Facepalm moments at work

Makhaira

Makhaira

Makhaira

Soldato
Joined
23 Nov 2007
Posts
4,969
Location
Lancashire, UK
Well I'm going to go on the GD tradition that if I share my idiot moment, hopefully others will share theirs and entertainment will be had as things no doubt get ever more outlandish...

I was sat in a fairly senior meeting today, and got asked a question that really needed to be answered by one of the engineering specialists. I looked up, couldn't see them, so tried to field the answer as best I could.

Got halfway through, glanced back around the room for eye contact, and there he was, sat straight across from me where he had been the whole time, looking slightly amused and bemused as to why I'd just tried fielding the question since "there weren't any engineering specialists present". Other equally bemused people staring at me wondering why I was trying to answer the question.

Selective blindness :(. Massive facepalm.

No doubt there have been worse, speak up GD!
 
Asking the person next to me "what are these other figures next to the prices, those ones there in brackets?" and before they could answer me blurting out "oh, ****. Silly me, they're the ones with VAT added on".
 
Hmmm, only one that springs to mind is rather juvenile. Was standing at the till checking somebody out and had a really massive fart I just couldn't hold in. I tried to clench my butt-cheeks as tight as I could to stop it, but that just turned it into the longest, loudest "squeaker" you've ever heard :( I tried to pretend it was something (god knows what...) on the ground behind the counter that had made the noise and even kicked at this imaginary something with a confused look on my face to really sell the bluff. The customer was either deaf or very polite because they didn't say anything and left as if nothing had happened.
 
Does getting someone to bring me a jug full of steam count? Because they were stood for a good 5 minutes at the coffee machine trying to fill a jug with steam before someone asked what they were doing :D
 
Best facepalm moment was after I handed over admin rights to one of my new guys. Ran through some basic house keeping he had to do, then proceeded to watch him execute the following command DELETE FROM manufacturers_standard

The poor geeser was in panic mode while I was quietly on the floor in hysterics. I gave him another 5 mins while he was desperately trying to find where the table data had gone. He turns a round and said .......... eeeerrrrrr I think the database has crashed. I say not possible as there is no data left for it to crash you just deleted eery single table entry for the manufacturers.

Lucky for him I am no fool and this was only in the dev environment which I had just cloned from production.

I then taught him the 1st Rule of SQL

Don't use DELETE FROM some_table without and accompanying WHERE unless your intention is thermonuclear table detontation.

I then gave him 5 minutes to vacate his bowels properly and remove the log he laid in his boxers !!!
 
lawz said:
Does getting someone to bring me a jug full of steam count? Because they were stood for a good 5 minutes at the coffee machine trying to fill a jug with steam before someone asked what they were doing :D
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Haha, I feel better already :P.

Similar sentiment to sending someone to get a tin of elbow grease :p.
 
This is beyond facepalm, but a few of us at work have bottles of (very) hot sauce, to add into soups and so on at lunch.

Well, cue one morning when I was reaching for my bottle. Supervisor calls me away for a sec out of the office, and I came back, and proceeded to shake the bottle.

Well, shake it until I realised that it was all over the office, my shirt, my hair and my face. :( I had taken the top off before getting called away, and forgotten when I had come back to the desk.

Expletives were said when I saw the state of my desk, expletives were said when I realised I had ruined one of my best shirts, expletives were said when I realised it was in my hair, but none of that was anywhere near the torrent of bad words coming out of my mouth when i tried to wash the hot sauce off.

Cue me stood in the corner of the little cubby kitchen for 50 mins with a bright red, very painful face, eyes stinging to **** and clamped shut. Was awful, I could barely breathe.

Never again I said. Never again will I touch hot sauce. Well, until a couple of days later, when I was happily adding it to soup once more.

As for the office, it all cleaned up nicely, and Vanish did the trick with my shirt. My reputation however, will now proceed me :( Looking back, it was pretty funny, but the pain was awful.
 
NeoReloaded said:
Got a labourer with the "long wait" last year, sent him down to the van for it! He was 39... LOL!
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We got this guy at my old job a few times with these.

Emptying the ice from the ice machine. ("IT KEEPS COMING!!??")
Emptying the hot water from the coffee machine. ("IT KEEPS COMING!!??")

He wasn't the brightest spark ;)
 
I'm a visual thinker/learner - so when I explain concepts, I draw little boxes/circles and join them with lines and arrows.

Without planning on it, one day after explaining a series of concepts, stepping back from the drawing board, it looked like I drew a big cocknballs :p
 
OH, yea and this one time, I had a fiddle with the Google adwords program we had.
Ended up by accident with similar math skills as above ^^ , blowing the entire budget in a month, which meant that the company (small as it was) couldnt afford the christmas party that year.
 
Talking at coffee time to two other lads, one who was rather metro, the other who was Indian. The subject came up around sunbeds and for whatever reason I turned to the Indian lad and asked did he ever use them. Felt like a right tool.
 
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