for about another week or so, now these ‘Engineers’ couldn’t have thought it was much of an issue because they’d been called 2 months earlier by this stage.

Finally it got a bit pissed off by all this silencing and started a countdown – we had 5 more ‘silences’ left – before *something* happened.

That something was a constant scream of sound that did not stop and would not be silent. again “leave it alone…. engineers…”

I finally had enough and went in to shout at it, not only was I getting stick about it, but my little ice cold palace of solitude had become a torture chamber of noise – I even got shouted at for going in to get the tapes if I didn’t close the self-closing door quick enough….

I looked at the box, I swore at it and finally saw “reset” on it – “ah ha – if I can reset the alarm we’ll go back to day one – a mere flashy light” I pressed it, it said “are you sure?” I pressed yes – “to reset hold the squares above at the same time for 5 seconds” which I did – it said “UPS will reset – are you sure” ‘in for a penny…’ I pressed yes.

The light above my head dimmed, oops.

The door which is locked with an electromagnet thudded as it unlocked.

The fans stopped and it went very, very quiet – a busy office is like a supermarket they don’t seem loud but when the noise stops the silence is deafening…

Yep – I’d blacked out the office – which meant the business arm of second largest Bank in Europe had just turned off in Wales, all of it. Oh and Coutts – so if The Queen had popped in to cash her Grio she’d be out of luck.

THAT FEELING.

I escaped the whole thing completely unscathed – my Boss, bless him, defended me to the end – No, he wouldn’t touch that – he was told not to – “well I’m not surprised if this UPS gave up, it’s been screaming it’s head off for 2 months – what do you mean why didn’t we tell anyone – we told Hiss about 100 times”.

All eyes on Hiss – She’d decided that it wasn’t really important and she was faaar too important to deal with it and had done sweet fanny Adams about it – it didn’t matter how hard she waved the bit of paper which showed I was in the room when it happened, or indeed who much the ‘engineers’ cried that “they just don’t turn themselves off” etc etc – I was untouchable – they knew I was involved because they kept inviting me to the fall out meetings – hoping one of the ‘engineers’ would rat me out, or some CCTV would appear but it never did – it quickly descended into a fight between the Insurance Companies – I know the final loss figure was over £100k, maybe £200k but that was no doubt BS for the Insurance people – but we did have to close at 11am on a Friday and didn’t reopen until the Tuesday. You have to consider that off the 100 or so people who worked there 50% or more would have been managers like me with at least a portfolio of £1m to manage, but some much more.

I took redundancy not long after.

Best thread ever

( @BoardinBob – thats my fave)

I know the final loss figure was over £100k, maybe £200k but that was no doubt BS for the Insurance

Sounds low for two days closure – nice avoidance job! Forgiven, not your fault.

Some fantastic stories in here!!
Keep them coming. I’m enjoying the schadenfreude 😆
Nothing to add myself… yet.

A few years back I was working in a RAF bomb dump. I was in a building forking 2x1000lbs high explosive bombs off a stack and as I was coming out of the building I forgot to put my forks down……

Que top of bombs hitting roof of doorway and getting pushed off said forks onto the floor.

I have never ever ran that fast since.

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…

Ha. I can trump that though. My editor decided to go to press with a dodgy headline from my report of an Old Bailey murder trial, despite my strong advice that it could constitute contempt.

The sinking feeling when I turned up the next day and saw the judge reading it…

Old Bailey judges give excellent bollockings. Luckily the trial had collapsed for an unrelated reason, or I reckon we’d have been prosecuted. 😀

Clipped a double decker with a hire van during rush hour. Everyone got off very lightly, but the shame of sixty commuters glaring at me through the bus windows as we checked it for damage though :0

sandwicheater – Member
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.

Was it all 1s and 2s?

can’t compete with any of the above. I tend to go for general low-level shiteness rather than the one-off catastrophe. Takes more long-term commitment. (Though just typing that feels like tempting fate.)

Though I’ve had a little taste of that empty stomach feeling re-reading an important email I sent, which included the key line “please could you not do this…” Should have been “please could you now do this..”

Hey ho. Must’ve been smoothoverable as I’ve forgotten what it was about.

I used to work for a specialist comms provider who partner with quite a few mobile phone networks globally.

A few years ago (before this became an acceptable practice) we were mucking about with a bit of satellite kit that enabled you to route gsm comms over its network. We were playing with some settings and how this was being routed back to earth all the while using my mobile as the test unit. My mobile suddenly rang and a very quietly spoken gentleman asked me to desist with whatever the ‘hell we were playing at’ as we were dangerously close to bringing down network access for all of the roaming users globally of this particular mobile phone network.

I waited for the fallout but never heard another thing about it.

Borrowed OH’s car.

Crashed OH’s car.

Into my mother’s car.

I still get reminded about it 😳

A cousin of mine, RAF pilot put a Tornado into the North sea ,£25 million up the spout !!

