Series Of People's Work Mistakes That Caused Chaos

Some of us had an unforgettable “messed-up” work experience. When the pressure and the stress of being a newbie pile up, it would be irresistible to make a mistake. It may be your lucky day if you have been given a second chance.

These Redditors share the most chaotic events caused by them in the workplace. By diving into these, we will have takeaways on what and what not to do while we are at work. Come check these out!

1. Drumroll Fiasco

A very important and very big customer placed an order for some chemical bulk to be delivered in early January. Our contract with them stated that every day we were late we would be fined millions.

The bulk plant finished on time and just needed the drums to pour the bulk into.

I was the purchaser responsible for buying the drums when the warehouse came up to my office and said, “Where are the 250-litre drums!? Bulk plants need them.” It's fine I thought, I placed the order before Christmas, and I remember doing it. I looked at SAP and thought, “Why is the supplier late? They're never late.” I check my order mouth goes instantly dry and I start to sweat.

I had placed the order, but I forgot that I needed to email them the PO for this particular supplier. We had just changed the system to allow SAP to auto-email the supplier after we placed an order, but not for this 1 supplier. I knew this, but I need to remember.

These drums had a 2-week lead time from the supplier so I knew I was busted. Not only would we have had millions of pounds of fines, but the production plant would have been put on hold having to store tons of bulk with nowhere to put it.

I went and told my boss and just told him I had messed up. Being an awesome guy and boss he thanked me for being honest and told me it would be okay. He called the supplier, sweet-talked them, and because we were a good customer they allowed us to take another customer's order. The drums were delivered the next day. That was about 9 years ago and I still think about it.

AboutTimeCroco

I accidentally left out the “Move Next” method on a loop that sent out an email broadcast, which meant it mailbombed the first recipient in the loop until we realized what was happening and ended the process. The worst part is the CEO’s email was the first email address in the loop.

He was a douche anyway and was absolutely incoherent with rage when his email organizer crashed when downloading 15,000 emails inviting him to take a satisfaction survey. Good thing it was only a test!

ShadyAidyX

One of the managers where I work had the junior IT guy add a vacation auto-responder to his email and the confirmation window had a checkbox "Apply to inbox.” The manager never cleans his inbox and the IT guy decided to check that box.

Something like 10,000 emails were sent that day. Important clients whom he would have been conversing more often with were getting multiple hundreds of vacation notifications. Nothing bad came from it and most of the clients were good-hearted about it. He was getting replies like "Frank, please stop. We know you're on vacation!"

Splat313

Chemistry teacher here. On my first day of teaching, I set my classroom on fire after some unfortunate incidents involving sodium, water, and a glass tank. The problem was that the glass tank was too big, so the hydrogen gas got to build up to a decent amount. Then suddenly kaboom!

The glass tank exploded, and there was shattered glass everywhere and hit the students, who were all wearing safety glasses. A column of water grew from the glass tank to the ceiling and the ceiling started to burn.

After a few moments, the fire died out the fire alarm was loud and I had to make sure all of the students were ok. Which they were.

It ended up being one of the funniest classes to teach for many years. The students absolutely loved it. I was a bit of a nervous wreck for a few hours. The worst thing in hindsight is all of the comments saying things like “You started your career with a bang” and stuff like that.

FatChemistryTeacher

Back in the floppy disk, pre-Internet days of computers, I was tasked by my job to do a software installation onboard a Coast Guard icebreaker. I flew from Ottawa to Halifax. Then I caught a taxi to CFB Shearwater, from where a twin otter flew me 1000 km north to a little town on the border of Quebec and Labrador.

From there, I was flown by helicopter to do an at-sea landing on the icebreaker. After landing I went down to the engine control room, where the computer was located, and laid out the disks: disk 1, disk 2, disk 3, disk 4, and disk 6. Disk 5 was still on my desk in Ottawa.

Khendron

Back in the 1970's this chemical manufacturing company in Michigan accidentally sent out a fire retardant they produced in the place of a livestock feed supplement they also produced. By the time someone figured out what happened it had already been used on hundreds of farms, and they ended up having to put down tens of thousands of cattle and pigs, and over a million chickens.

