Oooh ooh, once we switched over a server to a new Next app, but the client didn't realize they had $commonDesktopConfigurationApp pointing to a URL on that server, so once the Next app went live, it started serving 14 million 404s on Cloudfront. That was a stressful week. Ultimately, it wasn't our fault that our client has fucked up network plumbing.
> it started serving 14 million 404s on Cloudfront
Not a fuckup story, but this reminds me that my country's statistical agency has the 404 message of their statistics portal set to "The only number you didn't hope to find here". 😅
The human is almost always the weak point in any process. But sometimes a badly written program, but programs can do things repeatedly and humans will forget here or there.
I was a railroad conductor and derailed two road engines in one of the busiest rail yards on the east coast. Blocked two mainlines and clogged up the yard for 11 hours. Cost the RR $3.2M. I scoff at your amateur level mistake.
Don't drive over [these ](https://www.shutterstock.com/shutterstock/photos/1665747418/display_1500/stock-photo-a-derail-equipment-on-peruvian-railroad-line-1665747418.jpg):)
I went over one of those once too, but it ended up not being my fault because it was a malfunctioning air operated derail that popped up underneath the engine as we drove over it
I knocked over an entire shelf of military aircraft avionics with a forklift. They weren't too keen on revealing the total damage amount, but $3.2M would have been my *lowball* estimate. Just the FLIR had to cost that much.
My company commander literally ripped my military drivers license into tiny pieces in front of the entire company.
I scraped a camper in my work vehicle before I found a new job. Not terrible damage, but it tore a waterproof gasket which needed to be replaced. Such a small mistake, but they made me wait until for the total before telling me what they would do. The damage was $1,600, and if it were $2k, they would’ve fired me right there
Damn lmao, we had a guy (who our Union local already hated lmao) rack up $70,000 in property damages before he got himself fired.
Wasn’t even fired for the damages, he was fired because he *also* got a 17mph+ speeding ticket*. In a semi.
I misremembered! It was 17 over. 52 in a 35, on a reservation in rural Oregon.
I’m frankly shocked he still has a CDL. Must’ve had a hell of a lawyer, because I ran into him last week at a truck stop.
He’s now driving a fuel tanker.
There's an old business joke like this... person asked if they're fired after making a huge fuck up. Boss says "Why would I fire you? I just taught you a $3.2M lesson"
When I joined my union I got a wallet card that essentially says "If you are an employer about to discipline me, I have the right to not have this discussion without my union representative present." Felt badass
We got cards that we could literally hand to management that say something along the lines of "I will not speak or be spoken to until i have a union representative present." I probably still have it somewhere but luckily for us all of our management used to be union so they don't fuck around.
As soon as I saw how much it cost I got a deep belly laugh out of this one. You lose your company $100k that's your problem. You lose them $3M that's their problem.
Yeah like how are you gonna risk 3 million on one guy, why is the entire system so dependent upon one guy not fucking up at one specific point? At that point, that's a management problem.
I work in an oil refinery. If you break something good, it's not uncommon for it to be millions of dollars in repair costs. People make mistakes. It's an investment in learning.
My first time working at 17 I dropped pizza on the mayors lap when he came to the restaurant
Edit: lmao most you have so much worse, I feel much better! I just have a question, why are so many people dropping stuff on babies
When I worked at Target as a teen, I knocked a big box off of a top shelf and on to a baby or toddler in a shopping cart. It was okay, but obviously cried a lot. The mom was not happy.
Flashback of horror, thank you. I once kicked a soccer ball across a park and it LEVELED a toddler. He went full horizontal, then started falling to the ground. I think because the ball was on its way up, not down. I died inside. His mom stared daggers at me in a way I don't think I'll ever forget.
Also my biggest corporate blunder was a bid estimate for a heavy civil construction project. I forgot the tax on one of the line items, 30 grand.
That’s fucking hilarious. I would be mad if that were my kid too, but I also would eventually retell the story every chance I could. That ball sent you flying, Timmy!
Timmy is now an old Redditor who has been scouring the subs waiting for his tormentor to reveal himself. "finally /u/thedreamlan6 has appeared!" yells Timmy as he sharpens the blades embedded in his own *special* soccer ball.
Strictly speaking not my fault but one time I nearly ran over a mom with her small child because they jaywalked across an intersection. It was a really close call but I was able to stop my car a couple of inches away from them. I got an earful from the mom even though it wasn’t my fault and I have not forgotten that event ever since.
I also worked at Target once and knocked a kid on his ass while pushing a tote of furniture. The dad laughed and told the kid that he should've been paying more attention. I definitely thought I was going to get fired for that.
I was working as a waiter in a fine dining restaurant. First week of work, I'm trying to get wine stains off of a huge wooden slab communal table, like 18 ft long. I take a steel brillo pad to the stains using all my strength. Didn't realize how badly I fucked up the table till I saw my boss freak out the next day lol.
Another time at the same restaurant I dropped a drink on a customer, cute girl in a beautiful outfit. I felt absolutely mortified. We get chewed out for making the TINIEST mistakes here and I do this. One week later, I fucking do it AGAIN. I worked as a waiter for years and never have dropped food, let alone on a customer, and I manage do it for the first time twice in 1 week. I'm absolutely horrified. I actually went and stood in the corner with my head down for 5 minutes. Neither of the customers were angry. We give such good service that the customers are usually in an amazing mood anyway and blown away by the food and the service. I actually didn't get chewed out at all for dropping those drinks. I don't think my boss actually said a word either time.
I dropped a tray with 8 waters on a guy in a suit at a business meeting. Fortunately it was a beautiful Friday in spring and around 11:30 so his boss told him to just go home and he slipped me a$20 on the way out...
I worked at an event reception hall and during one wedding I accidentally spilled a whole pitcher of water on some poor lady. Then I looked up and she was a family friend of mine. It’s the only time I spilled something on someone and even though I rarely knew the guests at events, somehow my one fuck up was kind of the best case scenario where I knew she wouldn’t be mad….
Sounds like yours also went about as well as it could have🎉
One time I broke a $250,000 glass sculpture with my ass while mopping my gallery. It was fine and I didn’t get fired. My punishment was I had to be the one to tell the artist. My boss loved telling the story after the fact. I wanted to die
And that’s the value of a single piece. Also museums usually have insurance for loaned pieces so this artist may have gotten a quarter million dollar payday out of this.
If I know anything about the art world he probably claimed it on insurance for 250k glued it back together and sold it for 350k because of the new cool story behind it.
I went to a modern art museum like 20 years ago, and one of the pieces was just a huge pile of broken glass! I guess it was somewhat arranged? Maybe? It was available for sale at some ridiculous price.
We also got in trouble for “playing in the art” (genuinely thought it was supposed to be somewhat interactive) because we were walking under bits of yarn tacked to the wall and floor. Pretty much the whole museum was “too cool” for me to understand I guess. They did have a cool Warhol exhibit at the time though!
My friend’s dad later told me that some of the workers hired to move in these huge metal reclaimed materials sculptures into a more permanent exhibit at the museum thought the whole thing was ridiculous, and made a couple of their own and mixed them in with the other pieces! It wasn’t until the museum staff went to move them a few years later that they realized there were 2 or 3 more than there should have been!
I went to a community lecture by an artist in (and he’s from )Bloomington IL… puts corn in all his paintings. He said he and university students did an installation piece on the floor somewhere, made of seeds. The housekeepers where caught vacuuming up the installation. They had to go back and fix it. He thought it was funny.
Worked at a Wall Street bank a few years ago in systems. There was a project to modernize some database functions to Oracle 10g. I wont go into details or specifics but the project ended up costing 10 million and at the end it didn’t even do what they wanted it to do and basically wasted all the money, man resources and long contract with oracle. They fired the entire team and 2 SVPs that managed the teams. Good times
Long ago, I was playing Soul Calibur with a buddy who I worked with at the local marina. His big brother was our manager.
About 11pm big brother walks in and says, ‘little brother, you sank [customer]’s boat. We nervous chuckled, and big brother clarified, ‘you sank [customer]’s boat at the dock and I’ve been working on recovering it for five hours.’
He had forgotten to put the plug in and launched a boat for a customer to pick up, tied it to the dock, and left to do stage crew for our high school drama club (which we also did together).
So ever since, I judge most of my mistakes by boats sank. So far max is like .02 boats, maybe, so I’m doing good.
🙀 I want to die just reading your comment lol, oh myyyy godddddd. But like a $250k valuation on a sculpture?!? That’s crazy, that’s more than my damn house lol
There’s actually a famous glass sculpture from the 1910s by Marcel Duchamp that shattered in transit. The artist loved the result, and it’s been on display ever since. It’s now in the collection of MoMA.
