Tripped and dropped a box, worth approximately $220,000 today, of extremely precise tooling meant for a cutting die. I was on my way to my bench to wrap them up safely. Boss was not pleased that day.
First I was like wow, then I started to count how many zero’s there came afterwards. Ouch that hurts.
Accidentally hitting reply-to-all on a company wide email and more or less stating that I wanted to be transferred to another team.
There was a new team forming elsewhere, and in fairness, it was a great opportunity in a lot of ways. But… I didn’t get the transfer until another batch of jobs opened a few months later.
That… was a long few months.
Worst thing in the office place was when some idiot left their window open in the middle of Winter, temps fell below 0F with high winds, and froze the 2" sprinkler pipes running over their office. Flooded most of the 2nd floor then started running through and raining out onto the 1st floor (and then into the basement). And it happened during covid lock-downs so it was fortunate anyone was even in the building to report it.
My own personal oopsie was checking network cabling in a small room, bent over to check things low and then wandered out to check elsewhere… Then noticed there was a LOT of commotion on the sales floor. Turns out I hit the power switch on one of the phone cabinets with my ass and shut down half the phone lines.
Did you own up to it or just turn it back on?
Oh I came clean. We were actually trying to figure out HOW it happened so we could try and prevent the same issue in the future.
“no thicc booties allowed in here” sign
“Attention, trailer swings out!”
Missing my first shift at a large retail store because of a misunderstanding. When I showed up the next week, the manager was furious. Not the best start
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There were three women who were best friends, took their breaks together, etc. And in the Christmas season they wore matching knit sweaters and would walk down the hall side by side so it would read “Ho! Ho! Ho!”
But one day when I was leaving the break room, they approached… and one was out sick. Before I could stop myself I asked “Where’s the other Ho?”
Might’ve gotten a visit to HR from it if I hadn’t looked so shocked at myself.
Honestly, they were inviting that one upon themselves.
The one I still feel guilt over was a time when i found out someone had left an animal trap loaded when they left for vacation. There was a live raccoon in it. I know I shouldn’t’ve carelessly opened it, but I should’ve done something. Even killing it would’ve been kinder. I carry that one with me, to remind me to act when I can. I’m still bad at it, but I try.
The other day I told a customer I could smell gas in her apartment, and even though I feel like a dumbass because it wasn’t a leak (probably lingering smell from them moving an appliance and hitting it on and off by accident), I don’t regret mentioning it. Sometimes I just am going to be an obnoxious jackass about that stuff.
For the 2nd one, better safe than sorry. You would feel like more of a dumbass if you heard a story in the news about a gas leak fire, or some other form of damage/injury/death.
I recently had a gas leak scare. Originally thought it was plumbing. They checked for gas leaks with a tool and found nothing. No obvious plumbing problems. We called the fire department the next time we smelled it to be safe. No gas leak but a bad car battery being charged was releasing a sulfur smell and about to catch fire.
Tripped and hit my arm on the maple syrup canning machine that heats a water jacket to 200 f and got a 2 inch diameter blister.
I haven’t had any big mishaps myself, but I worked in a wafer fab and apparently the person who came in to replace me after I quit, dropped a whole box of wafers like a month into the job. Shit worth like $1M.
That said, massive fault on the company for a lack of better procedures handling those, and afaik the person didn’t even lose the job as it was an honest accident.
I used to have a boss that told me you never fire the person who made that expensive accident because you know that’s one person who will never make that mistake again.
Why would you waste that training budget?
Seriously, it’s way more expensive to replace someone unless they really suck. It’s best to invest in the people you have whenever possible.
I didn’t actually delete the data but for a solid 1min I thought I had deleted an entire production db of data.
I made a delete then I hit refresh and nothing came. I refreshed again and no records panic started to set in and I refreshed again and still no records. I knew that changes replicated over to our quick backup every min so I picked up the phone and when the guy answered I said I need you to turn off the replication right now I think I just deleted the ministry of health.