The chemical (polybrominated biphenyl or PBB if you want to look it up) has also made its way into meat, eggs, and dairy products, and they are still studying the long-term health impacts on the thousands of people who ate those products, and the descendants of those people, as well as farm workers and people who were employed at the chemical plant. So yeah, 100 unalive sheep is bad, but it could be worse.

Doomalgae

I dropped a screw inside the engine of a TGV train. Oh gosh. We spent half an hour trying to catch it by moving a magnetic stick inside the crankshaft, with oil spilling everywhere. It took us a very long time to get the very small screw stuck inside.

The engine was new and about to be mounted on a train that was supposed to run later in the day. I was so terrified I would possibly cause quite a lot of trouble since no other train or engine was available. Shoutout to my manager who finally got that screw and definitely deserved his half a dozen of croissants the next morning.

JPDLD

I was a nanny. A little 2-year-old I was watching fell and hit the back of her head on the concrete. I rushed over to her but she didn't move or blink, just lay on her back motionless. I tried to check for breathing and pulse and pretty much blanked on everything I'd ever learned in CPR/first aid training in my panic.

She seriously looked like it was over. I screamed for help, the neighbors came running, and I told them to call an ambulance. The police, fire department, and ambulance showed up within minutes. She was rushed to the hospital and a million tests were run.

Turns out she barely even had a bruise, no concussion, no seizure, no injury, nothing. The doctor said she probably just got scared and froze, for just long enough for me to lose my mind. Her parents were charged 5,000 dollars to tell them their child was surprised.

JamesandtheGiantAss

I work at a quick lube-style shop, so I work around fairly new vehicles. I wish I could say it's all cheap stuff, but no. The dude comes in one day for one of our services, so I'm doing everything under the hood of a luxury car. We filled the oil, ran the pressure check, and closed the hood because the newer luxury cars have a digital oil readout on the screen in the dash.

The dude leaves and comes back 5 hours later. His hood is freaking smoking. "Aww heck." We open the hood and there are about 3 quarts of oil in the engine compartment. I didn't put the oil cap back on properly like I thought I did. Man, I was pissed.

moonshinetemp093

I was working in the stock room at a retail store. I grabbed a soda pallet with the forklift and didn't realize it was a short pallet. The forks came out the other side and through to the pallet of glass and other soda bottles, it was up against. When I lifted the soda, the other soda bottles came up with it and dumped the entire unwrapped pallet of glass bottles spilling all that sticky soda on the floor.

That mess was hell to clean up. However, the vendor had to eat the cost because that store's posted policy is that they cannot leave unwrapped pallets unless it is being worked.

spaceduckcoast2coast

My coworker was trying to take down a pallet but he had the forklift too close to the racking. He accidentally pushed the support beam above the pallet he was going for so far up that the pins busted and both pallets (2L soda bottles) on that top rack tipped.

Luckily, nobody got hurt, the pallets were wrapped, and neither one fell completely. But they were hanging so far over the edge that most of the contents ended up falling anyway. The entire end of the warehouse was flooded with soda.

There were so many bottles on the floor that we couldn’t drive equipment through and we were wading through the sea of coke, squeegeeing it out the loading dock door. Four months later, we could still feel the stickiness.

[deleted]

I was new to SQL. I was having a hard time navigating it. One day, I accidentally mailed a list of people with deceased_date IS NOT NULL instead of IS NULL. So an entire marketing campaign was sent to deceased people. That eventually led to our marketing tools being hard-coded not to mail deceased people which makes sense.

I was terrified when I found out. Every time I think about that I cannot avoid but to feel nervous and terrified at the same time.

MikeRabsitch

The chef was angry that day. I was advised by my coworkers to do whatever it takes to get on his good side. I thought, "Eh, I'll just try to avoid him." He was standing in the cooler taking inventory. Beside him were the 5-gallon containers of prepped food.

I sneaked in and tried to quickly grab the ranch container, but in my haste, I nudged another. It was the French onion soup. All 5 gallons of it. On his pants and shoes. Yes, he was upset. The prep girl was upset.  

I had 10 minutes till lunch service started. I have no idea how I'm still alive.