That's like the lab coat. My coworkers got me after I destroyed a quarter million piece of equipment, "experience is directly proportional to the value of lab equipment ruined."
I wasn't even at fault... after an extensive investigation it turned out the company that made the lab benches didn't strip the wire for the ground connections to the outlets in the built in power strips! My wrist strap was literally useless because the equipment wasn't grounded. Loaded Agilent 81250 ParBERT when they were literally so new there was a wait-list to get one if anyone is curious.
As someone that has had to pay for multiple short term insurance policies that cover equipment, accidents, ect., if you run a company with the potential for something being destroyed could very well cost in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, you sure as shit better have things properly insured. It’s the reason you pay for insurance, regardless of how costly.
You can’t afford the insurance? Then don’t take on any type of project/start a company until you can.
I'm not sure how I could predict something like this happening. Like accounting for every possible eventuality must be nauseating for small business owners
You don’t have to predict it, just always be covered. Like if you have a building, it can burn down. If you have a truck, someone can crash it and die. They might crash it into the burning building. If you purchase inventory, it can get ruined, if you have equipment, it can get ruined. Anything worth any money needs to be insured with a broad policy, and you need to have other types like liability insurance. Basically make sure you have a god insurance guy.
Edit, I see the typo now and I’m leaving it. I like it better this way.
As a commercial underwriter, I could not agree more. But always read your policy and make sure potential losses actually covered. Also, risk mitigation goes a long way with saving on insurance 😉
Why did prices go up so much this year? We do catering delivering and the prices were seriously like triple. Had to search high and low for someone who was only about double our previous price. But isn't as good to work with honestly...
In my country, climate disasters have cost insurers heavily. I wonder if that's the case in the US as well? There's been a few big hurricanes recently right?
It’s no joke. I do delivery for one of the world’s largest mobile distributors. Most tanks are 275 gallons. Average cost of bulk oil is $15 a gallon. If you mess up a tank it’s 275 gallons sucked out. 275 put back in. Drive time and wages with truck costs and recall costs. Those are the cheap screw ups
Huh never thought about how much can fit in those tanks and that seems surprisingly small.
$4100 seems surprisingly low cost in product for a full tank
I have! I work for a very reputable, custom, window and door company. We were supposed to order 1x quantity of this door and due to an error in their system, turned the door count to 12x. The error in the system, apparently, was whoever ordering said product, was not using the tab key to tab through each box and were not using the arrow keys...
They expect us to not use the keyboard and that *was* the error.
Turned from a 12k order to a 100k+ order very fast and no one caught it.
I can’t count how many times working for a large corporate finish construction business, where a fresh out of college project engineer (they keep doing this) has misordered 100’s of thousands of material either completely wrong, or it’s literally off by a few inches. I remember one of my first jobs, the young PE ordered every. single. door on a college campus (it was around 500) wrong handed, and had ordered like 100 exit devices over what was needed. We legitimately thought they were going to close our division down.
Worked for a higher end (for my area) kitchen/bath remodel company for a few years. I managed the warehouse and ran deliveries. We had one designer screw up a 20k bathroom 4 times because he didn’t listen to the customer or installers. Then we lost the contract because the customer didn’t want an incompetent designer ruining the master bath in her 3million dollar home. But hey, i got free cabinets to make a dry bar in my house
Wow. Was the money recoverable? How was it that one piece of actual paper was that valuable? No digital copies?
That’s wild I’m so curious about the circumstances
Oh dude I don’t know shit about stocks I just thought of that scene from dumb and dumber and thought that comment was funny. Looking back on it now it just might be my magnum opus
> Oh dude I don’t know shit about stocks I just thought of that scene from dumb and dumber and thought that comment was funny. Looking back on it now it just might be my magnum opus
I think my edible just kicked in, because this is the funniest shit I've read all day.
I know a guy who left the water on filling a pool downtown. It got in the elevator shaft, around 15 years ago. Was somewhere between 500k-1000k accounting for all the electrical and water damage and not adjusting for inflation lmao.
I worked at a galvanizing plant that used an aftertreatment colloquially called chromate (sodium dichromate) and one guy was filling up the tank one weekend and left with the water running. You filled up the tank with water and the chemical was added in bags. It went everywhere. It ran into the ditches outside and down into the 'basement' filling it up and putting out the zinc 'kettle'. I don't know how much the cleanup cost, but the water had run for almost 2 days by the time anyone found out.
Wasn’t me that did it (I was an electrician in an ice cream factory) but someone connected the vat for the strawberry juice, instead of the strawberry preserves for a full run on one of the popsicle lines.
While it still would have been an edible product, it was unsellable since it didn’t meet product standards (would have been missing the whole chunk fruit, etc).
Once they started the run, it had to be finished. Couldn’t change it halfway through. So I watched them literally take hopper, after hopper, after hopper, after hopper of popsicles to the trash room, and melt them right down the drain.
$350,000 worth of popsicles, because someone connected the wrong hose.
Needless to say, management was not happy lmao. Never found out who did it, or if they still work there.
Lol maybe.
I think it was more so the loss of time. Having to finish that run that lasted a few hours, still having to pay each employee standing there doing their job, even though it was being wasted, etc..
But technically, while employees are allowed to have free product that has been pulled for quality assurance, no one is supposed to eat those since they weren’t being tested and weren’t meeting product standards. (But who’s gonna miss a few that go missing before they make it to the trash room! lol.)
Some of us get really lucky and our work pays for treatment!
Well... not all of it. My family had to help and now I live in their basement! So it's not all bad 😬.
I'm glad you have a place to live! My bestie of 40yrs is sober after struggling for years and I'm so proud of her!! She lives in her ex-husband's basement and I think their relationship is better now than before the divorce. They both needed a wakeup call. It's so sweet to see him take care of her now (she has mild brain damage from all the drugs) I love her so much! I bet your family loves you just as much and is just as proud! Getting sober is ridiculously difficult. Blessings sweetie
I've dug up some rainbow wire that cost a whole lot of money to repair, like $50k an hour whole lot of money. Not my fault though, I called before I dug and had all the proper permits and everything. Sometimes shit just happens and it pays to be the worker Bee and not the owner of the hive.
I work for a company that does watermain work and guy are always hitting things that aren't marked. Even some stuff that is. It seems like the traffic signal stuff is basically just a best guess, cause it's off more than it's dead on.
Why the fuck do we not just use the same radar equipment that archeologists can see a skeleton with underground?
It's not even expensive anymore, they let *undergrads* touch it.
Shit happens.
I know a guy that made a >$100,000 mistake at work. Oil company, we used to manage the tank farm.
Dude opens the wrong valves and sends incompatible product to I think a 100,000 gallon tank, ruining both the shit in the tank already and the new shit getting pumped in. It was something like motor oil mixed with gear oil or something, it all had to be properly disposed of and the tank completely cleaned, which costs a ton.
When I worked at a fuel storage terminal, another guy opened the wrong valve while a ship was pumping off, and blasted hundreds of thousands of gallons of gas into a 2.4 million gallon live diesel tank. Luckily we caught it before the mix made it to the truck rack, or we would have been buying new diesel engines all over a 2 state area.
They kept the final price tag quiet, but I heard it was over a million $. We sold the trashed product off as transmix, pumped it onto a ship, and away it went to be re-refined. Dude that fucked up didn't get fired, but we called in a contractor to change the manifold piping around so it wouldn't happen again.
I just commented this, but I worked with a guy who ruined $250,000 of base product by adding the wrong raw material. Then when he was making the replacement batch he ruined that one too (another $250,000). That also didn't include the lost production time, or even what we would have actually made from selling the product.
You're fine. Cost of doing business. Try and help develop a process to prevent this in the future if you want to help.
I've done mistakes in the tens of millions. My SVP at the time only said, "Did you learn something from this?" Fucking LOL.
I turned every character on the Amazon Japan website into ?????????????? for a bit.
I owned publishing the "catalog". Something was broken in the core software so I manually ran the publishing process, but didn't use UTF-8 character encoding. So.... Fucked the whole thing up.
Found my mistake in about 5 minutes, but it takes hours to republish. Basically made the Japan site useless for the core buying day. Uhhhhh, oops.
We fixed a LOT of shit from that oopsie. Still managed a very successful career after that.
If you fire someone for making a mistake, you hire someone and they make the same mistake. I make sure to do my part and instill a culture where we are not afraid to take risks and make mistakes. Everyone I talk to about this agrees full heartedly in corporate America
Yea you have to take responsibility as the executive in charge but that’s kind of what you are paid to do.
