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Borrowed a works van to move the contents of the garage ahead of our house move next week. All went fine until I dropped it back at the depot. I thought I would park it up rather than thoughtlessly dump it in front of the office.
Crunch. 😳
Sizeable dent on the van and a cracked bumper on another, both 64 plate VW's. Help me feel a little better by sharing your brick in the pit of the stomach moments.
Had a hire car in France. Somehow didn't notice the high kerb at a petrol station and dented the cill under the doors for about 2 ft as I turned across it. Ouch. £500.
Working on a unix system down Swindon (I was at home in Manchester), I'd be chosen as the administrator to do this work because of my seniority and it was a single server providing a critical service for a very large and well known oil company.
I completed the configuration work and had to reboot the server to fix the changes, we agreed a 5 minute outage with the oil bods, they put a holding page up to avoid losing any payments, I issue the reboot command, shutdown -h now. Bang. Should of typed -r. Now the server is shutdown and isn't coming back up. Massive sinking feeling. I phone the data centre guys and talk them through the manual restart procedure but they refuse to do it.....
Cue a 170 mile drive to press a button with very regular contact calls from an increasingly irate customer who keeps shouting how much money they've lost at me.
Installing fire detecting equipment in a test cell jointly run by the MoD, Rolls Royce and Westinghouse. Attaching it to an RSJ roof support. Using a mag base drill with 10mm drill bit. All going well until 'pop'. I have a look behind and have gone through a nitrogen charged 100 core data cable at £60,000 each. Only 6 existed in the world and they were all in this building. Collecting data from an RB 211 attached to a marine gearbox.
[i]Collecting data from an RB 211[/i]
*nods sagely and winces on your behalf whilst secretly having no clue what this means*
Miscalculating the annual offtake volume for a key ingredient. It was a convoluted contract in which forecasts are issued several months in advance, with those numbers becoming binding +/- a certain fluff factor the closer they get to fruition, until finally they are binding orders.
Our annual offtake was floating in at close to the 1000 tonne level that would enable us to get a price rebate on our total volume. So i was instructed to increase orders to pass that threshold. Only - I'd fluffed the previous forecast to the extent that increasing the month offtake by the maximum % allowed didn't quite get us over the line. i begged my counterpart at the supplier, but they weren't having it, so I had to fess up to my boss. Who after a short period of expletive laden ranting was very good about it.
We bought 996 tonnes that year, and because we missed the rebate level, we paid precisely €0.1/kg more for every single one of those kg than we needed to.
Yep, that is just short of €100,000
[company t/o was about $8.3 Billion, so they could just about afford it]
Ran into a concrete bollard in my estate. I must have driven round it 500 times but that morning as I turned the corner my front end cleared it but the back end hit it just at the rear passenger door.
£500 body shop bill
Worst thing was the wife had previously warned me on a couple of occasions that I was quite close to it. "Don't be silly Dear!, I'm nowhere near it"
A smudge of red paint was there to remind be of my abject stupidity for about a year before the bollards were repainted.
I once drove a forklift into a brick wall that my boss has spent all day building. WHOOPS!
Once hired a high-roof van for a house move. After I got used to it I forgot it was a van as it felt like driving my usual car... until I tried to enter a multi-story car park. Crunch!
Luckily, when I took it back they didn't check the roof 😀
On picking up a 4x4 from Christchurch airport in New Zealand, I went full on Fast Show and shouted LETS OFF ROAD!!! and charged off down the first dirt track I saw. The ford didn't look that deep. But it was just deep enough to conceal a gert big **** off rock which I slammed the front of it straight into!! 😳
Luckily I'd taken out the additional insurance, and there didn't seem to be any clause in it about being a complete and utter nobhead 😀
Sorry, I thought there would be enough nerds on here that further description would have been deemed patronising.
RB 211 is the Rolls Royce engine that 747 jumbo jets use. Someone thought it would be an idea to bolt one to a gearbox with a propeller and use in US minesweeper boats. We had over a 1 million lines of instrumentation coming off the engine. Fortunately there were enough intact cores left in the cable to do the job.
As a very new developper, I accidentally deleted a whole table from our ERP system db.