Chazzyberry

During the first week of my first job in animation after I graduated I had to move a bunch of scene files from one server to another. The files were heavy so I was told to just cut and paste them to make it faster. I accidentally put them in the wrong area and without thinking just deleted them. When I went back to move the files again, they weren't there, I had forgotten I hadn't copied them.

I lost 5 minutes of full animation, my long-time friend who recommended me for the job got into a horrible situation because his backups didn't catch the files and my direct supervisor worked for 21 days straight to help redo all the animation.

The studio and everyone involved were way nicer to me than I expected. I kept my job and I brought in donuts for the whole crew for a week after. But it was an awful start!

1_art_please

I once was the only videographer shooting a once-a-year event for my school with a camera. Towards the end of the night when the SD card was getting full I went to check just how full and accidentally formatted it (really stupid move).

That gave me so much anxiety and I felt like such an idiot. Imagine putting so much time and effort into a work for it to disappear in just a snap. Filmmaking, in general, is really easy to mess up.

WindowsMovieMaker200

I am a Controls Engineer. I made a copy-paste error while programming and a 2 was a 3. So one machine tagged at 3 was waiting for conditions of 2. So naturally the lift moved when it thought it should and crashed into another machine.

Of course, I was going to stand there, trying to figure out the issue while maintenance is up there replacing busted parts. But because I've made a thousand changes it didn't click fast enough and well to my foolishness, it happened again.

OfTheAtom

The worst I've done was crash an entire chemical plant by completely messing up a download and faulting the controller. There was a lot of screaming and overflowing tension all over the place, but the product was still in speculation.

I cannot even forget the "Oh heck, my software isn't responding. Did I just break something, or is this poorly optimized, proprietary awful software just having a seizure?" This question sucks, every time I remember it.

I_Automate

I worked in a nice steakhouse. Usually, a lot of customers dine in so it was always busy in the restaurant. On my first week of work there, I accidentally put salt in the sugar bowls and sugar in the salt shakers. I didn’t notice that mistake right away.

When the customers started to complain about their sweet steaks and salty coffees, that’s when we started to investigate what happened. We figured out my mistake and we had to pull all the salt and sugar from each table. That was my last day as a waiter.

Thebirdbrain

While I was in high school I had a job at night working at a decent restaurant. One of the biggest mistakes I made working there was accidentally mixing up the ranch with blue cheese from the big jugs the dressings came in.

I just added it to the salad bar with a tag out that said blue ranch so as not to waste it and the customers actually used it all up within a few days. I felt bad for screwing up but fortunately, there were no repercussions for my mistake.

dumbgringo

I at least partially blame my employer for this but they fully blamed me so. I briefly worked for the city zoo. We used "carts" that were an ATV with a dumpable bed on them for cleaning enclosures. Zoos are large so we also use them just as transport.

We had one with a known wonky parking brake. Maintenance had refused to replace it for months. One day I had to park it on an incline. I kicked it after parking and didn't budge. I turned around at least 3 times as I walked away to make sure it was still not going anywhere.

5 minutes later, I come back to hysteria. Naturally, as soon as I was gone, it had rolled down the hill and taken out half the fence to the camel ride area. It knocked some lady over. She was fine, I think she had just been knocked off balance versus full-on hit by it. My manager wasn't mad at all, and maintenance finally gave us a new cart, but I still got written up because of protocol.

Metal___Barbie

Not me but I worked at a place that made wiring harnesses. We had a new employee come over. The new dude on his 4th day was assigned to a station. He was running the wire-cutting machine. Everything was going smoothly at first.

All of a sudden. he says he is sick and leaves. After that, he never came back again. He didn’t give any notice or resignation letter. The reason was he absolutely messed up everything on the cut. What's sad is he wouldn't have been fired or even been in trouble. He didn't have to leave, he just had to be honest and explain.

[deleted]

I was promoted to terminal manager and I was a dumb 25-year-old idealist. We had an essential employee, a mechanic who kept our fleet of trucks running. At least that was his job description. Less than a month on the job, it came to my attention that he was a working alcoholic and his work on our fleet was underwhelming.