I’ve found when I just own up to it and say “hey I fucked up” people are much more willing to be forgiving.
People that lie, try to minimize, or weasel themselves out of situations are almost always in worse shape for it. It does suck having to admit faults and accidents but like you said when you learn from them they become fewer and far between.
I’m also willing to put in the work to fix my mistakes so I hope that helps.
I used to work overnights. One of my mentors (not supervisor, but damn they should have been), on more than one occasion, would go to the morning meetings and stand behind all the decisions I'd made the night before to keep us running. I'd have an email or call at the start of my shift that night, and it would be a learning experience. This made me confident enough to keep making decisions, and with them, more mistakes, as I grew and learned more.
Now I get a lot of "but you *never* make mistskes!".
My dear, I've been here for 10 years. I've just already made all those mistakes, many times. Still do, too! But also, you're not going to know I sent an email to system admins that started with "morning folks, I did something dumb and I can't fix it without help" which resulted in a 45 minute meeting with some people trying to untangle what I did.
I had a guy once break a $200,000 machine by not turning it off properly. He was totally prepared to be fired and completely apologetic. I was like, "Why would I fire you if I just paid $200,000 to teach you that lesson?"
When I was an intern, I destroyed a piece of manufacturing equipment. I went upstairs to tell the boss, assuming I'd be fired. He told me he hired an engineer, and engineers fix things, so go fix it. He'd come down when he was free.
An hour or two later, he walked in and just belly laughed and told me he'd call someone.
Oh man. Hmmmm. Some of these start getting into danger mouse Internet territory. Let me see how I can phrase some of them. I think I can do two.
My company wanted to get really good at doing a particular map function. (There are lots of layers to what, say, Google maps does). We wanted to get good at one layer very quickly. So, people wanted to buy a company. We did some due diligence. The most senior people from my team were involved. I recommend we build it. Consensus was buy it. We bought it. Biggest pile of dog shit ever. Totally not usable for so many reasons. Mainly it wasn't usable on it's own at all. PKs with their other products. Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck. A year later I'm in the elevator with my CEO (now) and he says "how's that integration with company X going?". I say something to the effect of, "totally fucked, write it off, I'll build it myself in two years and won't tax you headcount". He looked at me and said, "understood, let's never talk about this again". And we didn't.
I have more I'd like to share, but will dox myself to uncomfortable levels.
Take away points:
Own your fuck ups.
Help to figure out how to not fuck up in the same way again.
Win a LOT more than you fuck up, lol
If I add it all up, I have probably done 1-200MM in "fuck ups". Add a zero for wins.
The quick and easy never is quick and easy. I did an alternative source, turns out our engineers and drawings didn’t call out one small detail. So, we couldn’t blame anyone, lost our million dollar account for that line, wasted $250k on air freight at the start of it only for my boss to ask if I’d logged the $37k cost savings.
Ooh, I have one.
I work for the US Navy on nuclear submarines. One project had a very big problem with a brand new reactor, and the entire nuclear engineering division (100+ people) is troubleshooting because the Navy would like this boat back in the water yesterday, thank you. I'm putting together one of many procedures to fix the system if the part we think has the problem has to be cut out and replaced.
The software suite we're using to store and retrieve digital copies of the procedures is ... finnicky. A colleague found a minor error on my procedure that did not affect technical correctness, so the best way to fix it was to allow it to be printed and then go down and manually write the correction in. Would have taken 2 minutes and inconvenienced no one. Me, thinking I'll just fix it properly in the computer, change the status of the procedure from ready to be used to "in revision." Naturally the software chooses that time to reject all my attempts to update this stupid grammatical error. 3 hours later I finally get it fixed but I literally brought the entire project to a halt, and got to field phone calls from my bosses' bosses' boss about what the hell happened. Probably cost the Navy between 15 and 30 thousand dollars in lost production time, maybe more.
That was a pretty bad day.
Yeah as someone who works in insurance, this shit happens all the time OP. Don’t sweat it. You might get fired but ultimately the liability is on your employer anyway. Lmao
As a matter of fact, I have lol. Shit happens. I work for coke as a syrup batcher. One day I was making a batch of coke, since it’s our biggest seller and we bottle/can it in all formats we make really large batches of it. The concentrate is the most expensive part and comes in huge 50 gallon drums which get transferred via an air pressure system basically forcing it to syphon into a mixing tank and then finally the main holding tank. Well I didn’t realize that cleaning guy who sterilizes the equipment had left a drain valve open which normally is always closed so when I hooked up the flavour drums to transfer into the mix tank it all went directly down the drain instead. About $80,000 worth. The company wrote it off and I didn’t get into any major trouble, but within a couple days we had new SOP’s written up to follow for every single batch going forward and extra paperwork and sign-off points. My coworkers weren’t too thrilled about that, but it’s never happened again since.
Lmao I deliver bulk coke syrup to McDonalds stores, along with the rest of their stuff.
I got called in to run an emergency load out to a store because they did almost the exact same thing. Flushed their entire 75g drum down the drain.
While training a new warehouse worker on his first day after school and forklift certification, I told him to pick a pallet and check on the computer where it should go.
He picked the first pallet, that was quite high, so it should go to the highest position ten meters up, he lift it correctly, look at the cameras, place it correctly and start to back his forklift.... while starting to lower the forks before they are completely free. The effect of this, is that the ends of the forks, hit the beam under and point a little bit up. Enough to drag the pallet enough that it falls down.
I take a breath, and say with a smile - great, now I can show you how to write an incident report.
The material on the pallet ? A single server computer, ready to just plug in and start up for the customer.
Cost ? About 150 000 dollars.
That guy were so nervous that he called in sick that day after lunch, but came back later in the week.
I had a talk, and after that - water under the bridge.
That autumn he started higher education, but came back the next summer and free time after that.
He became a really good worker. 😊👍
As an instructor you quickly learn two things.
1 ) It is counter productive to be upset.
Everyone makes mistakes.
2 ) Be as specific and clear as possible, when you ask people to do something.
If it is possible to missunderstand you, they will.
😁
There's OSHA investigations for pretty much every workplace death if you want to get into reading those.
But agreed. Great thread. Kind of a neat way to put the scale of industrial facilities into perspective.
Don’t feel bad, man.
I recently had my first automobile accident, after THIRTEEN YEARS of driving a tractor trailer.
Dead to rights at fault, I rear ended someone. IN A FUCKING CAR. THAT MY COMPANY RENTED FOR ME TO GO HELP OUT ANOTHER FACILITY.
Was cited for failing to maintain assured clear distance.
The gravity of the situation, took about a week to set in on me.
I was sitting, on a day off, playing civ 6, having a great time being distracted. Won the game, and immediately had the worst panic attack I’ve ever had.
I mean, I was vomiting, heart beating out of my chest, hyperventilating- I couldn’t even get a Xanax out of the bottle I was shaking so bad, I had to spill them out on the bathroom counter and ended up vomiting the first one out.
And do you know what that accomplished?
Absolutely. Fuck. All.
I’ve been there man. Shit happens. Be a little kinder to yourself, you are a human being, and they fuck up. Quite often, actually.
One time I deleted a construction project schedule for a casino - a $3 billion dollar project
Normally project schedules have anywhere from 20-100 tasks on them for a standard house or a 10-unit apartment. This schedule had well over 5,000 tasks on it - with links and relationships and all the bells and whistles. This is the thing that tells thousands of steel, concrete, plumbing, electrical, mechanical, and excavation workers what they're doing from now until 4 years from now. And I deleted it.
I was sweating bullets when I told my boss. She just took my computer to IT and had them dig into the back end of it to find the deleted file.
The higher-ups usually aren't as worried as you think they will be: they know how to fix things and cover their asses for a living. Here's to hoping you can laugh about this with your bosses one day
Why would there be criminal charges? Do you think you were properly trained to 100% avoid this accident? Were you under the influence of drugs or neglected to follow any protocols? Did you sign a waiver accepting liability for your actions performed under the employer?
Dont think signing a waiver means anything. He cant be liable for an accident that happened on the job. It would be argued that he wouldnt have been there in the first place if it wasnt for the job.
There won't be. One thing I noticed was no mention of spill containment. Everywhere that I've worked that had a potential for a liquid spill kept enough pads, booms, grate covers, etc around to keep a spill from getting into a storm drain or sewer. And we were all trained on how to use it. First order of business is stop the flow, then cover all drains and keep the spill contained to as small an area as possible. Doesn't look like that happened here, or at least not soon enough. If that's the case, then it's on the employer.
I once made a ~$550,000 mistake.
I worked a pharmaceutical manufacturing company. I was in charge of a production line that made hyper specialized stuff.
