People have been sharing the worst ways they’ve messed up at work, from store assistants to those who work in financial services.
Reddit user u/29thattempt kicked off the tell-all thread on the r/AskUK subreddit, telling other users: ‘I wanted to hear your mishaps to make me feel better about a mistake I’ve made at work today.’
The question quickly prompted hundreds of people from around the world to share their professional mishaps.
One admitted they’d used ‘internet issues’ as an excuse for oversleeping by up to three hours while working from home, while another charged a customer’s credit card $60,000 instead of $6,000.
Another Reddit user admitted they put £130,000 instead of £13,000 on a contract for a part-time assistant, while another managed to shred 10 years’ worth of archived accounting records.
Here, FEMAIL shares some of the best tales…
People from around the world have taken to Reddit to share their professional mishaps, from store assistants to those who work in financial services (stock image)
Reddit user u/29thattempt kicked off the tell-all thread on the r/AskUK subreddit, telling other users: ‘I wanted to hear your mishaps to make me feel better about a mistake I’ve made at work today’
One Reddit user admitted they put £130,000 instead of £13,000 on a contract for a part-time assistant’s salary, and then the worker tried to insist the company honour it
Another charged a customer’s credit card $60,000 instead of $6,000 for electrical goods and the customer then had to wait a week to get the money back after the machine was limited to $900-a-day in refunds
Someone else admitted to telling their work that they needed the day off and they would ‘be back in the morning’, but said that was 7 years ago
One user admitted they overslept by three hours on their first day while working from home and then again by two hours on their second Monday morning, using ‘Internet issues’ as an excuse both times
Another user had a slip of the tongue when they were working at a call centre, as they told the person on the phone that they didn’t believe them instead of saying, ‘It’s not that I don’t believe you’
Customers had a much sweeter meal than they wished for, when one user filled the salt shaker with sugar, and covered their customer’s chips in sweetener
Another user shared a few mishaps from their financial services career, including transferring the same guy 60 grand twice and having a mixup between transferring 1mm to a customer who was due 40,000 and 40,000 to the customer due 1mm
A shop assistant in a petrol garage only charged a customer for their newspaper, forgetting to add the £90 worth of diesel in his car
One worker had to spend hours recalling individual emails after they send a marketing email to the company’s ‘Do Not Contact’ list, rather than their subscribers
Another forgot to cancel a £100,000 payment to a large client when they asked to cancel it, and it took weeks for the money to be returned
One worker was testing blood samples but didn’t check whether the incubator was working, so the 24 people had to get another blood test
Another Reddit user admitted that they once processed a payment for £30,000 instead of £300, and the client didn’t notice for 24 hours but ‘almost beat up his wife because he thought she had stolen his money’
A user who worked in an electrical shop accidentally damaged a cube-shaped, heavy TV by putting it on a conveyor belt, but it ‘bounced’ down. They said they never told anyone and that someone must have received a TV which was ‘damaged in transit’
An IT worker accidentally deleted around 40 login accounts for active employees, so no one could work for a day. They and a colleague managed to fix it, but the employees had a long wait first
A restaurant kitchen worker dropped olives in oil all over the floor in the kitchen during their busiest dining time, making a slippery, oily mess everywhere and said it makes them ‘cringe deep within to think about it’
One worker sorted an excel sheet by column but forgot to select all the columns first, making 300,000 emails mailmerge with other people’s data, and on another day accidentally released all the scheduled emails of mostly timed appointment reminders for every client on the system
Another Reddit user received a question from a customer and didn’t know what he was talking about. However, when she tried to forward the email to a colleague saying ‘je ne sais quoi’ and ‘I think this guy is confuzzled’ she actually sent it back to the customer
Another had 10 years of a company’s accounting archiving shredded and accidentally transferred £1million instead of £100,000 to HMRC
Another user said they didn’t have anything to compete, but then admitted when they were a postman they asked a family ‘oh having a big celebration?’ after seeing lots of cards and cars at a customers house, but it turned out their daughter died the day before