My boss told me to fire him once we had a new mechanic ready to come in. I told the old mechanic that he should probably start looking for new work if he couldn't do the job. The word got back to him through the pipeline that he was going to be fired.

I went to a bar with my assistant manager after working 40 days straight and lo and behold the mechanic showed up. Long story short, the mechanic attempted to abduct me with his adult son. The whole thing became a large dramatic event that put me in the hospital for a few hours and we both lost our jobs.

M-S-S

A customer got the best of me. I worked in upper-level customer service for an Australian winery conglomerate that shall remain unnamed. They owned a bunch of exclusive brands but only had a team of 6 or 7 customer service reps to service them all. Two of us got paid $1/hr more to be "upper level" customer service, and take "escalations", which is fancy talk for "get crap on by the wealthy.”

A customer from their top brand made an online purchase, which we shipped immediately. He decided he was upset about that, as we should have read his mind and known he wanted it three months later.

Anyway, he called me a retard, so I canceled his order, his wine club membership, and deleted his customer profile. I was not let go due to them literally needing me to keep the department running, but my manager burst a blood vessel in his eye.

Capt_Gingerbeard

In our previous organization, there is someone and let’s call him Bob. Bob works very high up in the North American Primary Metals division for Alcoa International. Bob decided that 1 of 2 Aluminum smelters in the US was paying too much for its contracted power rate (If you don't know, it takes a lot of power to refine raw aluminum from bauxite ore.) My facility occupied less than 1 square mile of land but used enough electricity to power 1/3 of the total households in Seattle.

Bob decided to terminate the contract in late winter last year. The majority of my facility's power was provided via a hydroelectric dam. In winter, water freezes, thus flowing through the dams much slower, yet power demand increases as people try to keep their homes warm.

The weekend after Bob ended the power contract, a cold snap hit our area for about 3 days. What should have been a couple hundred thousand dollars of power for that weekend ended up costing us more than 20 million as all excess power needs were paid at a premium. About a year later, our facility is upside down in a few other areas because of mismanagement, but it all started with Bob cutting our lifeline.

Here I sit today unemployed, as the facility was deemed unprofitable and a majority of our workforce was forcibly laid off 2 months ago. 700 direct jobs, thousands of other areas impacted by the loss of this facility, and millions of dollars taken out of our local economy because Bob went against 60 years of common sense. I hate Bob. I'd like to meet him one day.

PercsNBeer

I used to work at a company that organized festivals (art, music, literature, etc). We were organizing our annual literature festival. in the weeks leading up to it, everyone kind of pitches in with everything.

We had created gift bags for the writers who would be presenting talks/workshops at the festival. These were some lovely gift bags, lovely bottles of wine, skincare goodies, scented candles, books, and literary magazines. My team was in charge of putting the gift bags together, and we had a massive storeroom in the basement of our office where we were keeping all the gift bag things as they were delivered.

It was a super hot Friday, there were storms predicted for the entire weekend, and my supervisor asked me to close the windows in the basement before I locked up for the weekend. I told her I would, but I completely forgot. You can see where this is going.

We had cardboard boxes full of literary magazines that were going to go in the gift bags. They got rained on all weekend. By the time we got into the office on Monday (and by the time I made it down to the basement), they were a soggy mess. The cardboard boxes had completely disintegrated and the magazines inside were falling apart, too.

We had to reorder the magazines (at a significant cost) for the gift bags, and I was reprimanded by my supervisor. She read me the riot act. As a fun bonus, the rainwater went all over the floors too, so some of the gift bags had been soaked through, so I had to hang them all up to air dry around the office... Which was embarrassing.

FauxPoesFoes228

I have messed up so many times while I was in the workplace. I have my top 2 favorite stories which I will never forget.

The first one is when I worked at an egg farm and was carrying 12 flats of eggs. I didn’t see the pallet someone left in the walkway. I tripped on the pallet hundreds of eggs went flying and splattered all over the floor. Meanwhile, I fell and dislocated my wrist and shoulder.

The second one is when I was washing a dairy cow named Laverne before showing her at a county fair. She didn’t like having her tail washed. She kicked the bucket of soapy water over onto my rubber boots and took off running.