Luckily it was on the DEV system and I was able to take a copy of the live one and write a programme to write the data back into the table that I had to recreate. No one ever realised except a couple of people did notice that the table in the DEV system seemed to have more up to date records than it should have, somehow 😳
Oh, another good one. I noticed that the time on our main ERP was wrong - it was about five mins fast. I still had access to the server at that point so quickly went and corrected the time. Two minutes later the calls started to come in as update errors started and then the server crashed. Turns out it didn't like going back in time and writing records that were earlier than other records already existing...
shutdown -h now. Bang. Should of typed -r. Now the server is shutdown and isn't coming back up
Thank god for IPMI
Burnt my department down. Miraculously kept my job.
Sent an email to a work colleague slagging off my boss. A millisecond after pressing the send button I realised I'd addressed it to the wrong person. Guess who?
I think you need to expand on that convert
Finger went through the paper.....
It's only metal and plastic
No one was hurt
But it will cost .... think of it as idiot tax 😀
I did something along the lines of this:
sed -i "s/something/something_else/g" *
Accidentally in a directory I really shouldn't have containing many binaries that people used frequently.
The git log now says something like "Reverted due to andy sed mangling willy nilly" to my eternal shame.
Driving the works van packed with a collection of ladders on, down a hill (see where this is going?) approaching a T-junction with a car already waiting to turn onto the main A road.
Colleague had failed to secure one of the ladders. At all.
Ladder cleared the bonnet completely and proceeded at some pace directly under the car in front and into the main road.
The 'oh * * * * someone's going to die" feeling was pretty sickening, but by some miracle, folk managed to stop.
The shame when retrieving was nearly just as bad.
On a particularly boring night shift one we ended up playing indoor cricket. A magnificent hok shot looped over and landed squarely on the emergency shutdown button for the mainframe...
Reversing out of a 'car park'* having bought tree before christmas..... bang - lune reversed into the side of me.
Not my fault but not fun either.
Hang on! There was 2 bikes on that rack when we set off! Where's yours gone? 😳
Built a new checkout for a company then uploaded it and went home only to come in the next day to realise I'd left it in debug mode all night and no one could access it. 20k or so of orders down the drain. That would have got me into more trouble if my boss hadn't done the same thing a couple of years before.
taking out a frozen (apparently) fish in the freezer, uses a knife instead of a spoon to scrape it out ...hit that tube thingy that has gas thingy.. freezer died 🙁
We had a hired a big Ford SUV in Canada for 4 weeks.
A few hours before handing it in at the airport ,we thought we would do some last minute shopping in town.
Parked up on a baking hot day in a dusty car park.
On return I thought it would be a good idea to clean the screen. 🙄
As soon as the spray hit it there was a massive cracking noise 😯 .
There goes $300 (I think a new screen was $1500) of your card sir 😥
[i]It was probably a stone chip ,just in the right place to split the screen.[/i]
When I was a youngster, not long been in HM Forces, our unit replaced a load of old lightweight landrovers with spanky new 110&90's, one of which was a V8.
First drive out and I managed to roll it 😳
bearnecessities - I was walking across a cross roads on crutches after breaking my hip when a Land Rover stopped suddenly at the road opposite having misjudged some traffic with priority coming from his left.
He had a 2x4 sheet of 15mm mdf on the roof rack unsecured - it shot straight across 2 lanes of road and went past me at waist height and only about 3ft in front of where I was walking.
I was so shocked I didn't even swear at him as he changed his mind and shot off in the opposite direction.
The thought of what it would have done to my recently pinned broken hip if it had hit me still makes me come out in a cold sweat.
wolfenstein - a guy I used to work with has recurring bouts of chronic pneumonia linked to a similar thing which he managed to do with an iceaxe - count yourself lucky!
A sickening feeling that lasted a bit longer, a 15 mile drive to be exact.
Email exchanges with someone at work, a bit fruity-like.
Somehow I clicked print.
When the icon popped up in the tray, it was printing out at my home office.
I was not at my home office.
EDIT: wwaswas, that doesn't bare thinking about. 😳 That said, MDF or triple stage ladders?!
Preparing a brand new, fresh out of the packet, 19 ft Maxum 350 ci V8 powered speed boat.
Final sea trial prior to customer collecting the next day and I drag the prop through a load of submerged concrete.
