Lets hear about your biggest screw up ever at work .

[fastfredracing]

Today was almost the worst .
It is sneaking up on 30 years of being a mechanic. Id be lying if I said that I did not make some mistakes along the way. Fortunately for me, most of them have been pretty minor in the grand scheme of things . No one has ever been hurt, I have never been sued, and it did not put me out of business.
I've made most of the mistakes that lifetime mechanics do . left a wheel loose a few times, dropped a nut down an intake manifold,and lunched a motor . Had a hood fly open on a test drive etc...
Having said that, I recognize trouble areas, and have a pretty good system going to where I keep screw ups to a minimum.
Today, I was working on a customers gt3 motor, we're pinning coolant pipes, replacing the two coolant elbows, rear main seal, and clutch. He has been coming down, and helping out a little after work in the evenings, and today a little bit. Good guy, good custome r, friend/neighbor, all around car/Porsche guy
I had the motor out, and up on my hydraulic table that I showed pics of in the other thread. I had it chocked up on blocks and balanced out really good, and also had jack stands with 2x4 's under it just so that there is no way one can come along, and knock it over .
We are only about 30 minutes in today. He is working on one side, and I am on the other removing some plumbing and wiring to get at where we have to drill and pin . In one split of a second I go from unscrewing an inverted torx screw holding a coolant hose to watching the motor spill off the back of the table backwards, and come crashing to the floor . Before my mind could even process what I just witnessed, I could see fluids start to pour from the motor .
I honestly screamed at the top of my lungs like a scared little girl " oh my f%$&ing god "
Poor ( enter name here ) who after this incident, warned me that he is clumsy, leaned on the release handle for the table sending the whole shebang crashing down.
Long story short, once my blood pressure settled, we got it back up and evaluated what had happened, and really , no harm was done . It landed on the boards that I had propping it up, and only bent two of the long studs that the trans hangs on to, and we knocked the cooling housing off , that was already unbolted and just hanging on to a hose. We did about $ 20.00 worth of damage, and I actually think I found a shortcut to doing those coolant pipes in the course of repairing our mishap.
All turned out well, and we laughed about it the rest of the day, but for a second I watched $50 k slip from my hands.
Got any stories you want to share? Did you get fired?
We are both also really lucky that neither one of us got hurt. I was wearing my flip flops

[wdfifteen]

I hired a guy who turned out to be a crook, a liar, and a general dickhead. Cost me upwards of $300,000 through his salary, embezzlement and mishandling of funds by the time we were all through. Biggest screwup of my life, work or otherwise.

[Baz]

Were they your lucky red ones, Fred?

[fastfredracing]

Just like em. Love ya Baz !

[pavulon]

Let my ex-wife leverage me into marrying her by laying down a timeline.

[Baz]

Originally Posted by fastfredracing

Just like em. Love ya Baz !

[RKDinOKC]

Not allowed to reminisce about anything past 2 weeks ago. Am in my safe place now.

[id10t]

Well there was the time I deleted all the students from the course management system instead of just the ones that had dropped courses...

What sucked is I realized about 30 seconds into the process. But no way to interrupt it, and it took about 2 hours to complete... watching accounts and enrollments go one by one by one...

Then of course I had to reload them all, which took another 2 hours, watching them all reappear one by one by one...

[cstreit]

Originally Posted by id10t

Well there was the time I deleted all the students from the course management system instead of just the ones that had dropped courses...

Similar incident many years ago. My team were on the tail end of our fourth 100 hour work week building a prototype demo for a customer. Lots of configuration, data work, custom scripting, you name it. Trying to make the solution do something it wasn't designed to do, at a rate that was nearly impossible. Well I was working on multiple computers at once. Found that if we exported the database, dropped, it, then reimported, it would run a lot faster for a time. Much better than the usual reorg and re-index.

So I ran the export on one machine. Took a break, then sat down on the other and dropped the database. Turned to the other machine to rerun the create/import and to my horror - I didn't check that it executed. I had a typo. No export. The last one we took was about 100 hours ago. Sleep deprivation for that long does funny things.

I sat there staring at the screen mumbling "no no no" under my breath. As I was about to break the news - I remembered that we had an automated file backup that ran at 11:00PM. it was 11:30. It hadn't finished. I just hoped that it backed up the physical files before I had dropped them. It had. Restored it all and went home.

