I traveled to Brazil to do
volunteer work and met a beautiful girl. I spoke almost no Portuguese,
but we got by and I ended up staying at her house for a week while I had
a week in transit traveling between places. Her family was SO nice to
me. They made me dinner/lunch every day and I didn’t pay a cent.
It was the best week, until… The girl and I wanted to watch a movie,
but I was told that my feet were too dirty to lie on her bed (I was out
playing with her dog) and I had to wash them. I jumped over her to go to
the bathroom, but slipped on the way. I landed on her and badly
dislocated her knee. She was screaming in agony and was in a LOT of
pain. I ran for her mother and called her in broken Portuguese to come
help.
Her mother, father, two brothers and even the dog (who I had to hold
back) were in the room, and I had to explain to them in broken
Portuguese why their daughter/sister was crying in agony and how her
knee is dislocated. I was told that it was the worst pain she had ever
felt in her life.
Worst part about it? She was going on a fancy cruise in two weeks
time and had to spend the whole thing on crutches (IE no stilettos, no
dancing, nada).
For the curious… We are still together three years later and her
family (and of course my girlfriend) LOVE telling the story. When my
girlfriend was waiting for the doctor, my girlfriends mother said she
was more worried for me. She thought I was going to pass out because I
went so pale. I will take the embarrassment to my grave!
I used to work for a
veterinarian and one of our tasks was to euthanize sick animals-just
like any other vet’s office. The Veterinarian usually left this task up
to the other technicians and myself, until one day we put the wrong dog to sleep.
I still feel awful about it to this day. Both dogs were sick and both
were poodles, and I was instructed to “go get the sick poodle ready for
euthanasia…”
One of our technicians was having a bad day. A man
brought in his German Shepherd because he had just seen “Marley and Me”
and wanted to get the dog caught up on all of its shots. When the tech
brought the dog back, she slammed it on the countertop HARD. Like, hard
enough to where the other tech and the vet were like, “WTF?!” They
returned the dog to the owner after the blood draw and while waiting for
the heartworm test results, I hear the man SCREAMING for help. I walk
in and the dog is seizing on the ground, rolling in its vomit. We grab
the dog and try to save it…but it died. It had some kind of small bleed
or damage internally, and the tech DEFINITELY ruptured it. I don’t
really know the details because I was absolutely traumatized and didn’t
want to get involved. I was new and didn’t want to question
their…uh…practice. I almost quit that day. I couldn’t believe that tech
caused that dog’s death. And the owner had NO idea.
When I began my job working in a laser clinic, I hadn’t
had much experience working with these types of lasers. I was
technically still training but one of the other clinicians was running
behind time and asked me to treat this client for her. As I didn’t know
the machines too well (all tend to differ in strength, so treatment
parameters vary), the other clinician entered the parameters so I just
needed to point and shoot.
Well, this client was a stripper, who was having hair removal on her
Brazilian. We were chatting away, she was talking about her job and how
she only works three nights a week which provides her with more than
enough money for the week. So everything is going fine and she’s
writhing in pain (as people getting laser treatment do, it hurts like a
mo’), then afterwards she says it’s still feeling very hot and
uncomfortable, so I grab an ice pack for her. (A common rule is that
usually if you need to put a frozen ice pack on your va-juzh to make it
feel better then something’s wrong). I suspected that the parameters
were too high, so gave her all the post care advice and treatment for a
burn but she wasn’t too concerned and just shrugged it off. The next day
she returned with a crusty vagina and asked us to write a letter to her
employer explaining the situation and getting her off work for two
weeks (she was supposed to pay her employer each time she didn’t work a
set shift). Considering I crusted up her lady meats she was quite laid
back about the situation, although I suspect she may have had enough
funds to not care about working for the next two weeks anyway.
TL;DR: Burned a strippers lady meats, luckily she was cool about it.
Broke an expensive wine
glass while working behind a bar and pushed the stem through the palm of
my hand. Slipped while polishing it, didn’t do it on purpose.
Got fired a week later.
I ordered a new lens for our microscope. It cost about
10,000USD and that was a deal. The other places had this lens for about
5k more.
Boss was quite happy I managed to save so much money.
It came….it ended up not being a phase contrast lens so we couldn’t
view cells. MANY LOL were had. Especially when it was non-returnable.
I once dropped an unopened 4L glass container of
dichloromethane. It shattered and DCM went everywhere. The lab had to be
evacuated because of the fumes. When we came back it had basically
melted the entire lab floor. The floor stayed like that for about 6
months until it could be fixed and served as a constant reminder of my
clumsiness.
I have dozens of stories like this, including one where I flooded the lab in about 3″ of water. Science is fun.
I worked for a catering company when I was 16. While
working a pretty fancy wedding, I was tasked with pouring champagne at
the bride and groom’s table.
