Mistakes at work?

Many moons ago, was clearing up an overloaded SAN and me and the boss found a Oracle database file named "DELETEME" that wasn't with all the other db files.. so we did.

Turns out that was a bad idea, cue frantic midnight calls to expensive oncall Oracle consultants who worked all weekend to get it back up before the early shift on Monday and the paper was due out. :eek:
 
One week into a new job, instead of emailing one of the girls at work that I had asked out on a date, I accidentally emailed my new manager calling her sexy and saying how fit she looked today.

Funny now years later, but wasn't funny for me a the time. Think she thought I was after a promotion!
 
Whilst working on a faulty core router I needed to power it off on the main breaker. I did this and turns out the breaker labels were wrong and it took down the backup router. This resulted in London (and most of mainland EU as they came via London) isolated from the US
for one of the biggest IP carriers. Turned router back on but it took several hours for things to get back to normal!!
The electrical contractor took the blame for that, apparently credits paid out to customers run into 6 figures!
 
I was one of two people working long shifts trying to get new models out to a desk of traders. We worked tireless hours to test and retest every scenario we could think of, we rolled it out to traders and their market opened at noon.
5 minutes after noon I get a phonecall from the head of desk that's using our new models for the first time saying, in slightly more colourful language, "You just lost us $1 million - Thanks" :eek::eek::eek: and hung up. I didn't even get a chance to say a single word- I just looked at my colleague in shock still holding the phone.

Many frantic phonecalls later (I've never sweated so much at work) we were told that, as planned, the desk we trailed it on allows trades to be reversed in some conditions. Thankfully the trades were SO bad they met these conditions and were all reversed. We laugh about it now but I was not pretty at the time.

Turned out a third-party system had a bug which supplied a 0 as an input to the models when the value was actually empty.
 
I make mistakes at work, it's only human nature, although I have to be mindfull in my line of work if it's a serious one theres the potential I could kill someone so I always have to be 110% certain what i'm doing is correct, if in doubt I ask for help, simple as :)
 
Nash said:
What does that mean in this context?
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I'm not sure how HRG works but every Trust as a Clinical Coding section.
Lets take a simple journey -
1) Taken to hospital by ambulance could have a code of ZY52 which equals £570
2) Crash Team could have a code of MN23 which could cost £150 per minute
3) Heart surgery could have a code of TT56 which costs £4500
4) Aftercare could have a cost of £500 per day
and so on.

These codes are then sent to a Government body so that we get funded correctly.
HRG with Doctors must work in a similar way so whatever they are treating will have a code for it.
I could be totally wrong.
 
I advised someone to do a hard reset on an XDA once without asking if she had any important files on it. Turned out that the person had some very important pictures and had to drive 100 miles each way to the store to take them again LOL.
 
If I make mistakes, people die. True story. I loaded trigger solution into the analyser instead of wash buffer in my first few months, scrubbed the immunoassay unit so all B12/folates and troponins came back as zero. Nobody noticed for about 6 hours, by that time a 90 year old man was sent home because the lab results said he hadn't had a massive heart attack. Whoops.

He was called back in time though, so even though he's probably dead by now, it wasn't my fault.
 
At my previous company, although this wasn't the reason it's my previous company I hasten to add! I accidentally deleted an entire project the day it was due to be completed. Unfortunately I'd very stupidly not committed it to SVN.

I then compounded the mistake by covering up for 2 weeks trying to redo it franticly saying "sorry it's been delayed, issues in debugging!"

After 2 weeks I had to admit my mistake, I wasn't in trouble for the accident, I was in hella trouble for trying to cover it up!

Now I just tell people as soon as anything goes wrong on a project, even if it's my fault it's gone wrong. My current job is a SharePoint / Project Server consultant on Windows instead of a Ruby on Rails, Python and PHP in-house Dev on Unix, so disclosure is even more important so that it can be replanned with the client etc!
 
Not as big as some of you, but I did leave an advertising campaign running on linkedin without remembering it and it ran up about £3k before I noticed.

If anyone asks it was a sensible advertising move, but I know it was a complete waste of our company's money.
 
While I've made plenty of mistakes that involve big numbers (I forgot to post a £750k provision during the year end) I've never not been able to rectify one of them. Like someone else said; always own up, but think of a way to fix it first.

happy_2008 said:
£46,000 is a lot to lose for someones mistakes, im surpised they didnt get the sack for it.
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I work on a factory site and someone in production binned a batch of product worth in excess of £1m by opening the wrong valve & blowing out an asceptic filter. They kept their job!
 
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