Prop totalled (very specific) and the bottom of the leg badly damaged.
Arse.
"Good judgement comes from experience, which comes from bad judgement."
Jason Statham.
Though not normally known for his insight and wisdom this did strike a chord with me.
Parked outside the bank in Antibes on holiday
Ran to cash machine, back to car
Gap in traffic, went for it, so did a bright pink van
Looked horrendous at first, bumper goosed, pink paint and scratches everywhere
Friendly hells angel type fettling his Harley up the street from where we were staying, I managed in broken french to ask him about polish
He walked towards me brandishing a crow bar 😯 then used it to pop the bumper back out and polished all the pink paint off. Bought him a couple of packs of Marlboros
It still cost me £400 for a couple of paint chips on the plastic bumper that were about 1cm square
Taking a box of change to the bank. All bagged up and been collecting for a few years so totalled £170. Pull out of the drive onto the road and accelerate.
Yep, left the money on the roof of the car. The sound as it slid off on the road and exploded on impact was most upsetting. Was collecting it for a while and only lost a few quid, phew!
I issue the reboot command, shutdown -h now. Bang. Should of typed -r.
I've done that to shutdown my laptop, only in a remote shell on a China Mobile server rather than a local window. Luckily I was in China at the time, but still had to drive to a random tower block at 3am, get my interpreter to blag her way in, find the server and restart it....
Part of my job is to every month upload the Direct Debit amounts to be taken from customers accounts. Guess what I forgot to do once?
Cue £40k shortfall in company finances that month..... 😳
Just as well Im normally good at my job, otherwise I could have been gone!
Was the grandparent taxi at sister in laws wedding. Using wife's car. She told me not to use the 'boot unlock' button on the key fob as I could 'easily lock the car keys in', because it auto locks after a few seconds.
Just before leaving for the reception / photos I go to put camera and jackets in boot and get phone call from work. Finish call and come to horrible realisation I've just done exactly what my wife said I shouldn't.
Had to run around to find an alternative lift for the grandparents, called the AA and waited 4 hours for them to break in (luckily they could) and missed all of the family wedding photos. Wife not best pleased.
Work related one - was asked to transfer a number of staff in HR system, moved them to a new cost centre, but didn't known their roles didn't exist against that cost centre. Stupid system allowed me to do this without warning. First I knew was a phone call from HR telling me none of my staff were on this months payroll. Luckily paid them all by emergency BACs and sorted for the following month. For a short period I thought I was going to have to explain why people weren't going to get paid that month....
Oh God, so many...
I had to sub a report from a freelance at a Crown Court to go into a news bulletin. It ran to 3 pages of dense print and I had about 10 minutes. Somehow an important piece of information got distorted in the process.
Next morning I was up before the judge with my employers' lawyers explaining what had gone wrong. Luckily he believed it was a genuine mistake and none of the jury had head the report anyway...
I reversed a JCB off a 30 foot drop and landed on a railway line. Pat my shants.
Right.... where shall we start
Reversed into wife's car on the drive and stoved the side in. (she was sat next to me at the time 😳 )
Locked keys in boot of car (a soft top so no way in without the keys) whilst on holiday in France - The French garage guys had to dismantle the whole of the back of the car to get in. Still, I know the French for the keys are in the boot now.
Ran over own foot with a petrol hover mower - that one stung a bit
Drilled through alarm cable, whilst fixing up a wine rack - sorry neighbours
For someone who prides himself on 'attention to detail' there seem to have been rather a lot of er incidents.
In a queue to use the local amenity recycling site new transit van one car in front of me, he drove straight into the scalping bar above entrance, smashed in top of van, then promptly reversed into car behind and luckily in front of me. New van he just bought as well.
Working in a buisness cnetre, opened lift door and pushed trolley in, no lift there, trolley fell onto roof of lift, just jumped down onto roof retrieved trolley and shut door,and put sign on door lift broke.
Was the grandparent taxi at sister in laws wedding. Using wife's car. She told me not to use the 'boot unlock' button on the key fob as I could 'easily lock the car keys in', because it auto locks after a few seconds.Just before leaving for the reception / photos I go to put camera and jackets in boot and get phone call from work. Finish call and come to horrible realisation I've just done exactly what my wife said I shouldn't.
