33 People Share Their Biggest Work Screw-Ups

‘I funded a quarter of a million dollar loan not realizing one of the documents was signed incorrectly’
33 People Share Their Biggest Work Screw-Ups

No matter how badly you may have screwed up at work, one Redditor’s mom made a mistake that fired up the entire neighborhood. 

While working and living on a farm, her daily chore of burning weeds took a turn for the disastrous when the wind had a better idea of where the flames should go, and led the blaze out of the ditchbank she thought was containing it. The fire not only ended up destroying a neighbor’s home, but inspired a phrase minimizing future blunders in the Redditor’s family thereafter: “I may have screwed up, but at least I didn’t burn the neighbor’s house down.”

Accidental arson is one of many ways Redditors have majorly screwed up while on the job. Other wild mistakes include swearing on live radio, making an oopsie with hundreds of thousands of dollars and deleting half of the voicemails in the state of New York. 

EightOhms 10mo ago I cooked $10,000 of PA speakers after I let a hip hop artist's audio engineer run the system too loudly for an entire show. When my bosses told me it was $10k I thought they were exaggerating. But months later I broke my ankle and was put on desk duty. I had access to the accounting software and found the repair bill for those speakers. Legit $10k. I was honest and upfront about what I had done and they respected that so I didn't get fired. - 6.6K ...
 10mo ago I funded a quarter of a million dollar loan not realizing one of the documents was signed incorrectly. - 5.4K ... gfanonn 10mo ago My mom in the 70's processed a $100,000 loan but didn't put a 7 day hold on it to verify everything. Someone cashed it out and then it failed the verification steps. She didn't get fired. 2.4K ...
atducker 10mo ago I used a picture of George W. Bush with his face rotted half off as a sample image for some HTML work I was doing in 2006. The developers were supposed to replace it with the real image but they just put an image from the database in front of it and the Bush image was still there in the CSS styles as a background image instead. It was fine for quite a while and nobody noticed it until the database server went down and the whole front page of the website was wall to wall pictures
DismalTree4161 10mo ago Charged someone $2k while attempting to refund them a much smaller amount (I wanna say like $400). Manager was out of town for a holiday weekend and the error could not be fixed for like four days. 2.3K ... doktornein 10mo ago Maybe you should have picked up some Google play gift cards 814 ...
Fiascoe . 10mo ago I deleted the email app off everyone's phone in the entire company and it had to be fixed by manual intervention. Was about 2000 people. 473 ... + More replies
arcanepsyche 10mo ago Edited 10mo ago I worked at a movie theatre as a projectionist in the early 2000s and we had to pre-screen everything before it was shown to the public the next day. We were supposed to stay in the projection booth to monitor the reel (it was real film back then) but we'd often just go into the theatre itself to preview them. Halfway through The Hulk (the Ang Lee one) the film got caught in the projector and destroyed about 20 minutes worth of the movie. Each reel of the movie was worth $150k (edit: maybe
Bathroomlnner2036 10mo ago I was cold calling at a bank for Home Equity loans. I suggested to the wife that she could pay off the $10k balance on their credit card at a much lower rate saving a lot of money and possibly get a tax deduction. I had no idea she wasn't on the credit card and had no idea that the husband was hiding it from her. The husband left me a very nice voice mail. 2.1K ...
phil_mckraken 10mo ago The application service provider I used to work for called me in very early one morning. Customers were reporting a total service outage and the temperature was through the roof. The pager kept going off. We have to discount for downtime. Fifteen minutes later, I called the сто, waking him up. I said, By chance have you failed to renew our DNS registration? It was the loudest scream I ever heard. It was peanuts compared to the intercontinental clusterfark Crowdstrike kicked off. 1.6K ...
S_SubZero e 10mo ago I, following orders, documented orders, replaced a switch in a data center with a replacement (which they said to use by serial) which promptly took about two million users offline for a couple of hours before they figured it out. The network graphs were amazing. I never heard from that admin again. 2.9K ...
Jedly1 10mo ago I was on the receiving end. Wife and I bought a hot tub at the State Fair. One year later I see a credit on my card for the full price of the tub from the manufacturer. Being good people we do the right thing and call them. I explained exactly what happened. Explicitly saying we had the tub and were happy with our purchase. A few days later we received a billing statement showing a full refund and zero balance. TLDR: we got a guilt free free hot tub. 1.6K ...
llcucf80 10mo ago I used to work at a hotel, was there over 15 years. I'll never forget my first day though, my first check out. I remember it well, the gentleman's total was $800. I ran his card for $8,000. So the first thing I learned to do there wasn't a check out, it was how to do a refund. A refund of $7,200. I'm sure with processing fees that cost my company a pretty penny. I actually wasn't sure I was going to make it at the beginning, but I actually lasted over 15 years. But my first
Frito_Penndejo 10mo ago Literally 90 mins ago....I have been driving semi's for 18 years with no accidents, just popped both passenger side tires on our yard truck by misjudging the room I had on the right side rubbing them against a cement pole. So now I'm sitting here in the office waiting to be drug tested for an accident. FML, stressing the F out. 168 ...
Haephestus 10mo ago Not me, but my mom, back when she lived and worked on a farm. She was burning weeds along a ditchbank, and the wind kicked up and blew the fire into a neighbor's yard. Burned the neighbor's house down. It's become a bit of a saying in our household. I may have screwed up, but at least I didn't burn the neighbor's house down. 1.1K ...
hoffarmy . 10mo ago I ran a forklift into a concrete pillar and bent the fork tip to a 90 degree angle. 982 ... + More replies