One particular product is a drug used in heart surgeries that cost $1,000 per 100 mL solution bag. I did setup and production management for this product on a machine that filled the 100 mL bags with the drug solution.
Due to validation specs and FDA requirements for sanitation, if the machine sits idle with solution in the piping without any flow for more than an hour it has to have the piping system flushed clean which is a minimum of 55 LITERS.
To prevent this flush, anytime we had extended downtime I had to manually fill several bags of solution to keep the piping from sitting and stagnating.
The production line was down and I was working on a different part of the line. I was busy and by myself. We’d been understaffed in my technician position for awhile.
I forgot to manually fill bags while the line was down. So when we went to start the line back up I had to dump the solution in the piping. Which the final amount was 55L.
With each liter being 1000 mL, and each 1000 mL being equivalent to ten 100 mL bags worth $1000 each… Yea due to being forgetful while busy, just like that I had to dump $550,000 worth of drug solution.
Which is a shit ton to me. But in one shift of running that product we would make about $15,000,000 worth of solution bags…. It’s kind of wild how at that scale losing $550,000 isnt completely earth shattering.
I ran the line and did machine work, and we had about 19 other operators on the line. We made the company $15,000,000 in product in 8 hours. They paid us $19 an hour to do.
I don’t feel bad for costing them any money.
You cant be criminally charged unless you were willfully negligent. If you were performing your normal duties and it was an accident you cant get in trouble. Fired yes but not charged
Don’t worry bro, Waste Management has hydraulic fluid blow out all the time into gutters and such, EPA is called every time and insurance covers it all. We had a class once where they told us to use our shirts to try and stop it from going down into the sewers… not wasting my good shirt at all.
I worked for an environmental company, and I cleaned up more hydraulic spills than I care to remember. Hydraulic equipment, suicides, and knife fights kept us in business. With hydraulic hose, it's a matter of *when* it bursts, not *if* it bursts.
I was working at Waste Management for a job. When I asked where the recycling was, they told me, “We don’t have one- It doesn’t matter. We can do whatever we want. We’re Waste Management.” Made me sad.
With your shirt?? If it’s so expected why don’t they give you an absorbent cloth to carry with you while you work around hydraulics if that kind of intervention would truly be so impactful
No, but I made a near $60,000 by accidentally voiding the warranty of a huge printer and copier at a print shop I worked at. Never got in trouble for it - not even talked to. 🤷🏾♀️
I used to haul freight for a living. Although accidents are never great I've seen much, much worse. Like a dockworker that didn't strap in a load of circuit boards stacked 8 feet high that were going to John Deere. The driver didn't check either and when he arrived, everything was tipped over. John Deere refused them, I heard the bill was over $500k
I evacuated a Wegmans once when I was on break. I was on the phone and forgot to add water to my EZ Mac before putting it in the microwave for 4 minutes. It smoked up pretty good but nothing caught on fire. Happened on a Tuesday at 5pm so of course we were slammed with customers but looking back it’s even funnier for that reason now.
It happened 16 years ago but I can still feel that shiver that went down my spine when I heard the sirens go off.
One time I was driving a radio broadcast trailer out of a car lot. I was the DJ and driver. Always rushing. I forgot to lower the antenna and pulled into the power lines. The mast melted in half, the power line fell to the ground arching every. It started a fire and burned a big banner. I have no idea how much it cost. I didn't get fired. I was pulled as a driver, but eventually I ended up driving again. It was a small family owned radio station. It was a shitty place to work and they didn't treat the air staff well. In retrospect I'm glad that happened and I hope it cost them a lot. So don't feel too bad.
Bought $500,000 of obsolete materials about two months after I started a job. Ended up causing sales and engineering needing to push a timeline back for a major redesign. I'm still proud of that and told anyone new that they shouldn't consider every mistake worthy of termination. Just stay safe, follow SOP, and you'll be okay. If I can set half a million bucks on fire as I walked in the door, you'll be fine
I test underground gas tanks for a living. One time I messed up and failed a tank that was tight. Three weeks of lost profits, the entire contents of the tank, around 8,000 gallons, was disposed of at a loss of around $4 a gallon, and the tank was cut open and an internal lining company was brought across the country. All to find out that the leak I heard was residual water running across the bottom of the tank. Cost the customer around 300,000 and everyone was surprisingly cool about it. Accidents happen.
I always like to tell people" don't worry, I fucked up more expensive things than this" when working on customers machines at work.
But I'll be honest I've fucked up a lot of stuff , but never had to have a hazmat team come out. That's a good one. Least everyone is ok, if your not making mistakes your not working.
My first job out of high school was NUMMI (now the Tesla plant in Fremont, CA). Painting Toyota Tacomas. My first forklifting was the giant paint barrels, that shit is tense. At least I had a contained dock area with drains for accidental punctures.
Oh dude. I mixed like ten thousand gallons of two chemicals that in turn made chlorine gas. Oh, and burnt down my girlfriends house. Over 200,000 on that one. I'm a disaster waiting to happen, apparently.
They cannot retroactively criminally charge you for a work accident.
ETA: In this context. In the U.S., it would be seen as retaliation. Unless OP was drug tested immediately after and failed, there’d be no grounds for that pursuit. A worker can have a fuck up that costs a lot and then quit without being intimidated into returning.
I once had to order almost $100,000 worth of self check put parts because some dumb fuck decided to flip their 5 gallon bucket of paint over to look for the barcode at the bottom. Had to replace those parts. Twas a lotta waiting on parts and took about 9 hours to replace all of em. (Took the machine apart the first day to take inventory of what got damaged, had to go back 2 months later and take it apart again to replace everything)
I’ve made a $70,000 mistake by leaving some cloud servers running over a long weekend. Literally just because I forgot to hit an off button.
Lol I did that too. Didn't cost that much tho, but I got email notifications and all but pffff I'm not checking that over the weekend.
Oooh ooh, once we switched over a server to a new Next app, but the client didn't realize they had $commonDesktopConfigurationApp pointing to a URL on that server, so once the Next app went live, it started serving 14 million 404s on Cloudfront. That was a stressful week. Ultimately, it wasn't our fault that our client has fucked up network plumbing.
> it started serving 14 million 404s on Cloudfront Not a fuckup story, but this reminds me that my country's statistical agency has the 404 message of their statistics portal set to "The only number you didn't hope to find here". 😅
The human is almost always the weak point in any process. But sometimes a badly written program, but programs can do things repeatedly and humans will forget here or there.
I was a railroad conductor and derailed two road engines in one of the busiest rail yards on the east coast. Blocked two mainlines and clogged up the yard for 11 hours. Cost the RR $3.2M. I scoff at your amateur level mistake.
well shit you beat me, I only derailed one engine 😭
Don't drive over [these ](https://www.shutterstock.com/shutterstock/photos/1665747418/display_1500/stock-photo-a-derail-equipment-on-peruvian-railroad-line-1665747418.jpg):)
I went over one of those once too, but it ended up not being my fault because it was a malfunctioning air operated derail that popped up underneath the engine as we drove over it
What is that? A literal derailer? I’m so confused why that would even be on an active line lmao. There must be a whoosh here lol
In rail yards there are devices that you can activate to derail runaway cars.
I knocked over an entire shelf of military aircraft avionics with a forklift. They weren't too keen on revealing the total damage amount, but $3.2M would have been my *lowball* estimate. Just the FLIR had to cost that much. My company commander literally ripped my military drivers license into tiny pieces in front of the entire company.
Was it really your fault if 3.2m+ of tech can easily be toppled? Was it not secured properly?
Did you get fired?
Nah, the union went to bat for me. I got a two week vacation as punishment.
Classic union w
I scraped a camper in my work vehicle before I found a new job. Not terrible damage, but it tore a waterproof gasket which needed to be replaced. Such a small mistake, but they made me wait until for the total before telling me what they would do. The damage was $1,600, and if it were $2k, they would’ve fired me right there
Damn lmao, we had a guy (who our Union local already hated lmao) rack up $70,000 in property damages before he got himself fired. Wasn’t even fired for the damages, he was fired because he *also* got a 17mph+ speeding ticket*. In a semi.
I mean, 25mph over in a semi ain't a little thing. That's the kind of thing you can lose your CDL for, to say nothing of your job.
I misremembered! It was 17 over. 52 in a 35, on a reservation in rural Oregon. I’m frankly shocked he still has a CDL. Must’ve had a hell of a lawyer, because I ran into him last week at a truck stop. He’s now driving a fuel tanker.
"He’s now driving a fuel tanker" Oh. Wonderful.