Did similar once; I was using my dad's Volvo 244 at the time, and it was very easy to just click the lock button on the inside of the door and shut it, on this occasion I decided to swap jackets as it was a cold day and chucked my light jacket into the car, clicked the lock button and shut the door, simultaneously realising the car keys were in the pocket.
Trouble was I was on a byway near Uffington White Horse, with my G/F.
Tried all sorts of things to get back in, even breaking off a piece of fence wire to try to hook the lock through the door edge.
Eventually someone turned up with a new-fangled carphone, so I called my G/F's dad, near Malmesbury, and asked him to drive to my house, get the spare key, and drive up to Uffington.
He had a slight accident in his Saab on the way as well. 😳
Visiting a care home, little old granny walks out slowly gets into car and reverses back straight over the ramp of an ambulance picking up her husband, and destroyed it, she missed the ambulance, flashing lights and hi viz reflective tapes.
16 years ago I took a group of 6 students away for a weekend event in the College minibus As the only member of staff ended up driving back in pouring rain for four hours after a full on couple of days. Got back in the dark with the windows fully steamed up, reversed the bus into it's usual parking slot-bang! Someone had put a skip there. Doh.
What made it worse is that I had spent the weekend using the students to back up use of mirrors when reversing by looking out of the back window, but forgot at the last moment on the last occasion.
And before you ask, no I didn't see a very large yellow steel object when I drove into the carpark before reversing.
And yes, I got a lot of stick from students and staff for months about this.
Was on a pilgrimage to Lourdes when i was 18. Job entailed pushing the wounded holy to various places to have the Lord/Mary make them better.
One day my usual guy took a fit during mass and was taken to the hospital (i was outside playing football at the time so didn't know). At collection time i was given a very frail looking old in a wheelchair instead and had to push her down the long cobblestone road back to her hotel. It was bumpy and she kept slipping down the seat so i had to stop and, carefully placing my hands under her armpits, eased her back to a seated position. It felt as if i was hurting her by lifting her in this way so after a few goes i decided the next time it happened i'd to try to fix her from the front. I put my hands on her thighs and gently pushed her back up. She let out an almighty yelp so i stopped. I though i'd done some damage and i think the look on my face told a similar story. She just said 'it's alright son' and pulled back the blanket that was on her lap to reveal..not legs, but a big colostomy bag, the contents of which i'd squirted all over her.
^ Winner!
I think you need to expand on that convert
School workshop - I setup a CNC router doing a 3D job in plywood. Once I'd set it off (about 9pm) I was stupid busy and left the machine unattended in an otherwise deserted building and went off to another part of the site to do some other work. An hour later a very frazzled facilities lad finds me and tells me my department is on fire. Plywood is very abrasive and I had been a bit ambitious with the feed speed - tool had blunted, plywood got hot, embers into the extraction system, lots of fire. I arrived back at the building just as 8 fire engines, an incident control vehicle,one of those mega ladder vehicles and 50+ firefighters rocked up. The next 6 hours were some of the worst of my career!
Typing that I'm even less sure how I kept my job!
Hired a truck to move house. It was virtually identical to my dad's which I had driven hundreds of times. I set the mirrors, got in and reversed it straight back into a brand new car. Crushed both doors, shattered windows, caved in the door pillar - thing was a right off. I still remember that sinking feeling.
Driving back from undergrad mapping trip in South of France, decided to go via the Vercors. However, car had a hissy fit and blows up gearbox. Get towed to local garage in Grenoble where it is apparent it cannot be fixed in France (being a Datsun and having never been imported to France). So arrange to be collected and taken home by AA 5 star in 2 days time. Meanwhile wife of garage owner books us into a friends hotel 3 miles away and drives us there for the night. Go to check the insurance documents and realise that I had left the folder with all my documents, including my passport, on the roof of her car as we had got into it at the garage.
Cue a sleepless night and a long walk back in the morning only to find that someone had found it on the road and had handed it in to the garage office.
Phew
I spread a pre production test VX220 Turbo over about 150m of the A325 a few years ago.