earnestweasel22 10mo ago As a janitor I mixed ammonia and bleach to try and clean fresh tar stains tracked in on a vinyl floor. Almost died that night. 1.3K ... + More replies
GregLXStang 10mo ago Deleted all Active Directory accounts except the main administrator one. On a Friday. At three PM. In a 911 center. 147 ...
SteelCock420 10mo ago I deployed changes to routing on a firewall that sent an international bank to the shadowrealm. I realized my mistake in about 30 secs and reverted it, monitoring didn't even flag it, so customer never found out. Not satisfied and not being able to do what I originally wanted, did another change that resulted on the same. Reverted even faster, client never found out. To my defense the guys who managed azure never deployed any dynamic routing filtering (which they were supposed to), which created a loop and the issue I stumbled upon. 669 ...
jester29 10mo ago Leaving my mic on while i shouted obscenities after screwing up my talk break over a song intro live on the radio in a top-50 market. I didn't get fired at least 367 ... + More replies
reddi Karsa69420 10mo ago Not that big and not even my fault. Lady asked for a Peanut Butter Beer, I had one in mind so I walked her over there and handed it to her. Only for the beer to instantly explode covering her in beer. Oddly she still bough a six pack cause it smells so good! 1.4K ...
BatCommercial7523 10mo ago I dropped a database thinking it was junk. On a Friday. At 4pm. It wasn't. Cue pissed off customers, bosses and coworkers. 340 ... + More replies
peachcancant. 10mo ago Another IT fuck up. Finance manager left org. Director put in the term request ticket. I kicked him out of all groups and locked account without realizing he was the sole owner of the finance departments share point and it deleted it. I was able to recover it but it was an all day affair 94 ...
dj-spinnin-bones 10mo ago Not me but a co-worker (although I've had plenty of fuck-ups). Worked as a web designer developing marketing splash pages for media at an online retailer. When Barack Obama's book was released (back when he was prez), he typed Barack Osama on the web page instead of Obama. I would have thought he was full of shit saying it was an accident, but the look on his face said otherwise. Не was mortified he'd made the mistake. It was pretty small print, not prominent on the web page - but still... it was on site for the world
WannaBMonkey 10mo ago I took down voice mail for half of New York State, USA for about 8 hours because I clicked the wrong check box while checking off a list of systems to be stealthily updated since we didn't want to talk to the customer and arrange a proper window. I had to get a new job. - 312 ... boygirlmama 10mo ago As someone in NYS, I wouldn't have minded. Haha 35 ...
texguy21 10mo ago Set about 3 acres of grass on fire Imfao - 305 ... stevolutionary7 . 10mo ago You mean to say you donated three acres of grass to the local fire department for training. 282 ...
Overseerer-Vault-101 10mo ago Edited 10mo ago I got two. First was working counter at a Chinese. I kept clicking order ready instead of order accepted on the Uber eats machine. Lots off pissed of drivers no one told me what was going wrong. Second was taking out a building with a forklift. Just wanted to raise the load slightly as I was backing out the building and didn't want to catch the forks. Took out the lintel across the door that took the rest of the wall down, and part of the roof. Boss was not happy. 300 ...
mildOrWILD65 10mo ago U.S. Army FTX, Signal battalion, teletype operator, Germany, 1985ish. Never told much of our traffic was routed live, including Critic messages. Showing off, bragging that we could recover from a complete power loss within 10 minutes of power restoration, while lifting the safety cover to the emergency power shut off switch. Accidentally pushed said switch. Recovered systems in seven minutes. Got my ass chewed out, then praised for a swift, unplanned loss of power. 280 ...
Emalbi 10mo ago I missed one step in a price change which was the difference between a scaled fee and a multiplier. Was caught the next morning when service orders invoiced for tens of thousands of dollars when the normal rate would almost always be in the low hundreds. Immediately corrected and it took a couple days to reinvoice the wrong ones. I triple check this now when rates increase. 274 ...
Jason_DeHoulo 10mo ago I gave a customer who owed us $700,000 the wrong banking information. The customer then sent $700,000 in funds to the wrong bank account. Luckily for me, the account number did not exist and the payment bounced back to them. I got lucky in that I just had to sheepishly tell them to please reprocess the payment using the correct info. Had the account actually existed, would've been a nightmare trying to recover those funds. 238 ...
CypressBreeze 10mo ago My uncle worked at a coal power plant in the 80s and 90s. Their revenue was over $1M/day. One day he mistakenly pushed the emergency shut down button, turning off the entire plant. Once the plant is shut down, it takes over 24 hours to restart. So they lost over $1,000,000.00 in revenue. When his boss sat him down, he was mortified and said. I guess you will be firing me now. His boss said, No. If I hire someone to replace you, they might make the same mistake. But I know that you will never make
 . 10mo ago I broke a very expensive vacuum that cleans our pool and when the new one came i dropped the device that controls the vacuum in the water and broke that one too... 167 ...
Sabre_One . 10mo ago Was messing with our patreon. We were curious if you supported another account with your own community account. Would it just transfer our money from community account to account? Or put the money in our bank then pull, etc. We decided to drop a tier in some adult content for lulz. We didn't realize it would blast a email to all of our supporters. Saying that we support X nudes lol. - 159 ...
wibblywobbly420 . 10mo ago First day on the job with this very small company. I was printing a lot of stuff to the only printer in the office; a large Xerox workstation. I had no idea that it ran out of paper or that the owner used the bypass tray as the tray for printing cheques. My prints used up every single cheque, 4 days before payday. - 146 ...
PippyLongSausage 10mo ago Allowed a contractor to pour a slab on a huge building before the plumbing was in the ground. $200k 6.7K ... + More replies

Tags:

Scroll down for the next article
Forgot Password?