NationStates Jolt Archive

Biggest stuff-up you tried to hide from your boss

Everyone's done it.

You have approved something that has cost the company a mint to pay for but will never use.

Told someone at the pub confidential infromation about the big legal case you're working on.

Poured a concreate slab on the wrong block.

Come on tell us!

That there's an issue with an [effect] line which reads "Max Barry is the new Miss @@NAME@@"? I don't believe I ever told him about that. <_<

i break things a lot, one Saturday i broke like 16 things worth about £100 in total, then another time i broke this portable barcode scanner thing worth about £1000, fortunately my friend who was with me stuck up for me and didn't mention that i'd dropped it 4 times

Good work!

Personally I have cost my work about $6000 to reprint brochures due to a really simple typing error.

WOW! If I could turn back time, S##t think I just did!

i break things a lot, one Saturday i broke like 16 things worth about £100 in total, then another time i broke this portable barcode scanner thing worth about £1000, fortunately my friend who was with me stuck up for me and didn't mention that i'd dropped it 4 times

BUMP!!! but not too hard!

If you work in IT and make a f**k-up, you have to fix it.
If a worker using IT makes a f**k-up, you have to fix their error.

Can't win ...

My brother works in healthcare. You don't know what kind of safety breaches go on in 3M.

"Hey, aren't we meant to take two samples of this medicine to make sure it's safe?"
"TWO samples? To hell with that. Let's just put the same sample into the machine twice."

"This says the samples don't match. We'll have to start the tests again."
"But the write-up's in tomorrow! Just lie, and say they match."

When I was just the Supreme Ruler of the Universe, I had a whole lot of problems. Whenever something went wrong with the universe guess who was to blame? It was my fault a few times, however. Once I had the wrong planet destroyed - an inhabited and thriving one instead of an empty and desolate one that was a threat to the rest of the universe because it acted a good deal like a black hole. I of course had this planet blown up too, and I managed to convince him that the rogue planet had sucked up the nearby one. :D

What a great idea for a thread! Man, I've done so much shit over the years... I'm a completly lazy, unmotivated boob but I keep making $$$ for some reason. Here's one story...

About 7-8 years ago I worked as a computer repair technician. Now this was before the days when you needed an A+ certification to do this so I was pretty much hired off the street for pennies, but with no practical experience whatsoever. That company was a horrible place... I'd wake up in the morning and feel physical pain knowing that I had to go in there. I was also bloody awful at the job but a lot of it was due to the fact that their 'training' consisted of sending me to various customers by myself to fix problems, who paid $75-$110 dollars an hour for me to be there when, as often as not, I knew less than they did.

Anyway, this one time I got sent out to fix this huge-ass printer at a church. At that time I had never seen the inside of a printer in my life. I had no instructions of any kind... I just got handed a bag of parts, and was told to replace the equivalent parts and clean anything that looked dirty in there - no joke. So I went to this church and proceeded to completly disassemble this broken printer. Over time, though, my blood began to run cold as I realized that not only can I not figure out what was broken, but I'd forgotten how to put it back together again. I started to sweat and turn red... 2 hours went by.

After 2 hours the priest came in, and I had shit scattered all over the place. His printer looked like... have you guys heard of a game called Jenga? You basically set up a whole bunch of wooden blocks to construct a tower, and players take turns pulling blocks out out of this tower until the tower collapses. His printer looked a lot like the aftermath of a game of Jenga.

Anyway, the priest walked in and looked at me with skepticism. He was beginning to cotton on to the fact that I'm an imbecile. He said, 'You know, we've gotten that printer worked on a few times and I've never seen someone take the printer apart that much before'. I replied that this is because I'm doing a special maintenance procedure, recommended by HP, that is going to replace a lot of old parts. I also said that this is due to the fact that his printer is a certain age. He bought it and walked out. At this point I was thinking seriously about climbing out of the window, driving home, calling my job and quitting... even though I was on the 3rd floor at the time :(.

So 2 more hours go by. I finally got the printer back together, and it seemed to be working... this was completely by chance. I had half of my original bag of parts still in the bag, I had some other loose parts that I took out of the printer and replaced, and I had a couple of other parts that I took out of the printer and didn't replace... I have no idea what they did or where they came from. I stuffed all the parts in my pocket, puffed out my chest, walked into the priests office, and charged him $300 for my 4 hours of labor and probably about $100 more for the parts. He signed my sheet and I bailed out of there as fast as possible before the printer caught fire (actually it turned out that the printer worked for quite some time after that... I swear that printer was blessed by God).

Oh, and I took the parts out of my pocket and threw them out of the window while I was doing 70 on the I-95... nothing good could come from me keeping those parts on my person.

What's sad is that I've got 2 or 3 other stories from that job that are just as bad... some of them involving more than 1 technician. But about a month after the church thing, I quit. I was nearly broke and I had no other work lined up... but I just couldn't take it anymore. Best decision I ever made. ;)