That didn't go down well at work. At all.
many years ago i was on holiday with my wife in Dunoon, tried parking the car on the quayside and whilst reversing didnt take care to see where the edge was, reversed straight off so the car was seesawing, wife went to get out and screamed at her to stay put, luckily the tide was out and lots of passers by ran down to push the car up.
Hired a motorhome in italy.
Scraped it down the side of a lorry within an hour of picking it up.
€1500 deposit.
Ouch.
Used to be an air defence engineer in RAF.
Was servicing a surface to air missile system in a hangar.
Ended up putting the generator unit outside the hangar doors, whilst working on the main launcher unit inside the hangar and feeding the cable between the two through a gap in the closed hangar doors.
A few hours went by and I needed to open the hangar doors in a hurry, but forgot about the generator outside and cable through the doors.
Hangar doors weigh quite a bit and a generator on the end of a cable wasn't going to stop them trying to open
.....the resulting mess was rather embarrassing and expensive
Quoted a very big and important customer for £100k worth of kit for a big contract they had, which they subsequently ordered.
My buy price from the manufacturer for all that kit, it later transpired, was £125k.
Last year during a visit to my parents we all went out for a trip. I was driving my parents car with some of my kids and their cousins and my parents were driving a hire car (cheaper that way on the insurance). We arrived back at my folk's house and they have a drive running up the side of the house. I parked the car and everyone got out and I locked it and went to open the back door when one of the kids suddenly shouted 'Look! The car!' I turned round to see the car slowly rolling down the drive towards the road. At this moment my parents were arriving to see their car hurtling backwards onto the street with their son desperately hanging off the front bumper and hitting the wall of the neighbour who lives opposite's wall. Still can't fathom how I forgot to apply the handbrake. 😳
I may or may not have had a hand in the overheating of an engine, to destruction. To date the repairs (which are still ongoing) have cost the company I work for upwards of half a million quid. The thinking is another £8-900k will have us back in the position we were in prior to the "incident".
*rolls over*
*cuddles girl*
"There there, Sarah, it's OK"
(It wasn't Sarah I was cuddling)
A work mate borrowed an extremely expensive mountain bike years ago (early 90s?) from his rich friend and offered me a spin on it. As the resident bike "expert", I declared that the brake cables needed adjusting. How strange, I thought, that the adjuster needed a spanner rather than the knurled ones I was used to. But the cables were very well oiled.... Sinking feeling as a puddle of hydraulic fluid appeared on the floor. Had to go back to the shop for a bleed, who had no clue what to do with it either.
A few years ago I got the job of ply lining a new company van. I'd just finished and went to shut the rear door when something pricked my finger. I looked to see what it was, it was the end of a screw sticking out through the door. I think there was four on each door. One day old and in the body shop it went.
Just saw this one:
A spelling mistake by Companies House has forced a family engineering business under. Taylor & Sons Ltd was a successful engineering firm in Cardiff, with 250 employees, when an administrative blunder by Companies House destroyed the business overnight.The Metro reported that the problem arose when an administrative assistant was updating the details of a similar-sounding company that had been wound up. The real liquidated company was Taylor and Son Ltd in Manchester. The administrator confused the two firms, and mistakenly indicated that the Cardiff firm was in liquidation.
They corrected the mistake three days later, but by then the damage was already done. The details had been passed onto credit reference agencies, so their suppliers all believed that the company was going down the tubes.
The High Court ruled that the failure of the business was due to the mistake by Companies House, and they have been ordered to pay £8.8 million in damages.
Some Government employee mistypes a company name and it ends up with an £8.8 million bill. Glad i don't have to carry that cost!
Oh, hang on....... 👿
The 3 worst for me during a big MTB off.
The quiet before the impact.
The sense of impending doom before the pain starts.
Not wanting to open eyes to see what not pointing the right way.
Off the bike the worst is when my Daughter either hurts herself or is scared - her face screws up and at first the scream/cry is so high pitched it's not audible - then is sort of drops in tone until it's deafening - honestly I'd ride through a plate glass window naked before I saw her bop her head on her cot - it kills me a bit inside.
As part of my degree I did a year’s placement at a very large chemical works.
One of my tasks was to oversee some contractors who were installing handrails in a tank farm. One freezing February night they left site without installing a section of rail on a walkway. They should have done it and I and another guy, as the signatories on the work permit, shouldn’t have let them leave it unfinished.