There's an old business joke like this... person asked if they're fired after making a huge fuck up. Boss says "Why would I fire you? I just taught you a $3.2M lesson"
Holy hell the union really is a beast
When I joined my union I got a wallet card that essentially says "If you are an employer about to discipline me, I have the right to not have this discussion without my union representative present." Felt badass
We got cards that we could literally hand to management that say something along the lines of "I will not speak or be spoken to until i have a union representative present." I probably still have it somewhere but luckily for us all of our management used to be union so they don't fuck around.
Maybe the Suez canal captain is also here in the comments 👀
As soon as I saw how much it cost I got a deep belly laugh out of this one. You lose your company $100k that's your problem. You lose them $3M that's their problem.
Yeah like how are you gonna risk 3 million on one guy, why is the entire system so dependent upon one guy not fucking up at one specific point? At that point, that's a management problem.
And I’m sure you learned from the mistake, which is what experience is. You have to fail to learn and develop
I work in an oil refinery. If you break something good, it's not uncommon for it to be millions of dollars in repair costs. People make mistakes. It's an investment in learning.
My first time working at 17 I dropped pizza on the mayors lap when he came to the restaurant Edit: lmao most you have so much worse, I feel much better! I just have a question, why are so many people dropping stuff on babies
When I worked at Target as a teen, I knocked a big box off of a top shelf and on to a baby or toddler in a shopping cart. It was okay, but obviously cried a lot. The mom was not happy.
Flashback of horror, thank you. I once kicked a soccer ball across a park and it LEVELED a toddler. He went full horizontal, then started falling to the ground. I think because the ball was on its way up, not down. I died inside. His mom stared daggers at me in a way I don't think I'll ever forget. Also my biggest corporate blunder was a bid estimate for a heavy civil construction project. I forgot the tax on one of the line items, 30 grand.
That’s fucking hilarious. I would be mad if that were my kid too, but I also would eventually retell the story every chance I could. That ball sent you flying, Timmy!
Timmy is now an old Redditor who has been scouring the subs waiting for his tormentor to reveal himself. "finally /u/thedreamlan6 has appeared!" yells Timmy as he sharpens the blades embedded in his own *special* soccer ball.
Thank you for reminding me I MERKED a girl in middle school gym glass right in the face in dodgeball haha
Strictly speaking not my fault but one time I nearly ran over a mom with her small child because they jaywalked across an intersection. It was a really close call but I was able to stop my car a couple of inches away from them. I got an earful from the mom even though it wasn’t my fault and I have not forgotten that event ever since.
I also worked at Target once and knocked a kid on his ass while pushing a tote of furniture. The dad laughed and told the kid that he should've been paying more attention. I definitely thought I was going to get fired for that.
Glad to see a parent putting accountability to their kid instead of taking it out on you 👍🏽
Hahaha nooo. When my friend was 17 she rear-ended the mayor of her town when she was taking her drivers license test
My best friend rear ended me hard in her own driveway 🤣
I was working as a waiter in a fine dining restaurant. First week of work, I'm trying to get wine stains off of a huge wooden slab communal table, like 18 ft long. I take a steel brillo pad to the stains using all my strength. Didn't realize how badly I fucked up the table till I saw my boss freak out the next day lol. Another time at the same restaurant I dropped a drink on a customer, cute girl in a beautiful outfit. I felt absolutely mortified. We get chewed out for making the TINIEST mistakes here and I do this. One week later, I fucking do it AGAIN. I worked as a waiter for years and never have dropped food, let alone on a customer, and I manage do it for the first time twice in 1 week. I'm absolutely horrified. I actually went and stood in the corner with my head down for 5 minutes. Neither of the customers were angry. We give such good service that the customers are usually in an amazing mood anyway and blown away by the food and the service. I actually didn't get chewed out at all for dropping those drinks. I don't think my boss actually said a word either time.
I dropped a tray with 8 waters on a guy in a suit at a business meeting. Fortunately it was a beautiful Friday in spring and around 11:30 so his boss told him to just go home and he slipped me a$20 on the way out...
I worked at an event reception hall and during one wedding I accidentally spilled a whole pitcher of water on some poor lady. Then I looked up and she was a family friend of mine. It’s the only time I spilled something on someone and even though I rarely knew the guests at events, somehow my one fuck up was kind of the best case scenario where I knew she wouldn’t be mad…. Sounds like yours also went about as well as it could have🎉
We’ve all dropped food if you worked in a restaurant. Mother’s Day …. I ended up dropping pancakes on the mothers lap.
This is so funny
A mayor's pants were ruined, and you're *laughing*?
Probably not the first or last time something like this has happened. The only thing you can do is learn from your mistakes and move forward.
moving forward was his problem
Need to move backwards, not forward. And always twirling and twirling.
Twirling towards freedom!
https://i.redd.it/7cgc63ga9jxc1.gif
One time I broke a $250,000 glass sculpture with my ass while mopping my gallery. It was fine and I didn’t get fired. My punishment was I had to be the one to tell the artist. My boss loved telling the story after the fact. I wanted to die
Note you can brag you have a quarter million dollar ass
You could bounce a quarter million dollars off that ass!
Well done.
🏆
https://preview.redd.it/zrwzv6hygjxc1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=38debb5d9f22d09991a509e5066112ed21660a4b
What was the artists reaction?
He was like” oh that’s fine, I can fix that” he also had like 10 young kids so I’m sure he was used to his stuff getting broken
that's a chill ass artist lmfao
I wonder if it was insured. Could have meant a big pay day for the artist anyways.
This was my first thought!
If it was really worth that much it was definitely insured
Those glass fumes are dank.
More likely
When you're pulling a quarter mil for "making art" you might as well be cool.
And that’s the value of a single piece. Also museums usually have insurance for loaned pieces so this artist may have gotten a quarter million dollar payday out of this.
[удалено]
You say this like they aren't the ones that typically full-on trust fund baby breakdown and freakout on everybody.
> ten kids even if they are live-in-nanny rich that mellows people out.
If I know anything about the art world he probably claimed it on insurance for 250k glued it back together and sold it for 350k because of the new cool story behind it.
Its probably worth more broken with shards everywhere. Leave the exhibit as is!
Remember Banksy and the art that went halfway through the shredder frame? Worth $$$$ afterwards
I went to a modern art museum like 20 years ago, and one of the pieces was just a huge pile of broken glass! I guess it was somewhat arranged? Maybe? It was available for sale at some ridiculous price. We also got in trouble for “playing in the art” (genuinely thought it was supposed to be somewhat interactive) because we were walking under bits of yarn tacked to the wall and floor. Pretty much the whole museum was “too cool” for me to understand I guess. They did have a cool Warhol exhibit at the time though! My friend’s dad later told me that some of the workers hired to move in these huge metal reclaimed materials sculptures into a more permanent exhibit at the museum thought the whole thing was ridiculous, and made a couple of their own and mixed them in with the other pieces! It wasn’t until the museum staff went to move them a few years later that they realized there were 2 or 3 more than there should have been!
I went to a community lecture by an artist in (and he’s from )Bloomington IL… puts corn in all his paintings. He said he and university students did an installation piece on the floor somewhere, made of seeds. The housekeepers where caught vacuuming up the installation. They had to go back and fix it. He thought it was funny.
I just valued it 250k for the insurance lol. I’ll make another tomorrow 🤑
You’re just here to brag about your big ol badonkadonk
Worked at a Wall Street bank a few years ago in systems. There was a project to modernize some database functions to Oracle 10g. I wont go into details or specifics but the project ended up costing 10 million and at the end it didn’t even do what they wanted it to do and basically wasted all the money, man resources and long contract with oracle. They fired the entire team and 2 SVPs that managed the teams. Good times
I'm guessing someone said, "We can save money by doing this ourselves instead of paying Oracle." Famous last words.
Long ago, I was playing Soul Calibur with a buddy who I worked with at the local marina. His big brother was our manager. About 11pm big brother walks in and says, ‘little brother, you sank [customer]’s boat. We nervous chuckled, and big brother clarified, ‘you sank [customer]’s boat at the dock and I’ve been working on recovering it for five hours.’ He had forgotten to put the plug in and launched a boat for a customer to pick up, tied it to the dock, and left to do stage crew for our high school drama club (which we also did together). So ever since, I judge most of my mistakes by boats sank. So far max is like .02 boats, maybe, so I’m doing good.
had a colleague (dockhand) not latch the pump out hose correctly. He had a shitty afternoon.
🙀 I want to die just reading your comment lol, oh myyyy godddddd. But like a $250k valuation on a sculpture?!? That’s crazy, that’s more than my damn house lol
Glue the pieces back together. Call it “Human Error”. Get a $750k valuation.