I had never even opened a champagne bottle, so I obviously hadn’t poured any either.
I managed to spill champagne all over the bride, immediately after blasting her in the face with the cork.
Back in the mid 2000s I was working at a small financial
firm. One day, I accidentally clicked the “sort by column” in an Excel
spreadsheet with every client’s (we probably had 500+ clients/accounts)
address and information. Well, unbeknownst to young little me (I was 18,
far younger than any other person in the office), that shuffled every
single address, so none matched up with with the clients’ names.
That weekend several pieces of mail were sent to each address, and
come Monday, well, shit… NONE of the mail was sent to the right address.
Clients were pissed. Co workers were pissed. Management was pissed.
Over all? The mistake cost about $15,000 dollars. No one ever found out
it was me, as I was young and not high up in the company and nearly
every single person had looked over that spreadsheet at one point in
time. Yeah, I felt awful about it. No, I never said anything. They spent
weeks trying to figure out what had happened, and honestly I didn’t
realise my mistake until after the whole mess transpired.
First time using the phones at work, I accidently hung up
on a girl who wanted to compliment how well the customer service was
when she shopped there. I felt horrible.
Mentioned to the pilot that his red light on the wing was
out, grounded the plane on thanksgiving night for 12+ hours. Worst part
was the pilot announced to the 150+ people on the plane that it was MY
FAULT that we weren’t able to leave.
I was 18 at the time, and scared shitless working the check in
counter for the next 12 hours with a mob of angry passengers. All they
were missing were pitchforks and torches… Thanksgiving 2007, best one
ever!
Fuck that pilot.
The drummer for Rise Against came in to the bank I worked
at to exchange a few grand worth of Canadian money back to USD as they
just finished playing out there on tour. I was star struck and nervous
as hell. Ended up not paying attention to my screen and gave him about
$300 too much. A couple months later we had to go into his account and
take the extra money back out. My service manager just thought it was
funny because she knew how nervous I got around him.
I am a chef one time a few years back this young kid on
the line left his knife in an awkward position and went for a smoke
break. My dumbass grabbed the knife from the blade end and nearly sliced
my fingers off. I started bleeding profusely all over the cutting board
and salad station.
A bus boy drove me to the nearest hospital where I had to take a drug test and receive 9 stitches.
The owners of the restaurant paid for everything and I got a month off of work paid.
It was probably one of the dumbest things I had ever done. I needed the break though.
I work in oilfield, and during my first week with my
current company (I’ve been here six years) I was trying to take apart a
piece of expensive oilwell technology in something called a “breakout”
machine with allows you to apply and release torque on rotary
connections in huge amounts (like, 50-60,000 ft lbs).
Anyhow, this piece of equipment, a “pressure mill” had come back from
a wellsite and I attempted to take it apart in this machine. Having
just been trained, and having no one around that day, and me being
rah-rah to try and impress with my initiative, I cranked up the torque
on the breakout machine and kept turning a connection on the equipment
that wasn’t meant to be turned.
When it was clear this thing wasn’t coming apart, I walked around to
the other side of the machine and looked at the piece… it had completely
blown out and distended, with mashed steel splayed out all over the
place. I couldn’t see this from my vantage point when operating the
machine.
I walked to the general manager’s office (not even my foreman was
there that day) explained it, and we went and looked at the damage. He
sighed, lit up a cigarette and said, “Well, that’s worth about $15,000.”
Shrugged and walked out.
The next day, my foreman was back to work and said, “Hey when I was
new I did the same thing! Only the equipment was in prototype phase and
worth $40,000.”
Then there was the other time me and another shop hand (allegedly)
assembled some equipment incorrectly and it fell apart down an oil well
our company was servicing… it ended up costing close to $750,000 in
remediation and rig costs.
But that was never proven. Ahem.
I was working as a co-op at a very large federal agency. I
don’t remember why, but I was trying to locate a particular computer on
the network in our local office. We had about 1100 employees. I double,
triple, quadruple checked the command I was going to do, even had the
help from other employees to verify it. The message was “Please call IT
and ask for Puck Happy”. I fired it off the message and went back to
work waiting for the call to come. This would bring a popup on the
screen and you had to click OK to make it go away, so whoever got the
message would not miss it.
Right away the phone in IT started ringing off the hook. Turns out, I
had screwed up an option in the command line, and it fired to every
computer in the domain (a domain is typically all the computers located
at a site or organization). This particular agency’s domain was split
into multi-tiers, primary tiers at the region level, and secondary tiers
at the individual site level. So at first I thought I had sent it to
every computer at our site (1100), in actuality, I sent it to every
computer in the entire region. All 20,000+ of them.
The calls rang for hours and days afterwards, people asking to speak
with a lowly no-name co-op student. I got into quite a bit of trouble
for that one.