That evening a tanker came up the river to unload ethanol. One of the jetty crew had slipped earlier in the day on ice and broken his hip, so they were already in a “funny mood”. They came to my tank farm to open the valve for the unload and noticed that the handrail was missing. So they refused to do it.
The ship had to head out back to sea and wait 24 hours for the area to be made safe.
I was in trouble. A lot of trouble.
The area superintendent, who was also a signatory on the work permit and was already on a warning for other lapses, got fired.
Oh one that might be a bit more interesting for others.
I worked for one of the big banks in Cardiff for about 10 years - I'll give you a clue, it starts with an 'R' ends in an 'S'.
Anyway, in an effort to save costs they actually did away with strict admin staff in the 90's so everyone - whatever their level was given a few 'non-core' roles to complete - mine was to take a tape from the local server out every day at 3pm, put it into a Peli case and "escort" it to a Securicor Guard in full riot gear - I enjoyed this greatly because we'd recently be relocated in a brand new shiny office and thrown in the mix with a half dozen other departments - no one really knew what they other did so me marching stony faced each day carrying an armoured case to an equally stony faced guard made me look pretty hardcore (relative to the rock and roll world of mid-level business banking).
The most important bit was though it meant that my pass-card gave me access to the server room and no one else. It gave me a nice big ice cool air-conditioned room to change from riding kit, or to just take 5 - I shared this room with a large menacing looking box which I used to put stuff on whilst I changed - I would later learn that this was a UPS, or a great big battery which ran the place in the even of a power cut giving enough time for the servers which recorded everything we did to back-up and it was sick.
It started with a flashing light - which I mentioned to the boss's, boss's boss's PA who unfortunately considered herself to be second only to Triple B who told me to "leave it alone".
The next week it started beeping... "leave it alone".
The next week the beeping got louder, in fact very LOUD and very audible from our office it would sound every hour for 10 mins... "leave it alone".
The next week it became constant - 8 hours a day of BEEP, BEEP, BEEP I had my Boss e-mailed Triple B but it was intercepted by his PA "leave it alone" finally I was told to let my Boss into the server room for a look-see - on the screen was a big symbol - "Silence" the Boss said "well, that's golden press it" and sure enough it grew silent.
For an hour...
So I was sent into the room, every hour, on the hour to press the button.
Info back from Triple B's PA was "leave it alone" but now our Boss was involved it came with a short note - "engineers have been called, they'll be here soon". It's worth noting that Triple B and Hiss, his PA sat right at the other end of the office (about 100 people's worth) and couldn't hear the alarm.
This carried on for about another week or so, now these 'Engineers' couldn't have thought it was much of an issue because they'd been called 2 months earlier by this stage.
Finally it got a bit pissed off by all this silencing and started a countdown - we had 5 more 'silences' left - before *something* happened.
That something was a constant scream of sound that did not stop and would not be silent. again "leave it alone.... engineers..."
I finally had enough and went in to shout at it, not only was I getting stick about it, but my little ice cold palace of solitude had become a torture chamber of noise - I even got shouted at for going in to get the tapes if I didn't close the self-closing door quick enough....
I looked at the box, I swore at it and finally saw "reset" on it - "ah ha - if I can reset the alarm we'll go back to day one - a mere flashy light" I pressed it, it said "are you sure?" I pressed yes - "to reset hold the squares above at the same time for 5 seconds" which I did - it said "UPS will reset - are you sure" 'in for a penny...' I pressed yes.
The light above my head dimmed, oops.
The door which is locked with an electromagnet thudded as it unlocked.
The fans stopped and it went very, very quiet - a busy office is like a supermarket they don't seem loud but when the noise stops the silence is deafening...
Yep - I'd blacked out the office - which meant the business arm of second largest Bank in Europe had just turned off in Wales, all of it. Oh and Coutts - so if The Queen had popped in to cash her Grio she'd be out of luck.
THAT FEELING.
I escaped the whole thing completely unscathed – my Boss, bless him, defended me to the end – No, he wouldn’t touch that – he was told not to – “well I’m not surprised if this UPS gave up, it’s been screaming it’s head off for 2 months – what do you mean why didn’t we tell anyone – we told Hiss about 100 times”.
