What's the Worst Mistake You Made at Work? NSFW

[madmacmo]

I was having two separate over lapping texting conversations this morning. The first with my wife in the waiting room of her GYN, and the second with the Lead Admin in our office. Luckily she knows me all too well having worked together with her for a quite a while. The bad thing is she is also good friends with my wife and neither one are going to let me live this down ever.

 

[Sigurthr]

Lol.

Back when I was a precision TIG welder I unknowingly had chronic hypoglycemia. I have a hard time thinking logically when my sugars get low, and since I went for many, many years with low sugars I wouldn't get the physiological warning signs of low sugar until after I was in the dumb-as-a-door-nail state.

One day I was making conveyor belt pass-through support brackets that I had made hundreds of times before. It just wasn't coming together like it normally did, it seemed to fight me at every step. Note that this isn't a slot-A fits into channel-A type construction; everything was from scratch from sheet steel. I finish it just before lunch. Eh, it looks ok.

I went to lunch. Ate, and then came back to my work station.

My jaw dropped. I built it inside out and backwards. It was rotated inwards on itself as if you took a shirt and turned it inside out; the silhouette is nearly identical. Entirely inside out, left was right, front was back, etc.

I spent the rest of my shift cutting it all apart and rewelding it the right way.

As I later fount out when I began treatment for Addison's Disease, my blood sugars were dipping dangerously low on a somewhat regular basis. I still have to fight of chronic hypoglycemia, but thankfully my meds keep my sugars from dropping down to the retardation level.

 

[Down with Umbrella]

@ Sigurthr. That's rough, I've one holed a flange before on a 45. That sucks.

Two months ago we were in a hurry to get some pipe done and sent to hydro.
The drawings specified material A333, (we paint that pipe red) so I grabbed the 2in red pipe and started welding on the tees, flanges, etc. off it went.
Later I was looking at the scrap and noticed A106 faintly printed on the pipe.. It had been mispainted.
I wrested for a few days before I talked to the QC. He said the TIG process would be the same either way er70s filler metal. However if the client requested the MTR(material testing results) they wouldn't match A333 is a slightly better grade.

 

[Things]

Worst mistake at work? Thinking that working in an electronics oriented place (components and such, not so much commercial electronics) would keep most of the stupid people away. How wrong I was.

 

[ARG]

Worst mistake at work? Thinking that working in an electronics oriented place (components and such, not so much commercial electronics) would keep most of the stupid people away. How wrong I was.

If something is idiot proof they'll just make a better idiot

 

[Dr_Evil]

Although it isn't real bad, this is the worst one I can remember.

I had just finished going through an aircraft engine run class shortly before this happened. This was the first time I started a real engine outside the training I went through. There were three throttle detents; idle, start and cut-off. During a normal start, you would lift the throttle control up and move it forward over the detent. Then you would let it down and pull it back until it stops at the detent.

Well, that part of the engine start didn't go right. The throttle control was slightly bent. It wouldn't stop at the detent. I ended up going back and forth about 4 to 5 times. The fuel would cut off each times I pulled it back past the stop position. Then when I went forward each time, fuel would come back on along with ignition and relight the engine. I finally pulled it back slowly to the position it would normally stop. Then I continued on with a normal engine start-up.

This was either engine number 1 or 2 on a 4 engine aircraft. The person sitting in the co-pilot seat said he could hear the engine relight each time I went forward of the start position.

 

[The Lightning Stalker]

Okay, well there was this one time I was working as a student in the grounds department
at a college. We had some really nice GM diesel work trucks with lift gate and everything.
We were working near the barn and there was a low wall or foundation or something from a
building that had been removed. For some reason I was backing up with the door open and
it got caught on the top of the wall and bent past its normal point and got stuck fully open
or wouldn't close or something. My boss had to call his boss, who was a very even
tempered man, and he came over and proceeded to yell very belligerently at me.

My boss said that in the entire time he had worked there, which was like over 20 years, he
had never seen him once raise his voice like that. And keep in mind this was a college with
dumb college kids working as student workers and things would go wrong on a regular basis.
He later apologized after he had cooled down. It's not the kind of thing you soon forget. That
job was something else. There are so many stories and memories. I could write a book, but
I'm not much of a writer.