I grabbed both sides of her halter but my boots were slick and she ran around the washing area in circles with me hanging on to her head while my tractionless boots acted like water skis. Of course, this happened in front of crowds of people who started laughing.

Finally, I lost my grip and sat down in a puddle while Laverne ran toward a little boy holding a scone. He dropped the scone and ran, and Laverne ate his scone. I got night barn duty for that.

Gen-Jinjur

I injured myself in the nose with a screwdriver. I was 19 and it was my first day at work as a dishwasher. They gave me the grill, which was entirely encrusted in nasty burned-on carbon, and told me to take it out back and clean it.

For about an hour I chiseled the carbon off it with a screwdriver and a butterknife. I was almost done, but there was one bit stuck in the corner, and because I'm an idiot I tried to get it out by chipping upwards with the screwdriver.

The screwdriver slipped and continued upwards right into the tip of my nose.

So I ran back into the kitchen, completely filthy and bleeding profusely from the face, and yelled "I'm sorry please don’t fire me!"

They were very understanding and did not fire me. And once I got cleaned up and stopped the bleeding it turned out I didn't even need stitches. I ended up working there for several summers and eventually made it up to line cook.

Tgjer

I work at a jail. We have things called “keep parts” to keep people away from each other since they may have conflicts on the street or otherwise. I accidentally let these two guys go into the same room together.

The guy number 1 is massive. The guy number 2 is small and allegedly ended guy number 1’s friend. Guy number 2 doesn’t know guy number 1, but guy number 1 knows who he is and what he allegedly did.

So, they go into this room with about 30 other people and after about 20 minutes guy number 1 casually walks over to Guy number 2 and hits guy number 2 so hard. He could easily have ended him. Luckily we stopped it before it got worse. But I still messed up massively.

Stewapalooza

There were some concessions at a movie theater. I was making popcorn, but I had learned that if we used a bit more seasoning and oil, the popcorn tasted insanely better. What I didn't know was the popcorn machine had broken earlier, and wasn't stirring the popcorn anymore.

So after I had made a new batch, and no popcorn coming out, I decided to check on the machine and a hot glob of oil flew into my eye. I started cussing and screaming in front of a whole bunch of customers and got rushed into the back to wash my eyes out.

Flannelsandjeans

I worked for a politician who was terrible with names so I had them saved in his phone as the nicknames he gave them. One of them was “That crazy, hot wench” so I had her saved as “Melissa - crazy hot wench.”

One day the other staffer asked for her number so I sent it to him but accidentally sent the contact card to her instead. She kept ringing and messaging demanding to know what was going on and I spent all night dreading the scandal (we were mid-election). The next day my boss passed away in the office and to this day I feel terrible that one of my first thoughts was “Well I guess I got away with that.”

Fclune

One of the biggest mistakes I made in the workplace was when I reported a patient as being negative for BUP on a drug screen when they were positive. It was for a chronic pain drug management check-up.

So essentially I made it seem like the patient wasn't taking their pain pills and hadn't been. Might have broken down crying after the patient reamed me out. I dreaded that day and whenever I remember it, I can’t help but feel foolish.

saka_sandora

I did a pretty messed up work. I accidentally mixed bleach and ammonia. That day, we had to evacuate the whole restaurant for safety purposes. It really affected our day’s operation.

To clarify, we had a soaking agent for the silverware that didn't know was ammonia-based, and I mixed it with bleach and water because I figured if I was bleaching the kitchen drains I might as well use something that would foam up, and take the mildew with it.

Severedparadox

In Sweden, when you're in the 8th grade, you get to "practice" work for a week, like a short internship. I managed to get a dream position for me. I got to take care of the horses of a famous Swedish show jump rider, who had his horses in a large stable complex along with other super expensive horses.

Anyway, when cleaning the stable aisle, you opened the door to the stalls and swept the hay/dust into the stalls. One day when I was sweeping, I opened the door to a stall, swept stuff into it, and then moved on to the next, opening, and then I heard the sound of hooves entering the aisle. I turned around and realized that I had forgotten to close the previous door, and the horse was about to make his grand escape.

I panicked and started running after the escapee, only to hear a second set of hooves entering the aisle, as I of course had forgotten to close the other door before running after the rouge horse. By the time the 15-year-old me had a chance to react to the new situation the first horse had already made it out of the stable.