All eyes on Hiss – She’d decided that it wasn’t really important and she was faaar too important to deal with it and had done sweet fanny Adams about it – it didn’t matter how hard she waved the bit of paper which showed I was in the room when it happened, or indeed who much the ‘engineers’ cried that “they just don’t turn themselves off” etc etc – I was untouchable – they knew I was involved because they kept inviting me to the fall out meetings – hoping one of the ‘engineers’ would rat me out, or some CCTV would appear but it never did – it quickly descended into a fight between the Insurance Companies – I know the final loss figure was over £100k, maybe £200k but that was no doubt BS for the Insurance people – but we did have to close at 11am on a Friday and didn’t reopen until the Tuesday. You have to consider that off the 100 or so people who worked there 50% or more would have been managers like me with at least a portfolio of £1m to manage, but some much more.
I took redundancy not long after.
I know the final loss figure was over £100k, maybe £200k but that was no doubt BS for the Insurance
Sounds low for two days closure - nice avoidance job! Forgiven, not your fault.
Some fantastic stories in here!!
Keep them coming. I'm enjoying the schadenfreude 😆
Nothing to add myself... yet.
A few years back I was working in a RAF bomb dump. I was in a building forking 2x1000lbs high explosive bombs off a stack and as I was coming out of the building I forgot to put my forks down......
Que top of bombs hitting roof of doorway and getting pushed off said forks onto the floor.
I have never ever ran that fast since.
I had to sub a report from a freelance at a Crown Court to go into a news bulletin. It ran to 3 pages of dense print and I had about 10 minutes. Somehow an important piece of information got distorted in the process.
Next morning I was up before the judge with my employers' lawyers explaining what had gone wrong. Luckily he believed it was a genuine mistake and none of the jury had head the report anyway...
Ha. I can trump that though. My editor decided to go to press with a dodgy headline from my report of an Old Bailey murder trial, despite my strong advice that it could constitute contempt.
The sinking feeling when I turned up the next day and saw the judge reading it...
Old Bailey judges give excellent bollockings. Luckily the trial had collapsed for an unrelated reason, or I reckon we'd have been prosecuted. 😀
Clipped a double decker with a hire van during rush hour. Everyone got off very lightly, but the shame of sixty commuters glaring at me through the bus windows as we checked it for damage though :0
sandwicheater - Member
Taking a box of change to the bank. All bagged up and been collecting for a few years so totalled £170. Pull out of the drive onto the road and accelerate.
Was it all 1s and 2s?
can't compete with any of the above. I tend to go for general low-level shiteness rather than the one-off catastrophe. Takes more long-term commitment. (Though just typing that feels like tempting fate.)
Though I've had a little taste of that empty stomach feeling re-reading an important email I sent, which included the key line "please could you not do this..." Should have been "please could you [b]now[/b] do this.."
Hey ho. Must've been smoothoverable as I've forgotten what it was about.
I used to work for a specialist comms provider who partner with quite a few mobile phone networks globally.
A few years ago (before this became an acceptable practice) we were mucking about with a bit of satellite kit that enabled you to route gsm comms over its network. We were playing with some settings and how this was being routed back to earth all the while using my mobile as the test unit. My mobile suddenly rang and a very quietly spoken gentleman asked me to desist with whatever the 'hell we were playing at' as we were dangerously close to bringing down network access for all of the roaming users globally of this particular mobile phone network.
I waited for the fallout but never heard another thing about it.
Borrowed OH's car.
Crashed OH's car.
Into my mother's car.
I still get reminded about it 😳
A cousin of mine, RAF pilot put a Tornado into the North sea ,£25 million up the spout !!
Ive had more than a few while driving for the company I now manage , hitting the blades on a chopper with the wagon ..£32k repair , a barrier at BAE another 16k to fix , but the one that always makes me giggle, I used to deliver around York on a daily basis ,this one day I was having a bad day ,nothing was going right you know the type of days , well I was on a road looking for an address and realised id past it ,stopped and threw the wagon in reverse checked my mirrors nowt there so shot back ..BANG! only reversed over the top of Marco Gabriadinis car ... after we exchanged details I went back to work and claimed he ran into me (for fear of loosing my job ) Well 12 months later this went to arbitration in York ,his brief , my works brief and my MD , we argued about hire car costings as his replacement Merc seemed a little lavish as his car was in the garage for 3 weeks , long story short I had to defend my driving and we ended up paying half ( a win for my boss) .
