People have been sharing the worst mistakes they made at work – 23 total cock-ups that will make you feel like employee of the month
13.
‘Spent an entire day uploading information into the training database, rather than the live one. I also managed to break the public facing website for a county council (without realising) and buggered off on holiday.’
–kestrelita
14.
‘Ran an SQL delete statement on a live production database (very live and very expensive) and accidentally did not highlight the WHERE clause, which meant that the entire transaction table got deleted instead of just a single row.
‘Took a LOT of effort and explaining to sort out.’
–AfternoonLines
15.
‘In an extremely exhausted and overworked state during the busiest time of the year I cleaned our production equipment with rags that were too wet and broke the kitchen blenders that were needed to finish the Christmas production.’
–buwchgochgota
16.
’20 Years ago I worked in NHS IT. At the time I was new to tech really and work in general and our old server room wasn’t amazingly labelled. While trying to diagnose over the phone with someone why they weren’t able to connect to I think the radiology server I realised the server I had been stopping and starting for the last 20 minutes was the pharmacy server.
‘Neither were patient critical thankfully but I definitely wanted the world to just swallow me up at that time.’
–LittlePinkNinja
17.
‘Assistant manager in a pub, we had a gas delivery system for the beer pumps that had an emergency reserve tank if the mains ran low or out but before you went home you had to flick the switch back to allow the tanks to reset.
‘Well one night I forgot, the next day my boss had called an engineer, we had no draught beers for 3 days whilst they attempted to fix the issue. We had to get a new gas system from this. With all new pipes units and labour it was close to £10,000. Safe to say my boss wasn’t happy.’
–Educational_Corgi809
18.
‘I once accidentally turned the water off for 3000 properties for about an hour.’
–purple_spade
19.
‘I took over a role, and went through all the contracts, dutifully putting the renewals in a calendar for reminders. There was a contract which expired on 3/11/2022, so I put in the calendar, 3rd November, great!
‘Turns out it was a US contract and the date was actually 11th March, which caused a lot of chaos when we got a call 4 days before asking if we’re going to renew.’
–shitthrower
20.
‘I can’t share details because it’d narrow me down to a handful of people in the world but I did an IT national-level critical system fuck up. In reality it only made a few hundred people’s days a bit harder as they had to compensate for it during the outage but still.
‘A more senior staff member came to me and said “Turkishhousefan, see this? Did you do this?” and I had to say “I don’t recall doing that but the evidence suggests that I did.”
‘Felt bad, man.’
–turkishhousefan
21.
‘Moved a joystick in the wrong direction and caused millions of dollars worth of damage to a major piece of equipment and caused it to be out of action for months. Very much not a good day.’
–riderism
22.
‘Ex-science teacher, did a demo in front of the class, started generating a little more smoke than expected but no biggie.It was my first week in a new school, I hadn’t clocked where the smoke/heat alarm was…
‘Set the fire alarm off and the whole school had to be evacuated.’
–flyingredwolves
23.
‘On my first day managing the computer server it went down. It took three days for me to realise I had kicked the plug under my desk and turned it off.’
–Pure_Werewolf0101
Source r/AskUK Image Screenshot