People are sharing the worst mistake they made at work – 21 for the archives
We doubt very much that there’s ever been a person who hasn’t, in some way or other, messed up at their job. They might have accidentally jammed the printer, for example, or missed a deadline.
They might even have accidentally put the same tweet in a round-up post three times instead of one.
Dan Douglas shared one of his own mistakes, and asked people to do the same.
what’s the worst mistake you’ve ever made at work? after a long & stressful day speedwriting summaries i mixed up the names of (BBC director general) Tony Hall & (disgraced paedophile) Stuart Hall in a report i sent to… BBC DG Tony Hall, all the BBC top brass, the BBC trustees,
— Dan Douglas (@dandouglas) May 12, 2021
They duly obliged, and we strongly suspect some – if not most – of these people wake up in a cold sweat, thinking about what they did.
1.
One of my first graduate jobs, the HR manager accused me of 'spending all the working day' on a certain website. I denied it. They opened the site and the lead story on the homepage was a column headlined 'Justin Myers says: I hate my job and want to die' https://t.co/9dAFtR9EkE
— Justin Myers (@theguyliner) May 13, 2021
2.
ordered 40 instead of 4 two kilogram bags of diced mozzarella and had to desperately bootleg them to every other pizza express in the hampshire area https://t.co/W4A0LUAcw5
— edie (@multiplebears) May 13, 2021
3.
I once booked a panel, engineers and an audience for Tuesday the 4th, and a venue for Wednesday the 5th. They were quite surprised when we showed up! https://t.co/TfwYSQC3EN
— Ed Morrish (@edmorrish) May 13, 2021
4.
I was hurrying to leave at the end of the day. I put on my jacket in a hurry. Pushed my hand through the sleeve and accidentally punched my boss’s mother in the face. She was visiting the office. That was a bad day.
— Nick Ward (@WoodofKings) May 13, 2021
5.
I put a band and crew on a flight to Hanoi instead of Ho Chi Minh City. https://t.co/2jxRIkXBP8
— 👋🏻 (@Ohanthonio) May 13, 2021
6.
Fairly minor one but I still feel *awful* about the time I served a lovely elderly couple apple crumble with extra custard… & it turned out the chef had a saucepan of cheese sauce next to the saucepan of custard. They ate it and I didn’t realise my mistake till some time later https://t.co/mDiG4JTv1T
— Kirsty Rolfe (@avoiding_bears) May 13, 2021
——————————————————————————————————————————————————–
Promo > Subway have bravely handed over access their instore radio network to legendary comedy pirate radio station Kurupt FM
——————————————————————————————————————————————————–
7.
Driving a 14000 tonne ship into Singapore on joystick. I had been doing it for a few hrs and all of a sudden when we got close to land my mind switched it's understanding of right & left, so I was countering left swing w/ more left helm… Had to ask a crewman to take over. https://t.co/PnxdcHquvK
— John Nejady (@ProducerJohnN) May 13, 2021
8.
Sent email to colleague explaining how bad external person was at replying to emails, cc'd external person in. Went to their place of work to explain, apologize but also make case for why email was sent. Left proud, looked down, entire shirt open, entire meeting in my bra https://t.co/01eRWcjjpD
— Lauren Sadler (@Lozzatron88) May 13, 2021
9.
At a previous company I moaned about one of our clients in an email I managed to also copy them into. https://t.co/NR7fpGcxdj
— Liam (@SouthendSanti) May 13, 2021
10.
2nd day of my first engineering job i managed to not only exclusively lock the rest of the company out of every single file, but broke the version control tool to the point where neither me nor my line manager could unlock them for about 6 hours https://t.co/xzOEcle96I
— Stephen is a Wizard who can do Magic (@stepheniscowboy) May 13, 2021
11.
When temping for a Bank’s clearing dept a million years ago, I accidentally transferred about £150m to the wrong bank. Only for about an hour, and it was sent back when they spotted the error, but my goodness what an hour 😬😰 https://t.co/tA3uYmUMWE
— Dan Smernicki (@DanSmernicki) May 13, 2021