As we left court I had parked my 7.5 ton wagon on the car park opp the building we were in , I wasn't paying £10 to park and I was in a rush as I had deliveries to do that afternoon , so after defending my driving abilities infront to these guys ,I jumped in the wagon and set off , id only gone 100 yards up the road but there was a right weird sound coming from the back of the wagon .. id only caught the bumper of Marcos briefs car on the way out and was dragging it down the bloody street ,I could have died right there as I walked back up the street with these guys watching and placed it next to his car ,saying " I believe you have my details " needless to say I got a right round of them when I got back that evening
I work for a oil company, we bring stuff in from offshore via pipeline which keep the oil rigs pumping and several chemical plants going. We have two pumps one on line one spare.
I made a **** up and tripped the online pump, and then in my panick started the 2nd one too early and tripped that too.
cue a phone call to the electrician to go and power them back up. He was on a training course and was a 3 hr drive away. shutdown and reduced all the plants/rigs, ust have cost a fortune.
I've just been reminded of the time my daughter was running full pelt down a hill at bradgate park. As she runs past me I stupidly went to tap her on the back with my hand resulting in the best tap tackle on her foot you could ever do.
Que the slow motion vision of my daughter taking off and landing on gravel. I very nearly puked with shock. Bribed her with ice cream and sweets we told mum she had fell off the slide.
15,000 cans with the wrong shave gel ... and no one ever noticed
In my early twenties I was driving for a large motorcycle superstore in Bristol (Fowlers if anyone's local) ran by Old man Fowler himself,lovely affable old guy who still rode motorcycles daily even in his 70's.Leaving work one evening with my colleagues we noticed old man Fowler wheeling a brand new demo VFR 750 out of the showroom to ride home,the perks of owning the company eh! I leave the car park behind him in one of his own Transit's
and follow him down the road at a safe distance,safe until he stops in the road to see why one of his directors is waving at him from the staff carpark.Unfortunately I'm also wondering the same thing,and shunt him down the road at speed whilst everything else is happening in slow-motion,including him desperately trying to persuade his aged legs to keep the bike upright at running speed before they collapse in a heap with the bike on top of him.Thankfully he wasn't badly hurt,but running the top Boss over in his own van whilst a director watched wasn't my finest moment.
I went straight to the pub where my mates wondered why I was unusually quiet,and on explaining why the whole bar erupted en-mass in laughter.
It was a talking point at work for weeks,and recalling it still makes me shiver even now.Amazingly there were never any repercussions at all and I continued working there for many years after the incident
I sat back in my chair, satisfied that an easy job had been well done, as 27,000 printed copies of the quarterly community magazine I produced went out the door, bound for delivery later that day with the local free paper.
That evening, via the power of the paperboys and girls, the community would enjoy reading about the various activities of the helpful groups operating in their area.
One article in that issue was a piece about a lady who had set up a local support group for parents of children who'd been sexually abused by a family member. By chance, she walked into the reception to see another organisation who worked from the same building. I'd met her a couple of weeks earlier and taken down my notes about her story.
"Hi, Marie (not her real name, can't remember it), the mag with your story is going out today, have a read, hope you feel it represents you well." I handed her a spare copy.
Five seconds later, "Oh no, that's not right, it wasn't my husband who abused our boy, it was his brother, the uncle."
I'd accidentally branded an innocent man a paedophile x 27,000, and that misinformation was currently making its way to homes in the roughest parts of a rough town, and although I'd not named him directly, I'd named his wife, so it wouldn't be too hard to figure out who he was.
Therefore, I'm the only person I know who has been responsible for free paper deliverers re-doing their rounds and knocking on doors, asking for the free magazine back, please. They work in the afternoon, when most people are out, so we didn't get that many back, and I lay awake in bed that night, assuming my wrongly-identified chap's corpse was lying burning in an alleyway somewhere.
Handed in my notice with immediate effect the next day, and drank four bottles of wine that night.
stevedoc - Member
" I believe you have my details "
😀
Superb.