‘What’s the biggest f**k up you’ve made at work?’ – 21 answers that will make you feel like you deserve a promotion

Everyone fears making a mistake at work but, usually, the most it will cost us is a bit of embarrassment. However, some people make such almighty errors that they can end up frighteningly close to joining the dole queue. Over on the always entertaining r/CasualUK subreddit, user BigBeanMarketing posed this question:

‘What’s the biggest fuck up you’ve made at work? Bought a FTSE100 to its knees? Shagged your bosses wife at the Christmas Do? Microwaved fish at lunch? What was it?’

And people were keen to chip in with answers that will make your job feel very secure indeed.

1.

‘First day working at Game as a teenager, someone buys a PS4. I scan everything, bag it, give it to them and they walk out. Five mins later I realise I forgot to take payment.’
–literallycannot321

2.

‘I get to tell this periodically, but I was given the job of posting a sizable brochure about a hotel/spa development going through planning to hundreds of people who were objecting to it on the council website.

I take a great deal of joy in repetitive tasks, so I banged this out in a day. However I had not measured the size of the envelope containing the brochure and so, a few days later a great many people received a note from the Royal Mail saying there was additional postage to pay for an item.

And so, a great many people ended up turning up at the sorting office to pay the postage for an item they did not want, did not ask for, extolling the virtues of a development they had actively objected to. Made the local paper. Somehow kept the job after.’
–Additional-Weather46

3.

‘Not me but I was on a flight on Friday where the pilot took a turn on the runway wrong and got a 787 stuck in the grass. 350 passengers that needed food and accommodation paid for by the airline for an extra 48 hours.

Oddly enough we had a different pilot home. Spoke to the stewardess and she said she’d never seen it happen in 35 years of flying.’
–Fun-Needleworker9590

4.

‘Sending the previous month’s magazine to print instead of the current one. 150,000 wrong magazines delivered.’
–nonoanddefinitelyno

5.

‘I was working in Qatar, and my section got a brand new van, as in just had delivery mileage brand new. After driving it all day I decided to fill it up at the fuel station and brimmed it with diesel.

About 200 metre from the fuel station it broke down, and it was then I realised that it was a petrol van not diesel. Not only that, but the sticker telling you it was petrol was almost bigger than the van itself and absolutely unmissable.

Ended up getting written off before it had even done 100 miles, and I earned the nickname Van Diesel for the next three months. Took weeks for the thing to be recovered too, so I had to drive past the reminder of my stupidity twice a day.’
–SteveGoral

6.

‘One of my earliest jobs was at a branch of a bank in the 90s. My boss had been effectively exiled to Scotland by the bank because the branch he previously managed had been robbed while he was in the toilet. He came out of the toilet and said something like ‘I wouldn’t go in there for a while’ then noticed one of the staff members was sobbing and said ‘It’s not that bad Sandra’. It took him a while to realise they’d had an armed robbery.’
–regprenticer

7.

‘Drove two hours to install a safe, without the safe. The boss was really impressed. Knelt down to pick open someone’s front door and put my knee through the glass, he just very dryly said ‘Well, that’s one way to get in’.’
–lynch1986

8.

‘I edit funeral livestreams for a living and we’re trained to end streams whenever mourners have left the room (so they don’t see staff preparing for the next service, etc). I absentmindedly ended a stream while the song “You’ll Never Walk Alone” was playing. It ended on the specific part where it goes ‘you’ll neeeeever walk…’. In a tragic turn of events, the deceased had mobility issues. Needless to say, the family weren’t very happy but everyone at work found it hilarious.’
–KToTheA-

9.

‘I left a tap down in the pub I worked at, went to change the barrel, came back up to see behind the bar flooded with Stella. Luckily it was busy in the lounge but the bar was dead, boss was distracted so I quickly mopped it all up. She came round to the bar just as I was finishing, she asked what happened and I said someone spilt a drink. I left shortly after before the quarterly checkups so got away with it.’
–Plus_Mirror_4917

10.

‘In my job we ship to hundreds of companies, all saved in our address book. I deleted the entire fucking thing. Spent the best part of two days crazily punching in and saving addresses starting from our biggest customers and nobody ever mentioned it. I didn’t do a lick of other work those two days but somehow got away with it.’
–NoTurkeyTWYJYFM

11.

‘Broke payments on one of our clients sites. Except it was only the confirmation of said payments, money was still taken. 200k in extra charges to customers over 36 hours that had to be manually reconciled refunded and customers apologised to.

Owned up to it as soon a I found the mistake, the client liked us more after that because they could trust us, as we didn’t hide it.’
–loony383