After a bit of troubleshooting it turns out the data was fine and my delete worked as intended. The issue was in my client and we checked a few things then gave up. I went for a long lunch after that.
The biggest actual mistakes I’ve done were all caught by a really good manager i had and so I can’t even remember them because they never blew up.
Worked, after hours from home, on a Windows Server and fixed and issue with the Database on there. After doing so i thought I’d go to bed and shut down the machine… only I hadn’t yet left the RDP connection and shut the server down by Accident. Had to drive to work and start the server up again.
Accidentally shutting down a Windows server is impressive. They have that “why are you shutting down?” dialogue to prevent this scenario.
Oh I was totally on autopilot and selected “Maintenance (Software)” because that is what I did… and I discovered the brainfart two seconds too late.
And there are ways of having that entry removed from the list of options entirely, and not just shifted to the drop-down menu. Makes it harder to physically shut down, but its absence can be a WTF big enough for you to realize which machine you are working on.
I don’t bother doing that to VMs, which can be trivially restarted, but their Hyper-V hosts? You betchya I do it to those.
Was relocating a $10k piece of networking hardware and dropped it into another 10k VM server. Server was fine, network hardware was not. It was during a project that was a real mess, thought it was a stupid mistake though.
We were able to work around it, though we did lose the contract we were trying to make. Honestly though given how rushed and panicked that whole three months was though, we were lucky nobody suffered anything worse. Real shitshow.
Way back as a line cook I was on saute and it was the season for soft shell crab. I had a full rail of tickets, and 2-14in. saute pans with oil heating up on full blast while I knelt down to grab the crabs from my prep cooler across from the range.
The 'roided up chef stepped over me to get to middle to expedite the rush, and grabbed one of the pans with now very hot oil in them…realizing that they had oil he stopped his motion but Newtons law kept the oil flowing, down onto my bare forearm, hand and how I was positioned my ankle.
The grill guy immediately took a pan of water and splashed my arm with it, rolled down my sleeve and soaked it…and as a bonus being a dumbass I finished the shift before driving myself to the ER. Some good blisters but fortunately no scarring, very little pain because it was kept covered.
Bonus bits: The hotel/golf resort just implemented a drug policy, and if you were injured or did 200 USD of damage you needed to take a drug test, which I did. Policy also stated that you wait 3 days not working for the results. This was the start of a very busy weekend with a car show on the golf course, etc, and every warm body was needed, I went in to work the next day and if they wanted to send someone else for a drug test because they caused the accident, I suggested the ill tempered redheaded café chef…my results were discarded later.
Bonus bonus, right after the policy was put in place, a manager dropped a chandelier & walked away from his job after 5 years working there instead of taking the drug test.
Nice try, HR.
A couple of things come to mind. Nothing really happened with either, but I can’t think of anything worse:
First, years ago, when I was active duty army as a 15B Aircraft Powerplant Repairer (in the guard now), I was clipping blades on the first stage of the compressor due to damage. There’s 20 blades in the first stage, and you have to clip the one opposite as well to maintain balance. Well, I counted wrong and clipped the wrong blade. The GE rep (representative from General Electric, who makes the engine) was right there and must not have been paying attention. It ended fine, though, just extra work I had to do.
Second, less years ago at my current job as a Diesel Technician, I was doing a warranty repair for a service bulletin. I was still pretty new here, and warranty jobs pay less time, but this was like the third one I had done and was making good time, so I was trying to hurry. It was cold that day, and people complain when you have the bay doors open, so I had it just open enough to raise the cab, which meant the door was almost all the way open anyway. When I had done as much as I could do with the truck in the shop, I lowered the cab so I could pull it out and use our forklift to remove the part. I had forgotten about the door and ran into it. Didn’t get in any trouble though, just had to take a drug test per policy, and the door doesn’t close right to this day.