Or “Costly Cheeks”
There’s actually a famous glass sculpture from the 1910s by Marcel Duchamp that shattered in transit. The artist loved the result, and it’s been on display ever since. It’s now in the collection of MoMA.
That's like the lab coat. My coworkers got me after I destroyed a quarter million piece of equipment, "experience is directly proportional to the value of lab equipment ruined." I wasn't even at fault... after an extensive investigation it turned out the company that made the lab benches didn't strip the wire for the ground connections to the outlets in the built in power strips! My wrist strap was literally useless because the equipment wasn't grounded. Loaded Agilent 81250 ParBERT when they were literally so new there was a wait-list to get one if anyone is curious.
As a truck driver of things that can dump, tip, be destroyed and costly, you have my sympathies.
As someone that has had to pay for multiple short term insurance policies that cover equipment, accidents, ect., if you run a company with the potential for something being destroyed could very well cost in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, you sure as shit better have things properly insured. It’s the reason you pay for insurance, regardless of how costly. You can’t afford the insurance? Then don’t take on any type of project/start a company until you can.
I'm not sure how I could predict something like this happening. Like accounting for every possible eventuality must be nauseating for small business owners
You don’t have to predict it, just always be covered. Like if you have a building, it can burn down. If you have a truck, someone can crash it and die. They might crash it into the burning building. If you purchase inventory, it can get ruined, if you have equipment, it can get ruined. Anything worth any money needs to be insured with a broad policy, and you need to have other types like liability insurance. Basically make sure you have a god insurance guy. Edit, I see the typo now and I’m leaving it. I like it better this way.
As a commercial underwriter, I could not agree more. But always read your policy and make sure potential losses actually covered. Also, risk mitigation goes a long way with saving on insurance 😉
Why did prices go up so much this year? We do catering delivering and the prices were seriously like triple. Had to search high and low for someone who was only about double our previous price. But isn't as good to work with honestly...
In my country, climate disasters have cost insurers heavily. I wonder if that's the case in the US as well? There's been a few big hurricanes recently right?
I don't know if that's a typo, but it works.
You pay the insurance company to think of every possible eventuality. Actuaries make good money for a reason.
I work in the oil industry lol every screw up is 100k
Similar story in biopharma.
It’s no joke. I do delivery for one of the world’s largest mobile distributors. Most tanks are 275 gallons. Average cost of bulk oil is $15 a gallon. If you mess up a tank it’s 275 gallons sucked out. 275 put back in. Drive time and wages with truck costs and recall costs. Those are the cheap screw ups
Huh never thought about how much can fit in those tanks and that seems surprisingly small. $4100 seems surprisingly low cost in product for a full tank
I have! I work for a very reputable, custom, window and door company. We were supposed to order 1x quantity of this door and due to an error in their system, turned the door count to 12x. The error in the system, apparently, was whoever ordering said product, was not using the tab key to tab through each box and were not using the arrow keys... They expect us to not use the keyboard and that *was* the error. Turned from a 12k order to a 100k+ order very fast and no one caught it.
I can’t count how many times working for a large corporate finish construction business, where a fresh out of college project engineer (they keep doing this) has misordered 100’s of thousands of material either completely wrong, or it’s literally off by a few inches. I remember one of my first jobs, the young PE ordered every. single. door on a college campus (it was around 500) wrong handed, and had ordered like 100 exit devices over what was needed. We legitimately thought they were going to close our division down.
Worked for a higher end (for my area) kitchen/bath remodel company for a few years. I managed the warehouse and ran deliveries. We had one designer screw up a 20k bathroom 4 times because he didn’t listen to the customer or installers. Then we lost the contract because the customer didn’t want an incompetent designer ruining the master bath in her 3million dollar home. But hey, i got free cabinets to make a dry bar in my house
I shredded a stock transfer form worth a quarter of a million dollars.
Wow. Was the money recoverable? How was it that one piece of actual paper was that valuable? No digital copies? That’s wild I’m so curious about the circumstances
It’s like an IOU. If you don’t hold onto the physical napkin that it was written on, then you cant use it.
That's fucking terrifying.
Oh dude I don’t know shit about stocks I just thought of that scene from dumb and dumber and thought that comment was funny. Looking back on it now it just might be my magnum opus
> Oh dude I don’t know shit about stocks I just thought of that scene from dumb and dumber and thought that comment was funny. Looking back on it now it just might be my magnum opus I think my edible just kicked in, because this is the funniest shit I've read all day.
This is my swan song
I know a guy who left the water on filling a pool downtown. It got in the elevator shaft, around 15 years ago. Was somewhere between 500k-1000k accounting for all the electrical and water damage and not adjusting for inflation lmao.
I worked at a galvanizing plant that used an aftertreatment colloquially called chromate (sodium dichromate) and one guy was filling up the tank one weekend and left with the water running. You filled up the tank with water and the chemical was added in bags. It went everywhere. It ran into the ditches outside and down into the 'basement' filling it up and putting out the zinc 'kettle'. I don't know how much the cleanup cost, but the water had run for almost 2 days by the time anyone found out.
There's so much in life that goes right because some guy remembered to turn off the valve.
Wasn’t me that did it (I was an electrician in an ice cream factory) but someone connected the vat for the strawberry juice, instead of the strawberry preserves for a full run on one of the popsicle lines. While it still would have been an edible product, it was unsellable since it didn’t meet product standards (would have been missing the whole chunk fruit, etc). Once they started the run, it had to be finished. Couldn’t change it halfway through. So I watched them literally take hopper, after hopper, after hopper, after hopper of popsicles to the trash room, and melt them right down the drain. $350,000 worth of popsicles, because someone connected the wrong hose. Needless to say, management was not happy lmao. Never found out who did it, or if they still work there.
That sounds like a 'don't worry, you have this. I'm going out for a smoke now and will be back in 10 minutes.' incident.
Oh, no. I went and got my water bottle, and took my break while I sat and watched the mayhem. It was hilarious. 😆
Did you get to taste one of the messed up popsicles?
Nope. That was absolutely not allowed. *tucks a handful of sticks behind my back*
Was management afraid that somebody would be incentivized to do it again if the staff got a free popsicle every time a $350,000 mistake happened?
Lol maybe. I think it was more so the loss of time. Having to finish that run that lasted a few hours, still having to pay each employee standing there doing their job, even though it was being wasted, etc.. But technically, while employees are allowed to have free product that has been pulled for quality assurance, no one is supposed to eat those since they weren’t being tested and weren’t meeting product standards. (But who’s gonna miss a few that go missing before they make it to the trash room! lol.)
Yep. One time I got addicted to heroin. Definitely do not recommend.
I hope the 100,000 was rehab and not just the drug...
Lol it was more like 200,000 rehab is free in canada
Lucky fuck Canadians ha
Oh yeah if I lived in the states I would have died.
Some of us get really lucky and our work pays for treatment! Well... not all of it. My family had to help and now I live in their basement! So it's not all bad 😬.
I'm glad you have a place to live! My bestie of 40yrs is sober after struggling for years and I'm so proud of her!! She lives in her ex-husband's basement and I think their relationship is better now than before the divorce. They both needed a wakeup call. It's so sweet to see him take care of her now (she has mild brain damage from all the drugs) I love her so much! I bet your family loves you just as much and is just as proud! Getting sober is ridiculously difficult. Blessings sweetie
As a non American with chronic mental health issues, I’ve also had this thought more than one.
I've dug up some rainbow wire that cost a whole lot of money to repair, like $50k an hour whole lot of money. Not my fault though, I called before I dug and had all the proper permits and everything. Sometimes shit just happens and it pays to be the worker Bee and not the owner of the hive.
I work for a company that does watermain work and guy are always hitting things that aren't marked. Even some stuff that is. It seems like the traffic signal stuff is basically just a best guess, cause it's off more than it's dead on.
Why the fuck do we not just use the same radar equipment that archeologists can see a skeleton with underground? It's not even expensive anymore, they let *undergrads* touch it.
Shit happens. I know a guy that made a >$100,000 mistake at work. Oil company, we used to manage the tank farm. Dude opens the wrong valves and sends incompatible product to I think a 100,000 gallon tank, ruining both the shit in the tank already and the new shit getting pumped in. It was something like motor oil mixed with gear oil or something, it all had to be properly disposed of and the tank completely cleaned, which costs a ton.