I just froze, didn't know what to do. The stable manager caught the second horse before it got out of the stable and started screaming that I was an idiot. I was mortified. I ran out of there and planned to just go home, admit defeat, and start googling "What do idiots work with.”

I hid for half an hour until a staff member (not the manager) found me. He told me they caught the other horse (a stallion). He was nice about it and said I gave him (the stallion) the time of his life getting to admire the mares in the stable next door for a while.

IceCygnus

My mom’s mess-up story is even worse. She used to attend a high school that required you to work on a farm all summer so one summer she worked and lived at a working farm and brought her horse (a stallion) with her.

One day she decided her horse needed to be washed and since they didn’t have tie-ups in the barn she thought tying her large fairly wild stallion to the old rickety porch would be the best idea. He spooked, pulling down the porch and breaking down the paddock fence for the sheep in his escape. Leaving her standing there trying to catch a dozen sheep, and a stallion, and explain the huge mess.

Animallover4321

I worked at a retail store when two women walked by me and said “Tell your colleague that she gave us excellent service” on their way out of the store. I told my coworker about it afterward and she said “Who were they?”

For some reason, to my foolishness, I said “I’m not sure but they were two heavy-set women” and then described what they were wearing. My coworker said, “Oh that was my mom and my aunt.” I have never been more embarrassed in my life.

PeterPumpkinsEater69

I had an important meeting that could eventually lead me to a huge promotion. I kid you not, I zipped my zipper onto my male organ after taking a round in the bathroom and it freaking hurt like hell. Not as bad as that Ben Stiller movie, but trust me, it was not a good situation.

I actually went to a local pharmacy to grab some pain reliever to hopefully ease some of the pain just to get through the meeting. Just to clarify, this happened in the bathroom at my office about an hour before the meeting.

[deleted]

I used to work as an explosive ordinance clearance engineer. This card comes round the office for Tony. I wrote “Happy birthday mate, from Dave” The Lady who gave me the card looked on in horror.

I was confused so I said ‘“What?” She replied, “You can’t write that!” I asked again, ‘Why not?” She then sighed and said, “He’s just had his leg blown off by a landmine.” I had to try and change it to best wishes. But it was pretty obvious what I did. My boss comes round later, an ex-major royal engineer, and said, “I heard what you did Burns. He’s going to be hopping mad when he sees you.”

TelephoneTable

I had a mess-up story I will never ever forget. Back when I worked in the service industry, I used to work at this place famous for its tea. They have 5-gallon tanks of their tea that we make 8 at a time.

Well, it was my last day and I was picking one up freshly brewed right after I added the sugar and completely dropped it all over myself. It was hot and sticky. I got a new shirt on my last day. That mistake cost the whole restaurant and of course, my job.

clittle24

I almost passed away from hypothermia. I was a bartender and we kept a lot of drinks the guests wanted ice cold in a walk-in freezer. So I went inside the first freezer, drinks weren’t there.

Then from that first freezer, you walk into the second one. I forgot to put a stopper so the door won’t close. I was freaking out, getting colder by the minute. I screamed but no one could hear me. A co-worker came in to check on me, he thankfully knew where I was.

Loleetahaze

Years ago when I was an undergrad, I worked in a lab and had an incident. I was there at 2 a.m. on a Saturday, fixing and staining cells. I was preparing them for viewing under a microscope. Part of the process involves utilizing sodium azide.

I put the NaN3 into a buffer solution in too small of a conical and screwed on the cap, without thinking. Hydrogen gas evolved, the conical exploded, my clothes caught fire, and EHS wasn’t very happy. The PI of the lab couldn’t stop laughing. The only serious damage was to my ego It was sodium borohydride (NaBH4) that caused the issue.

EJX713

I worked at a car detailing place. We had enormous buckets with taps on the end of them for all of the chemicals we would use to clean the cars. One day before we closed up for the weekend, I decided to do an acid wash on my car to get all of the tar off of my bumper and wheels and such.