I didn't tell them until after the demonstration.

[dad911]

Agreed to let my brother-in-law in as a partner.

Long story short, 10 years later, it took multiple lawsuits and almost 200k in legal fees to get rid of him and my ex-sister.

Worth every penny.

[JossP80]

Approaching 40, I can't think of any major, interesting ones of late in my professional career, but in my late teens I was working my first job at a race/repair shop (after a few semesters of high-school auto shop).

Once there were three of us dropping in a new motor (into I forget what... But it was a big, fully dressed v8). After a first attempt, we had to pull the motor back. As we did so, one of the two adjustable legs on the engine hoist slipped out of its sleeve sending the whole motor to the ground from maybe 4 feet up. Cracked the block and a few other bits. The worst part was the shop owner was shady and told us to patch it in some ridiculous way. I was too young and dumb to speak up about it, sadly.

[masraum]

I had 2 terminal windows open, one to a lab device and the other was a major datacenter router. Before you reload anything, always make sure you're positive you know exactly what you're reloading.

There have been others, fortunately, most of them were relatively harmless.

I had a colleague once when we both worked for the networking vendor providing support to their customers that turned on a debug that promptly kicked everyone out of the device. She hit enter several times and nothing. So she then said something like "Hey, do you guys have access to the device?" "No, we thought you had access." "I've lost access, can you reboot it?"

..."uh, we'll have to call you back. The device is at an unmanned location about 400 miles away. Someone is going to have to go there to reboot it."

Yeah, I don't think I've ever done anything quite like that.

[sc_rufctr]

Originally Posted by pavulon

Let my ex-wife leverage me into marrying her by laying down a timeline.

Been there done that but I was very young. As it turned out it was the best thing I ever did.
I raised 3 fantastic kids on my own who are successful and independent!

[Evans, Marv]

I was 19 and working for a reinforcing steel fabricator - Western Rolling Mills, which was a subsidiary of Allison Steel supplying steel for bridges, freeways, buildings, etc. They had started me on detailing easier jobs. At that time you had to write out each fabrication ticket for each group of steel that had to be cut & bent. I transposed a lot number with the number of pieces on one ticket. So the shop was cutting close to a thousand #9 bars about 8 ft. long with a bend on one end. The shear operator got suspicious after a few hundred and asked to have it checked, and I/we found out the mistake. That mistake at that time amounted to a few years of my pay. The company said that mistakes are made, but don't make another one like that. Needless to say "lesson learned."

[Jolly Amaranto]

My first "real" job (social security deducted and all that), while still in high school, was a lowly busboy at a seafood restaurant in Kemah, Texas. There were about 5 or 6 of us who worked Friday and Saturday nights from 5PM to 1AM. Was dreadful hard work but I did it. I guess my dedication was noted as when school was out for summer, the manager offered me a plumb job. I would be the only busboy working the day shift. Come in at 10AM set up for the lunch crowd which was not anywhere as busy as weekend nights. I helped the wait staff bring food out so they gave me a cut of their tips. Once things quieted down after lunch I got a meal, anything on the menu. Then I unpacked clean linens and stacked them and organized things for the evening shift along with other odd chores. Then I was out of there before things got frantic. It was late summer and I was reloading a milk cooler/dispenser during the lunch rush. They used these 5 gallon containers that consisted of a cardboard box with a plastic liner. A white tube stuck out the bottom and served as a valve when a weighted lever crimped it shut. I had hefted the new 5 gallons of milk up into the open enclosure and really gave it a shove to push it in. The side split wide open, cardboard, plastic liner and all. 5 gallons of milk gushed out all over me, around the corner from the beverage area and down the steps into the dining room. The dining room was tiered with three levels all the way down to the big picture windows overlooking the board walk on the boat channel. Milk made it all the way to the bottom. People were jumping up and screaming as they got out of the way. I just hauled out the back door and went home. Never went back, even to pick up my last pay check. I guess they mailed it to me.

[porsche4life]

Accepting the damn job in the first place!

Glad to have that place behind me now!

[aap1966]

Not my screw-up, but I was the 'target of opportunity' afterwards.