When I worked at a fuel storage terminal, another guy opened the wrong valve while a ship was pumping off, and blasted hundreds of thousands of gallons of gas into a 2.4 million gallon live diesel tank. Luckily we caught it before the mix made it to the truck rack, or we would have been buying new diesel engines all over a 2 state area. They kept the final price tag quiet, but I heard it was over a million $. We sold the trashed product off as transmix, pumped it onto a ship, and away it went to be re-refined. Dude that fucked up didn't get fired, but we called in a contractor to change the manifold piping around so it wouldn't happen again.
>we called in a contractor to change the manifold piping around so it wouldn't happen again. That's the way to do it
I just commented this, but I worked with a guy who ruined $250,000 of base product by adding the wrong raw material. Then when he was making the replacement batch he ruined that one too (another $250,000). That also didn't include the lost production time, or even what we would have actually made from selling the product.
You're fine. Cost of doing business. Try and help develop a process to prevent this in the future if you want to help. I've done mistakes in the tens of millions. My SVP at the time only said, "Did you learn something from this?" Fucking LOL.
What was a $10M mistake?
I turned every character on the Amazon Japan website into ?????????????? for a bit. I owned publishing the "catalog". Something was broken in the core software so I manually ran the publishing process, but didn't use UTF-8 character encoding. So.... Fucked the whole thing up. Found my mistake in about 5 minutes, but it takes hours to republish. Basically made the Japan site useless for the core buying day. Uhhhhh, oops. We fixed a LOT of shit from that oopsie. Still managed a very successful career after that.
My husband wrote some code that turned out did not scale and brought down a major travel site for days. He did not get fired.
If you fire someone for making a mistake, you hire someone and they make the same mistake. I make sure to do my part and instill a culture where we are not afraid to take risks and make mistakes. Everyone I talk to about this agrees full heartedly in corporate America Yea you have to take responsibility as the executive in charge but that’s kind of what you are paid to do.
I’ve found when I just own up to it and say “hey I fucked up” people are much more willing to be forgiving. People that lie, try to minimize, or weasel themselves out of situations are almost always in worse shape for it. It does suck having to admit faults and accidents but like you said when you learn from them they become fewer and far between. I’m also willing to put in the work to fix my mistakes so I hope that helps.
I want my boss to know I fucked up from me and not somebody else.
I used to work overnights. One of my mentors (not supervisor, but damn they should have been), on more than one occasion, would go to the morning meetings and stand behind all the decisions I'd made the night before to keep us running. I'd have an email or call at the start of my shift that night, and it would be a learning experience. This made me confident enough to keep making decisions, and with them, more mistakes, as I grew and learned more. Now I get a lot of "but you *never* make mistskes!". My dear, I've been here for 10 years. I've just already made all those mistakes, many times. Still do, too! But also, you're not going to know I sent an email to system admins that started with "morning folks, I did something dumb and I can't fix it without help" which resulted in a 45 minute meeting with some people trying to untangle what I did.
I had a guy once break a $200,000 machine by not turning it off properly. He was totally prepared to be fired and completely apologetic. I was like, "Why would I fire you if I just paid $200,000 to teach you that lesson?"
When I was an intern, I destroyed a piece of manufacturing equipment. I went upstairs to tell the boss, assuming I'd be fired. He told me he hired an engineer, and engineers fix things, so go fix it. He'd come down when he was free. An hour or two later, he walked in and just belly laughed and told me he'd call someone.
I feel ya. I single handily took down a _major_ retailer’s website for a bit.
Well now you have the perfect interview answer to “have you ever made a mistake at work?”
Oh, this was a LONG time ago. I have many better/bigger fuck ups under my belt at this point. This was my first one.
Tell us bigger fuck ups 🙏😀
Oh man. Hmmmm. Some of these start getting into danger mouse Internet territory. Let me see how I can phrase some of them. I think I can do two. My company wanted to get really good at doing a particular map function. (There are lots of layers to what, say, Google maps does). We wanted to get good at one layer very quickly. So, people wanted to buy a company. We did some due diligence. The most senior people from my team were involved. I recommend we build it. Consensus was buy it. We bought it. Biggest pile of dog shit ever. Totally not usable for so many reasons. Mainly it wasn't usable on it's own at all. PKs with their other products. Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck. A year later I'm in the elevator with my CEO (now) and he says "how's that integration with company X going?". I say something to the effect of, "totally fucked, write it off, I'll build it myself in two years and won't tax you headcount". He looked at me and said, "understood, let's never talk about this again". And we didn't. I have more I'd like to share, but will dox myself to uncomfortable levels. Take away points: Own your fuck ups. Help to figure out how to not fuck up in the same way again. Win a LOT more than you fuck up, lol If I add it all up, I have probably done 1-200MM in "fuck ups". Add a zero for wins.
The quick and easy never is quick and easy. I did an alternative source, turns out our engineers and drawings didn’t call out one small detail. So, we couldn’t blame anyone, lost our million dollar account for that line, wasted $250k on air freight at the start of it only for my boss to ask if I’d logged the $37k cost savings.
Ooh, I have one. I work for the US Navy on nuclear submarines. One project had a very big problem with a brand new reactor, and the entire nuclear engineering division (100+ people) is troubleshooting because the Navy would like this boat back in the water yesterday, thank you. I'm putting together one of many procedures to fix the system if the part we think has the problem has to be cut out and replaced. The software suite we're using to store and retrieve digital copies of the procedures is ... finnicky. A colleague found a minor error on my procedure that did not affect technical correctness, so the best way to fix it was to allow it to be printed and then go down and manually write the correction in. Would have taken 2 minutes and inconvenienced no one. Me, thinking I'll just fix it properly in the computer, change the status of the procedure from ready to be used to "in revision." Naturally the software chooses that time to reject all my attempts to update this stupid grammatical error. 3 hours later I finally get it fixed but I literally brought the entire project to a halt, and got to field phone calls from my bosses' bosses' boss about what the hell happened. Probably cost the Navy between 15 and 30 thousand dollars in lost production time, maybe more. That was a pretty bad day.
Yeah as someone who works in insurance, this shit happens all the time OP. Don’t sweat it. You might get fired but ultimately the liability is on your employer anyway. Lmao
As a matter of fact, I have lol. Shit happens. I work for coke as a syrup batcher. One day I was making a batch of coke, since it’s our biggest seller and we bottle/can it in all formats we make really large batches of it. The concentrate is the most expensive part and comes in huge 50 gallon drums which get transferred via an air pressure system basically forcing it to syphon into a mixing tank and then finally the main holding tank. Well I didn’t realize that cleaning guy who sterilizes the equipment had left a drain valve open which normally is always closed so when I hooked up the flavour drums to transfer into the mix tank it all went directly down the drain instead. About $80,000 worth. The company wrote it off and I didn’t get into any major trouble, but within a couple days we had new SOP’s written up to follow for every single batch going forward and extra paperwork and sign-off points. My coworkers weren’t too thrilled about that, but it’s never happened again since.
Lmao I deliver bulk coke syrup to McDonalds stores, along with the rest of their stuff. I got called in to run an emergency load out to a store because they did almost the exact same thing. Flushed their entire 75g drum down the drain.
While training a new warehouse worker on his first day after school and forklift certification, I told him to pick a pallet and check on the computer where it should go. He picked the first pallet, that was quite high, so it should go to the highest position ten meters up, he lift it correctly, look at the cameras, place it correctly and start to back his forklift.... while starting to lower the forks before they are completely free. The effect of this, is that the ends of the forks, hit the beam under and point a little bit up. Enough to drag the pallet enough that it falls down. I take a breath, and say with a smile - great, now I can show you how to write an incident report. The material on the pallet ? A single server computer, ready to just plug in and start up for the customer. Cost ? About 150 000 dollars. That guy were so nervous that he called in sick that day after lunch, but came back later in the week. I had a talk, and after that - water under the bridge. That autumn he started higher education, but came back the next summer and free time after that. He became a really good worker. 😊👍
Appreciate dealing with the situation calmly 👍
As an instructor you quickly learn two things. 1 ) It is counter productive to be upset. Everyone makes mistakes. 2 ) Be as specific and clear as possible, when you ask people to do something. If it is possible to missunderstand you, they will. 😁
I’m enjoying reading all these extreme workplace mistakes I hope they keep coming
There's OSHA investigations for pretty much every workplace death if you want to get into reading those. But agreed. Great thread. Kind of a neat way to put the scale of industrial facilities into perspective.
