Cock ups at work

shazzz

No, this isn't about Vermooten's alleged drunken shenanigans at the Christmas party...

Some poor numptie must be sitting at home today watching the Chancellor squirming to save his job because said numpty put a disk load of data in the post.

So, what's the worst cock up you've made at work...... Were you forced to 'resign'???

shazzz

What !!!!!!

My hilarious intro doesn't work now. :evil:

The title of this thread is COCK UPS AT WORK

pneumatic

Well, c8ck, fool or foul, in my case almost too many times to mention! (I used to be a bit of a risk taker!): e.g.

shutting down 64 computer terminals across Europe for two days by logging out of mine with the "off" switch (back in the days of green screens and command prompts).

printing the name of the wrong pompous VIP in the programme for a public ceremony

Being responsible for 8 hour queues at student registration

The point is that, rather than doing the decent and honourable thing of falling on my sword and resigning, I had to do the much harder and more humiliating thing which is to stick around, apologise in person and sort the problem out so it didn't happen ever again (at least, not on my watch).

I wonder whether calling for heads to roll is actually letting them off lightly. Perhaps people should be made to clean up their own vomit.

vermooten

Maybe you should change it to FUCK UPS AT WORK.

I never make mistakes at work so I can't contribute to this thread....

popette

I once switched the red switch at the back of my pc, which changes from 240v to 110v - explosion!

spen666

vermooten wrote:

...

I never make mistakes at work so I can't contribute to this thread....

I make mistakes, but I never work so i'm out of this thread

dunnnooo

pneumatic wrote:

Being responsible for 8 hour queues at student registration

YOU SOD







Sorry. Uni made a bit of a mess of my registration and I'm still a bit sore about it...[/b]

For me, it's a close call between feeding staff the wrong thing for lunch so it cost management £80 rather than 2 or 3, or nearly managing to burn my cooks tend down, when touring.

pneumatic

dunnnooo wrote:

pneumatic wrote:

Being responsible for 8 hour queues at student registration

YOU SOD

Sorry. Uni made a bit of a mess of my registration and I'm still a bit sore about it...[/b]
.

That's ok, I felt a bit gloomy about it myself at the time. Good news is that the next year, we reduced waiting times from 8 hours to 8 minutes (really!). Near the end of this small bureaucratic triumph, a student came up to me saying he wanted to complain. I braced myself:

"Last year, I queued for 5 hours and, in the queue, I met loads of people who are still my friends. This year, I didn't have to queue at all and so I met nobody!"

You can't please all of the people all of the time.

ricadus

I was a relatively inexperienced employee working on a book of borderline profitability – I think it was the Penguin Price Guide for Record Collectors – and, working my way through the page roofs, I was getting annoyed that the final column of the discography tables (99.9% of the book was this kind of tabular matter) wasn't fitting neatly, causing loads of ugly turnover lines.

I had a brainwave – set that last column in italics! (italics being slightly narrower widths to roman, at least in this book's font).

Since we were at revise proof stage I phoned a global instruction for this tweak through to the typesetter, who duly obliged.

All went well until their bill for the work arrived. This one brief instruction had necessitated massive amounts of manual overrides to the otherwise database created layout and the setter's final bill was therefore many £1000s higher than originally estimated. The book would never make a profit.

When the girl in charge of project budgeting saw the invoice she had a kind of breakdown, collapsing in tears and had to take the rest of the day off.

The bill meanwhile was passed higher and higher up the chain of command; eventually it reached the UK Production Director, who was a manager of such importance that he was unfamiliar with this unglamorous project and the people involved with it and so promptly signed it off.

---

Another cock up:

When I was away on holiday the Reference Director decided that the new English Dictionary we had just finished must have an extra acknowledgments page crediting all the in-house staff involved (including himself), and not just the book's compiling editors (the authors) that is standard.

The book was virtually on the press, so this extra late page was inserted by the printer – and bumped off the very last page of "Z' entries of the dictionary, books pages being always multiples of 8, 16 or 32 page sections and this one had been carefully made to be full right to the final page, no awkward blanks left over.

shazzz

So that's why I've never been able to find out what a zygote is!

bagpusscp

Changing the infa red lamp on a cctv camera {tower type } started to whinch tower down . At a certain point relised safety clip was attached to the wrong place . :shock: :shock: :shock: ........To late ....... .Said tower decended rapidly. :roll: :roll: :oops: :oops:

Owned up .Gaffer said the person who hasn't made a mistake ain't born yet. .

ps .I has never tried to chane another infa red lamp since.

trailtrash

I was doing some basic moves on our office telephone system and while it was updating I was casually looking at the battery back-up thing. For some reason I pressed a button labelled 'by-pass' that I hadn't pressed before (as you do). Turned all the phones in the building off for ten minutes as it re-booted itself while I blamed a non-existant flash of lightning! It's so good I don't work in an intensve care unit. Oops.

ivancarlos

I set the work on fire once. Left a bunsen burner under a shelf. It had a pilot light on it and the heat gradually built up until it burst into flames. Meanwhile we were having a teabreak when the fire alarm went off. We all thought it was a drill until the fire brigade arrived. There was a horrible realisation when they told us where it had started. I was only a student at the time so they put it down to inexperience. :oops:

chrisjsmith

I'm always cocking up at work - makes things interesting!

(1) I did a debugging run (test) Direct-debit collect run through a payment provider for 2,500 people (taking £40 membership from their accounts) which was successful. Then I did it again. The I realised it was reading the production configuration and I'd just filtched £200k out of peoples bank accounts. That took a lot of sorting out i'll tell you.

(2) I referred to my boss as a midget c*nt and he was behind me (in the same week).

(3) I fell through the ceiling onto the floor next to someone's bed at Newham General hospital after I kneeled on a tile rail rather than the cable gantry support. I was crawling through the ceiling trying to route some LAN cable at the time.

(4) I spilled beer in my company tablet PC and killed it dead. That took some explaining.