Turns out that when I came in on Monday I forgot to turn the tap off to the acid. Everyone had to wear a mask in the place for a couple of days because of the smell. With the hole in the ground, I evaporated and the cost of all of the acid I wasted took a few paychecks to replace.

jackk801

I used to work preparation at a fairly large chain restaurant. One day, nearing lunch, I decided it would be funny to play a prank on the line cook who was by himself for the next thirty minutes.

I set all five of our microwaves to go off at the same time. The only problem is they were empty, and I set them all for a minute each. They all caught fire. It was the first of the month Saturday.

TheyToldMeToSlide

I was forklifting a 10,000 Liter tank of paint. To get the last bit of paint I need to tilt the forklift and then wait until I obtain as much of the paint as possible to make sure it's empty.

It was like waiting for the last bit of honey to drip out of the container. Something like that. So by the time lunch comes and still to no avail, the thing keeps trickling in a good amount so I decide to go to lunch to see if it will finish by then to start my work. Knowing full well the smaller container will not overflow at all.

After lunch, I am staring at a 40-meter paint spill, which probably cost the company a ton of money since the paint is unique enough to resist acid melting through steel. It's a rich aerospace company so meh they fine.  

So remember how I mentioned I need to tilt the forklift a bit? I forgot to do so, then instead of trickling down into the other smaller container, it was dripping along the pipe backward trickling around the container. Surprised I didn't lose my job there, but I quit that place a while ago anyway. And before that, there was a fire too.

Payback22

A vendor of ours claimed that an antenna they installed for LTE was faulty. I asked the engineer on site to confirm and told him to troubleshoot all possibilities first because this site required a huge crane, shutting down 2 lanes on a highway, a crew that was certified to work in a crane basket, a ton of insurance, police and shutting down a highway exit. It was quite a lot to get organized.

So the day of the swap everyone was on the site, the crane vendor and crew were there with a new antenna when I decided I should look to see if there was something the engineer might have missed.

There are a bunch of different colored cables we used to power up these antennas, different colors because each sector of a tower will use a specific pair of colors so the crew on the tower and the engineer at the base know which antenna they are powering on.

Well turns out the engineer at the base had paired up pink and black instead of what should have been red and black. I made the change quickly and the crew that was in the crane confirmed that the antenna was powered on.

Meanwhile, the engineer who was supposed to be working at the base of the tower was running late but once he got there, boy did I have bad news for him. The best part is that the company he worked for fired me 2 months earlier but I was hired on by the antenna and radio manufacturer less than 2 days after they fired me. Felt good to throw a $30,000 bill at them because of their incompetence.

buttpincher

I was a truck driver in a small town in rural Tennessee, our info on this facility noted a $7500 fine for leaving the posted truck route.

Outbound truck route signs and the information blurb on my Qualcomm are very different, and there were a bunch of cops around. Not wanting to chance that fine, I followed the sketchy truck route signs.

Turns out there were two truck routes, and I picked the wrong one. I ended up driving my fully loaded, way underpowered semi-up rural Tennessee mountain roads and ended up having to go up the west side of Monteagle on US41A. Twisty, steep, narrow switchback road at 79,500 lbs in a semi that can barely get out of its way.

Trailer would cheat over the double yellow with my cab touching the brush on the outside of the lane, crawl up that mountain at 15 mph flat out. The entire way from the town I picked up to Monteagle had zero turnarounds. Zero. None. Only dirt side tracks and small residential areas.

It ended up putting me 120 miles out of route, lost my chance at a shower for the night (and I smelled like a chicken factory), and made me late for my next appointment. Oh, and I checked later what the truck route was supposed to be, and found out that the $7,500 fine was only a $75 fine.

Another mess-up was when I managed to drop a loaded trailer onto my drive tires and pin the truck. It had rained but the top layer of gravel was dry, dropped the trailer, and between me pulling the pin and getting in the truck the right landing leg broke through the ground.

When the trailer took its weight on the legs it immediately sank into the ground and landed on the right rear tire, pinning the truck. It took about an hour of cranking (lifting about 30,000 lbs half an inch), locking all the drive wheels together, turning off traction control, and then flooring it in reverse to pick the trailer back up with the truck. Glad I didn’t have to call a tow, though.

Beekatiebee