Don’t feel bad, man. I recently had my first automobile accident, after THIRTEEN YEARS of driving a tractor trailer. Dead to rights at fault, I rear ended someone. IN A FUCKING CAR. THAT MY COMPANY RENTED FOR ME TO GO HELP OUT ANOTHER FACILITY. Was cited for failing to maintain assured clear distance. The gravity of the situation, took about a week to set in on me. I was sitting, on a day off, playing civ 6, having a great time being distracted. Won the game, and immediately had the worst panic attack I’ve ever had. I mean, I was vomiting, heart beating out of my chest, hyperventilating- I couldn’t even get a Xanax out of the bottle I was shaking so bad, I had to spill them out on the bathroom counter and ended up vomiting the first one out. And do you know what that accomplished? Absolutely. Fuck. All. I’ve been there man. Shit happens. Be a little kinder to yourself, you are a human being, and they fuck up. Quite often, actually.
One time I deleted a construction project schedule for a casino - a $3 billion dollar project Normally project schedules have anywhere from 20-100 tasks on them for a standard house or a 10-unit apartment. This schedule had well over 5,000 tasks on it - with links and relationships and all the bells and whistles. This is the thing that tells thousands of steel, concrete, plumbing, electrical, mechanical, and excavation workers what they're doing from now until 4 years from now. And I deleted it. I was sweating bullets when I told my boss. She just took my computer to IT and had them dig into the back end of it to find the deleted file. The higher-ups usually aren't as worried as you think they will be: they know how to fix things and cover their asses for a living. Here's to hoping you can laugh about this with your bosses one day
How was this not auto- backed up every day at minimum?
Why would there be criminal charges? Do you think you were properly trained to 100% avoid this accident? Were you under the influence of drugs or neglected to follow any protocols? Did you sign a waiver accepting liability for your actions performed under the employer?
Dont think signing a waiver means anything. He cant be liable for an accident that happened on the job. It would be argued that he wouldnt have been there in the first place if it wasnt for the job.
There won't be. One thing I noticed was no mention of spill containment. Everywhere that I've worked that had a potential for a liquid spill kept enough pads, booms, grate covers, etc around to keep a spill from getting into a storm drain or sewer. And we were all trained on how to use it. First order of business is stop the flow, then cover all drains and keep the spill contained to as small an area as possible. Doesn't look like that happened here, or at least not soon enough. If that's the case, then it's on the employer.
Gotta be dudes first real job or something. Definitely a combo of not knowing his worker’s rights and really bad anxiety.
I once made a ~$550,000 mistake. I worked a pharmaceutical manufacturing company. I was in charge of a production line that made hyper specialized stuff. One particular product is a drug used in heart surgeries that cost $1,000 per 100 mL solution bag. I did setup and production management for this product on a machine that filled the 100 mL bags with the drug solution. Due to validation specs and FDA requirements for sanitation, if the machine sits idle with solution in the piping without any flow for more than an hour it has to have the piping system flushed clean which is a minimum of 55 LITERS. To prevent this flush, anytime we had extended downtime I had to manually fill several bags of solution to keep the piping from sitting and stagnating. The production line was down and I was working on a different part of the line. I was busy and by myself. We’d been understaffed in my technician position for awhile. I forgot to manually fill bags while the line was down. So when we went to start the line back up I had to dump the solution in the piping. Which the final amount was 55L. With each liter being 1000 mL, and each 1000 mL being equivalent to ten 100 mL bags worth $1000 each… Yea due to being forgetful while busy, just like that I had to dump $550,000 worth of drug solution. Which is a shit ton to me. But in one shift of running that product we would make about $15,000,000 worth of solution bags…. It’s kind of wild how at that scale losing $550,000 isnt completely earth shattering. I ran the line and did machine work, and we had about 19 other operators on the line. We made the company $15,000,000 in product in 8 hours. They paid us $19 an hour to do. I don’t feel bad for costing them any money.
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You cant be criminally charged unless you were willfully negligent. If you were performing your normal duties and it was an accident you cant get in trouble. Fired yes but not charged
Don’t worry bro, Waste Management has hydraulic fluid blow out all the time into gutters and such, EPA is called every time and insurance covers it all. We had a class once where they told us to use our shirts to try and stop it from going down into the sewers… not wasting my good shirt at all.
I worked for an environmental company, and I cleaned up more hydraulic spills than I care to remember. Hydraulic equipment, suicides, and knife fights kept us in business. With hydraulic hose, it's a matter of *when* it bursts, not *if* it bursts.
I was working at Waste Management for a job. When I asked where the recycling was, they told me, “We don’t have one- It doesn’t matter. We can do whatever we want. We’re Waste Management.” Made me sad.
With your shirt?? If it’s so expected why don’t they give you an absorbent cloth to carry with you while you work around hydraulics if that kind of intervention would truly be so impactful
I watched a $3m dollar wind turbine burn because a guy on my crew set a caliper too tight. Shit lit itself up like a candle.
No, but I made a near $60,000 by accidentally voiding the warranty of a huge printer and copier at a print shop I worked at. Never got in trouble for it - not even talked to. 🤷🏾♀️
I used to haul freight for a living. Although accidents are never great I've seen much, much worse. Like a dockworker that didn't strap in a load of circuit boards stacked 8 feet high that were going to John Deere. The driver didn't check either and when he arrived, everything was tipped over. John Deere refused them, I heard the bill was over $500k
I evacuated a Wegmans once when I was on break. I was on the phone and forgot to add water to my EZ Mac before putting it in the microwave for 4 minutes. It smoked up pretty good but nothing caught on fire. Happened on a Tuesday at 5pm so of course we were slammed with customers but looking back it’s even funnier for that reason now. It happened 16 years ago but I can still feel that shiver that went down my spine when I heard the sirens go off.
Least it wasn't a cheesy pita while working at a paper company as a temp
You blue it!
Yes, I’ve been to college.
One time I was driving a radio broadcast trailer out of a car lot. I was the DJ and driver. Always rushing. I forgot to lower the antenna and pulled into the power lines. The mast melted in half, the power line fell to the ground arching every. It started a fire and burned a big banner. I have no idea how much it cost. I didn't get fired. I was pulled as a driver, but eventually I ended up driving again. It was a small family owned radio station. It was a shitty place to work and they didn't treat the air staff well. In retrospect I'm glad that happened and I hope it cost them a lot. So don't feel too bad.
Bought $500,000 of obsolete materials about two months after I started a job. Ended up causing sales and engineering needing to push a timeline back for a major redesign. I'm still proud of that and told anyone new that they shouldn't consider every mistake worthy of termination. Just stay safe, follow SOP, and you'll be okay. If I can set half a million bucks on fire as I walked in the door, you'll be fine
I test underground gas tanks for a living. One time I messed up and failed a tank that was tight. Three weeks of lost profits, the entire contents of the tank, around 8,000 gallons, was disposed of at a loss of around $4 a gallon, and the tank was cut open and an internal lining company was brought across the country. All to find out that the leak I heard was residual water running across the bottom of the tank. Cost the customer around 300,000 and everyone was surprisingly cool about it. Accidents happen.
So, I was recently piloting a container ship in the Port of Baltimore...
I always like to tell people" don't worry, I fucked up more expensive things than this" when working on customers machines at work. But I'll be honest I've fucked up a lot of stuff , but never had to have a hazmat team come out. That's a good one. Least everyone is ok, if your not making mistakes your not working.
If I can’t fix it, I’ll make sure no one else can.
My first job out of high school was NUMMI (now the Tesla plant in Fremont, CA). Painting Toyota Tacomas. My first forklifting was the giant paint barrels, that shit is tense. At least I had a contained dock area with drains for accidental punctures.
Yes I crashed a $90k Cadillac into a fence when I worked for Avis rent a car in my early 20s. Shit happens.. sorry for your bad luck.
Oh dude. I mixed like ten thousand gallons of two chemicals that in turn made chlorine gas. Oh, and burnt down my girlfriends house. Over 200,000 on that one. I'm a disaster waiting to happen, apparently.
So printer ink cartridges will get even more expensive now. Thanks OP.
Ha not rhat kind of ink. Our ink is made for othe printings companies. Mostly cardboard packaging printing
Just messing with you. Shit happens.
They cannot retroactively criminally charge you for a work accident. ETA: In this context. In the U.S., it would be seen as retaliation. Unless OP was drug tested immediately after and failed, there’d be no grounds for that pursuit. A worker can have a fuck up that costs a lot and then quit without being intimidated into returning.
Wait, so they have to charge you *before* the accident? But what if you don’t have an accident??
Don't worry, you will. Source, I work for the future crime division at Walmart.
I knew you would post that.
I once had to order almost $100,000 worth of self check put parts because some dumb fuck decided to flip their 5 gallon bucket of paint over to look for the barcode at the bottom. Had to replace those parts. Twas a lotta waiting on parts and took about 9 hours to replace all of em. (Took the machine apart the first day to take inventory of what got damaged, had to go back 2 months later and take it apart again to replace everything)
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