Also, at the same place, I gave a friend of mine a paper cut on his eyeball.
I was doing some vacuum leak testing in a $40,000 acrylic
vacuum chamber that was filled with water dyed with methylene blue. We
were using a 45lb weight to hold the samples down, the weight slipped
off the sample and crashed into the bottom of the tank cracking the
bottom plate of the tank and spewing all of it’s 30 gallons of blue
water all over the freshly painted white floor in the lab.
In my defense, my boss instructed me to use the weight even though I
told him it wouldn’t work. He was understanding.. told me to spread the
water all over the floor to dye the whole thing, and slap some silicone
caulk onto the crack. I did both and continued to test once the caulk
had dried, believe it or not the caulk held. I convinced him to let me
buy a clamp to hold the samples down for the rest of the testing, haha.
TLDR: Dropped a weight cracking the bottom of a $40,000 vacuum chamber.
I was flirting with a coworker after we had closed. She
said something about not being afraid of anything, so, being the wise
ass that I am, I stretched a rubber band and pointed it at her face from
a foot away. I just stared at her. She smiled and said: “You don’t have
the balls.” So, naturally, I let go of the rubber band, but I tried to
do it in the way where it shoots backwards, just to faker her out. Well,
as you could guess with the context of this thread, it ended up going
the other direction, the in-her-face direction. Smacks her in the face
right under her eye. It welted up almost instantly and her eye get red
and teared up.
Instead of apologizing like every ounce of my body was screaming for me to do, I just said “I don’t have the what now?”
She just started laughing and then I explained I didn’t mean to hit
her, and we still went out on our date. Dated for several months after.
TL;DR: Had the balls.
I’m a robotic engineer. I was working a job at a sausage
packing factory. I set the payload parameters too low. To make a long
story short, everyone went home that day having been cockslapped by a
robot.
Edit: so payload determines the speed of the robot. It moves slower
when carrying heavier objects, to prevent damage to the joints. I set
the payloads too low, so the robot thought it was carrying something
lighter. It moved so fast it lost suction on the sausage in its vacuum
gripper, sending these fat honey garlic missiles across the room and
down the assembly line. That also happened to be where the entrance was.
I “broke” a million dollar machine. X-ray diffractometer
with a robot disc loading system. I was allowed to make my own discs but
I wasn’t supposed to touch the machine, even though I had ascertained
how it worked after months of being there. It’s an insurance thing. I
wasn’t officially trained, ergo no touchy.
So one day I really needed a sample processed ASAP. The machine was
free, no one was using it. I couldn’t find a SINGLE person out of the 6
or so folks who were allowed to touch it. So I thought, fuck it. I’ll
load the disc, do it in less than an hour and no one will be any the
wiser. So I make my disc and walk over to the machine. Press the button
to unlock the cabinet. BWWOOOOOOOOOOO SPUT SPUT SPUT
Silence. The lights all go out. Machine becomes totally unresponsive.
What happened next is one of my proudest moments of crisis management. I
calmly went over the bench, put on some gloves, cleaned away all my
disc prep, got a cloth, wiped down every part of the machine I had
touched, binned everything and walked away, locking the door behind me.
I go upstairs, sit in the lab and make a new batch of formula, even
though I don’t need one. The next day someone asks me if I used the
machine. I play dumb and say I was just about to find the person so they
could run a sample for me. She tells me not to bother because the
diffractometer is knackered. I say that’s a shame. By this point I’ve
spent ~30 hours with a pulse of 110 at least.
The next day they tell me that the maintenance staff forgot to fill
the cooling vats so the machine shut itself off in self defense.
Overwhelming relief floods my body.
Honestly, if I had actually broken it, I would have taken that secret to my grave.
tl;dr Thought I had broken the most expensive diffractometer on campus
I used to work on a nuclear missile carrying submarine.
During missile ops a missile was pulled up and out of a tube. Well we
have procedures for a reason. The procedure wasn’t followed exactly like
it was supposed to and the missile hit a ladder left in the tube. BIG
FUCKING DEAL. Like the President gets a phone call from someone within a
half hour big deal. My job is not involved with the missiles, but I was
there and holy tits I have never seen so many high ranking people so
pissed off/scared.
I was assisting with the offload of a C-141 engine off of
our C-5. It was during Desert Storm, December 21 1990. A USAF Reserve
crew was waiting for this engine – they’d been stranded for a week or
more and without this engine they wouldn’t make it home for Christmas.
Unfortunately due to some strange geometry with the connection of the
engine dolly to the tow vehicle, the tow bar bent in the engine cowling
during the offload. All procedures were followed, we did not get in any
official trouble but the engine was not repairable at that location.
They estimated $30,000 in damage to the engine.