Ive had more than a few while driving for the company I now manage , hitting the blades on a chopper with the wagon ..£32k repair , a barrier at BAE another 16k to fix , but the one that always makes me giggle, I used to deliver around York on a daily basis ,this one day I was having a bad day ,nothing was going right you know the type of days , well I was on a road looking for an address and realised id past it ,stopped and threw the wagon in reverse checked my mirrors nowt there so shot back ..BANG! only reversed over the top of Marco Gabriadinis car … after we exchanged details I went back to work and claimed he ran into me (for fear of loosing my job ) Well 12 months later this went to arbitration in York ,his brief , my works brief and my MD , we argued about hire car costings as his replacement Merc seemed a little lavish as his car was in the garage for 3 weeks , long story short I had to defend my driving and we ended up paying half ( a win for my boss) .
As we left court I had parked my 7.5 ton wagon on the car park opp the building we were in , I wasn’t paying £10 to park and I was in a rush as I had deliveries to do that afternoon , so after defending my driving abilities infront to these guys ,I jumped in the wagon and set off , id only gone 100 yards up the road but there was a right weird sound coming from the back of the wagon .. id only caught the bumper of Marcos briefs car on the way out and was dragging it down the bloody street ,I could have died right there as I walked back up the street with these guys watching and placed it next to his car ,saying ” I believe you have my details ” needless to say I got a right round of them when I got back that evening

I work for a oil company, we bring stuff in from offshore via pipeline which keep the oil rigs pumping and several chemical plants going. We have two pumps one on line one spare.

I made a **** up and tripped the online pump, and then in my panick started the 2nd one too early and tripped that too.

cue a phone call to the electrician to go and power them back up. He was on a training course and was a 3 hr drive away. shutdown and reduced all the plants/rigs, ust have cost a fortune.

I’ve just been reminded of the time my daughter was running full pelt down a hill at bradgate park. As she runs past me I stupidly went to tap her on the back with my hand resulting in the best tap tackle on her foot you could ever do.

Que the slow motion vision of my daughter taking off and landing on gravel. I very nearly puked with shock. Bribed her with ice cream and sweets we told mum she had fell off the slide.

15,000 cans with the wrong shave gel … and no one ever noticed

In my early twenties I was driving for a large motorcycle superstore in Bristol (Fowlers if anyone’s local) ran by Old man Fowler himself,lovely affable old guy who still rode motorcycles daily even in his 70’s.Leaving work one evening with my colleagues we noticed old man Fowler wheeling a brand new demo VFR 750 out of the showroom to ride home,the perks of owning the company eh! I leave the car park behind him in one of his own Transit’s
and follow him down the road at a safe distance,safe until he stops in the road to see why one of his directors is waving at him from the staff carpark.Unfortunately I’m also wondering the same thing,and shunt him down the road at speed whilst everything else is happening in slow-motion,including him desperately trying to persuade his aged legs to keep the bike upright at running speed before they collapse in a heap with the bike on top of him.Thankfully he wasn’t badly hurt,but running the top Boss over in his own van whilst a director watched wasn’t my finest moment.
I went straight to the pub where my mates wondered why I was unusually quiet,and on explaining why the whole bar erupted en-mass in laughter.
It was a talking point at work for weeks,and recalling it still makes me shiver even now.Amazingly there were never any repercussions at all and I continued working there for many years after the incident

I sat back in my chair, satisfied that an easy job had been well done, as 27,000 printed copies of the quarterly community magazine I produced went out the door, bound for delivery later that day with the local free paper.

That evening, via the power of the paperboys and girls, the community would enjoy reading about the various activities of the helpful groups operating in their area.

One article in that issue was a piece about a lady who had set up a local support group for parents of children who’d been sexually abused by a family member. By chance, she walked into the reception to see another organisation who worked from the same building. I’d met her a couple of weeks earlier and taken down my notes about her story.

“Hi, Marie (not her real name, can’t remember it), the mag with your story is going out today, have a read, hope you feel it represents you well.” I handed her a spare copy.

Five seconds later, “Oh no, that’s not right, it wasn’t my husband who abused our boy, it was his brother, the uncle.”

I’d accidentally branded an innocent man a paedophile x 27,000, and that misinformation was currently making its way to homes in the roughest parts of a rough town, and although I’d not named him directly, I’d named his wife, so it wouldn’t be too hard to figure out who he was.

Therefore, I’m the only person I know who has been responsible for free paper deliverers re-doing their rounds and knocking on doors, asking for the free magazine back, please. They work in the afternoon, when most people are out, so we didn’t get that many back, and I lay awake in bed that night, assuming my wrongly-identified chap’s corpse was lying burning in an alleyway somewhere.

Handed in my notice with immediate effect the next day, and drank four bottles of wine that night.

stevedoc – Member
” I believe you have my details “

😀

Superb.