So, as a young Resident on a vascular surgery rotation we had a particularly difficult patient, let's call him Mr Joe Smith. Mr Joe Smith may have been a bitter, vindictive and deeply unpleasant man, but I am convinced to this day that everything he knew he had learnt from the Master, his wife. Nothing we did was adequate for the Smiths, particularly Mrs Smith who seemed to regard her calling in life to be torturing nursing staff and questioning the competency, loudly and regularly, of the medical staff. Mr Joe Smith needed a comparatively minor surgical procedure, but Mrs Smith was convinced that our incompetence would result in the death of her husband. An opinion she shared at volume with most of the ward. We eventually convinced her to trust her husband to our surgical skills.

At the same time in the Intensive Care Unit was another Mr Joe Smith. I never met Mr ICU Joe Smith, but he had been in ICU for sometime and, in hospital parlance, was "not doing well." At the time my Mr Joe Smith was undergoing surgery, Mr ICU Joe Smith finally succumbed to his illness.

Can you see where this is going?

The ICU resident then rang (my) Mrs Joe Smith and opened the conversation with "I'm ringing you to let you know that, AS WE EXPECTED, your husband Joe has died." The response he received down the phone line indicated that that statement was perhaps NOT as expected as he had anticipated.

Meanwhile, towards the close of (my) Mr Smith's surgery, which had gone very well, the anaesthetist took a phone call, and began to laugh. After relating the story to the theatre, the Professor of Vascular Surgery turned to me (the most junior doctor there) and said "Well, there's something for you to sort out".

27 years later I still vividly recall the subsequent conversation with Mrs Joe Smith.
How to describe it? Let's just say the barracks scene from Full Metal Jacket is not a bad analogy, albeit what I received entailed more colourful language and fewer pauses for breath.

[Bill Douglas]

Confession time. I worked at a bank and all the electronic transactions in the retail stores came through this particular computer. I was moving it from one room to another. Two cables - data in and data out. I had two big companies on standby and a count down...

I moved the computer but I had one cable coming out of the wall then back into the wall, and the other cable out of the computer and back into the computer. The funds transfer people and visa+Mastercard where mystified by it wasn't working when it came back up. After about five minutes of sweating bullets I spotted my error and changed the cables around.

"Hurray, it's back on line, what did you do?" I told them I reseated the connections and it sprang back into life. I accepted their thanks and gratitude for saving the day - having thought to reseat the connections a few times until it came right.

[HardDrive]

I'm going to cheat, I've screwed some things up, but my stories are all boring.

My colleague at work however has a certain level of fame on the team. I'm a software developer. And this person managed to drop(erase) our entire development database. We work in a massive, enterprise system with n+1 connections with others. It took a long time to restore and unwind.

[Cooper911SC]

I've been detailing cars for 20+ years. I've had some amazing opportunities to take care of many awesome cars, prepare 100 point Duesenbergs for Pebble Beach and work for some well known restorerers and collectors.

But...When I was still wet behind the ears...I bought my first quality Porter Cable polisher around 1996 because I scratched the crap out of the hood of a freshly repainted 964 Turbo!

Some unknown debris got caught in my wash mit and the hood took the hit... it was down low near the hood crest...the owner ran a traditional Colgan bra. I finished washing the car (went every week). Put the bra back on sweating bullets! It covered the damage.

That week I went out and bought a $250.00 polisher, pads, and the correct Meguiars polish.

The next week I took care of the mistake!!

Fast forward 20 years... next mistake and my most expensive to date (knock on wood) [although I'm insured now]. I started installing clear bra paint protection film in the early 2000's.

I had a new 991 C4S and the owner wanted only XPEL 40Mil thick PPF on the headlights. I did the install and the film was a little "long". No problem, just hand trim off the extra 1/8"... 40 Mil is hard to carefully hand trim with a blade. I scored the headlights too!! When I pulled off the excess film the UV coating partially pulled from the lenses too!!

That was a $3,000.00 mistake for new main headlights!

The irony is that this is now a known problem partially "on Porsche's supplier". They went with a new supplier/coating for 991 & up lights... there is now a known delamination problem. NOT recommended to install PPF on the new lights.
Although I openly admit I "cut" the lenses.

Live and learn... sucks to own it, but taking care of the customer is what keeps you in business.

I'll leave this thread with a funny but likely true thought. The difference between an amateur and a professional is that the professional knows how the hide his mistakes.