I realized the full price of the damage later that night at the NCO
club. At a table near us we overheard some guys talk about that damn C-5
crew that broke their engine. A couple of them talked about missing
Christmas, their kids cried on the phone when they told them, etc. They
looked at us and could tell we were from a C-5. They asked if we knew
who it was (there were several C-5s in that night), and of course we
said we didn’t know anything about it. The look on their sad and angry
faces made me feel worse than anything up to that point.
I’ve been waiting for this thread. Little background
first. I work for an airport company that does mostly private aircraft.
We are 24/7 365. It is a franchise system and we are headquarters. I
work in IT 4+ years now as desktop support. When this happened I was
still very new ~6 months. I was cleaning up one night and I couldn’t a
place to plug in my vacuum. So I thought well there is a plug on the
server rack. Big mistake. About 30 seconds later, it zapped all the
power out of the battery back up and took down ALL the servers. I had
brought down my company with nothing but a vacuum. I panicked, I ended
up hooking them (about half the servers) to a generator and gave up. I
got super bitched out the next day. I asked why he didn’t fire me, he
said “I would have to worry that the next dipshit I hire will do it” My
nickname to this day is Hoover.
I was working from home on a client’s website on a
Saturday. Our agency had a terrible habit of working on live sites,
which I hated, but I didn’t have any say in how we had thing set up.
Can you tell where this is going?
So I needed to drop a database table and replace it with another one.
Like a smart developer, I backed up the table before dropping it. Like a
stupid developer, I accidentally dropped the entire database instead of
just the one table.
Oops.
“No problem,” I thought, “I’ll just recover from the backup on the
server… Which I can only access from the network at the office.”
I immediately called my project manager and simply said, “I just
fucked up big time and need you to let me into the office.” She didn’t
even ask any questions, she just said, “I’ll leave right now.”
It only took me about an hour and a half from the time I dropped the
database to recover the site, and thankfully the client hadn’t even
noticed for the first 45 minutes.
Like a fucking adult, I immediately claimed responsibility, explained
what happened and why, and apologized profusely to everyone (client,
bosses, PM). Thankfully everyone was cool about it and the client didn’t
lose too much data.
Perhaps amazingly, this incident didn’t change anyone’s minds about
working on live sites. I worked there for nearly another year before I
quit.
I was in charge of selling a very expensive piece of equipment on eBay for our company and forgot to set a reserve price.
I’m sure the gentlemen was ecstatic to win this particular auction for $9.95
I didn’t do it but I witnessed it, in college I worked at
the airport as a cargo agent. Unloading planes putting things into
storage and what not. One of the things we handled was the Alaskan
Flights, what comes in on the Alaskan Flights? Fish and Crabs…this was
about the time Deadliest catch was coming on the air. I thought it was
cool, hey here is this crab that people are risking their lives for.
So, the Crab comes in one day and I go to take it off the truck to
put it on a pallet to put it into the fridge in the warehouse. Me being
the careful sort goes to take a hand-truck to carefully put in the walk
in. As I’m doing this my co-worker goes….I got this and goes to
get the forklift. So, I watch him, I watch him take the forklift, I
watch him take the forks and miss the pallet, into the first row of
boxes and then lifts the forklift up. Next thing you know there’s crab
legs all over the warehouse floor. People were risking their lives to
find this crab, braving the hard weather and this idiot with a forklift
ruins most the shipment.
I’m not sure but I think the price of crab legs went up 20 dollars on the East coast after this.
I worked for my father repairing jewelry and the very
first piece I worked on was a small, 18K gold cross. The customer told
me that the cross was given to her by her mother, who had passed away,
and was very special to her.
I put the cross on my charcoal block, heated it up with the torch and BAM, it melted half away just like that!
I was too scared to tell her so I found one just like it and gave
that to her instead. I feel bad to this day, thirty five years later.
I was running audio for an NFL press conference. I forgot
to turn my cell phone off in my back pocket. My mom called me, but I
didn’t realize it was ringing because I was wearing headphones
monitoring the coach’s audio. I hear him say, “Seriously? Does this kid
even realize it’s going off? Someone needs to fire this guy.” I then
notice it, my face turns red, I stop it from ringing, and the press
conference continues. 30 seconds later, the notification ring goes off
from my mom’s voicemail. The coach gets pissed and abruptly ends the
press conference early by walking off stage. I wanted to die. The media
was not happy.
That same month, I left a $20,000 camera on a tripod in the studio
over night. I came in to work the next morning, it was toppled over,
lens busted.
I was an intern, so all was forgiven.
I work at concessions for our parks (pool, baseball
games, etc,) and we have spray bottles for pretzels for when we want to
put salt on them and one time one of the girls working there grabbed the
bottle of 409 that we use to clean and sprayed the pretzel with it. She
still used it to get salt on it and gave it to the customer. I’m never
ordering from the concessions ever again.
