Most expensive mistake at work

I worked in the engine plant of a large car manufacturer in a key role for new models

The full drawings for the engines were huge and contained lots of highly confidential info - which competitors would move heaven and earth to get hold of.

Produced by a bespoke plotter these drawings were folded in a very specific way by another machine which was attached to the side of the plotter.

Once folded the drawings were like carrying a large Sunday newspaper and supplements.

The bespoke shredder got a lot of use as everything had to go through it but, when I started my role, it had been ot of action for weeks.

The day the shredder was repaired, I put a full engine drawing in and left it to it. The shredder jammed, then caught fire leading to a full evacuation of the offices.

It was then so badly damaged it had to be replaced at huge cost.

Nobody told me the drawing had to be partially unfolded
 
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FlashGordon said:
£140k. An order wasn't executed correctly. Had to put it right in a volatile market.

I lost a fair bit of sleep that week.
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What market was that?

I've plenty of trading losses but errors I've been involved in a few corkers.

Worst one was we took down an enormous estoxx trade with fat edge and all checked out to the pub. About 5pm the counterpart calls me and says where's my delta hedge. I said we traded clean, no delta. Checked the tapes and yep it was with delta. Just over a mill on that one.

Texas hedged a put on TY over a weekend. Casual 2.2m dv01. Zero sleep that weekend.
 
Kevj said:
I very nearly once sent a quote with the backup estimate sheets still included in the spreadsheet. I’d deleted them out of the wrong version rather than the client version.
Immediately realised and recalled the email. It didn’t cost the company anything as we won the work, but it probably would have if they’d seen the mark up id included.
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Reminds me of when I was working with a civil engineers. They were bidding for a framework contract for a council.

The council sent the pricing boq out as a pdf, and the estimator asked me if I could turn it back into an excel sheet. I phoned the council and asked them to send over the xls instead of trying to convert it.

The sheet that was sent over had all the other contractors pricing in, but they had hidden the columns. Knocked up a quick formula that put our price as the lowest for each item by a random small percentage and sent our offer back. Surprisingly we won the three year deal.
 
monkeytassle said:
What market was that?

I've plenty of trading losses but errors I've been involved in a few corkers.

Worst one was we took down an enormous estoxx trade with fat edge and all checked out to the pub. About 5pm the counterpart calls me and says where's my delta hedge. I said we traded clean, no delta. Checked the tapes and yep it was with delta. Just over a mill on that one.

Texas hedged a put on TY over a weekend. Casual 2.2m dv01. Zero sleep that weekend.
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I read this in train guys voice.
 
tunstallhill said:
As a construction site setting out engineer I've made a few big errors, buildings getting constructed in the wrong place by 500mm for example
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The winners winner. Just as well you’re not god. You’d a stuck Tunstall Hill on Silky cricket pitch and the ski slope on the Board Inn roundabout…..then where would we be eh?
 
Suspender Sue said:
I've told this one before, again Uni. related.

Mate and I were employed by the Uni. Aafter qualifying as Researchers (science and Rngineering). He forgot to check the plastic piping on the water-cooling circuit for a high temperature oxidation rig for a rest to run er a ban holiday weekend.

Pipes burst and water percolated into the ceiling cavities of the two floors below (third floor lab) and into various offices and labs with some very expensive experimental kit.

Over £1 million of gear was knocked out of action though once gear was dried, this dropped to £1/4 million. Two scanning electron microscopes were narrowly missed as was an X-Ray Diffractometer. That would have probably more than doubled the cost.

Somehow, my mate got off with attending a NEEBOSH course to re-educate him on health and safety. After an uproar lasting three days, the academics quietened down and returned to hiding in their offices as they normally did.

But it wasnt the end as some builders had thought it a great idea to hide rubble in said ceiling cavities rather than dispose of it properly. And ceiling tiles made of polystyrene arent very strong.

A lecturer was sitting at his desk a week later when some of the ceiling tiles and rubble collapsed on him. His office door was unlocked and people rushed in to see he was okay.

Upon looking at his computer screen, his obsessive porn addiction was revealed to all.

This was early noughties and the place nearly called itself the City University of Newcastle upon Tyne.
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Absolute gold that like! 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
 
As my auld marra (RIP) used to say: “Anyone can make a mistake, it’s how you get out of it that counts”………….and maaaaan did he know how to get out of some tricky situations.
 
legend7 said:
At my old job I ordered 56 sets of bespoke mirrored wardrobe doors for Gentoo and I'd ordered them 100mm too tall from a place in scotland, were worth about 28k and absolutely no use to the merchant I worked for.
Was discovered when the first 3 sets were sent in.
I managed to get the glass parts remade (couldn't be cut down) and the trims all amended by a metal company down here and sent back to the manufacturer to assemble the rest and think that only cost about 4k so money well spent.
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Every mirror in our house is thanks to that sort of stuff.
Kevj said:
I very nearly once sent a quote with the backup estimate sheets still included in the spreadsheet. I’d deleted them out of the wrong version rather than the client version.
Immediately realised and recalled the email. It didn’t cost the company anything as we won the work, but it probably would have if they’d seen the mark up id included.
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A firm I used to work fors new office boy started sending out the customers price sheet and the real ones alongside the plans to the lads on site. They couldn’t understand why everyone was banging on about a pay rise all of a sudden. No pay rise so we awarded ourselves one by leaving site an hour early every day.
A few weeks later the big boss found out we were feckin off early so kicked off by going round every site one day. Someone must’ve mentioned it as the next lot of plans for 6or7 sites had no price details and a pay rise appeared a few weeks later. Unfortunately we went back to proper hours instead of pushing our luck.
 
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Not my mistake, thankfully, but I used to work for a big manufacturing software company and a few years ago one of our customers, Lockheed Martin in California accidentally dropped a big satellite on the workshop floor. Oops! They were turning it on a manipulator and someone had forgotten to re-fit the retaining bolts after they were removed for a previous operation. I seem to remember that the repairs cost about $135million.
The good news for us was that after that it was easy to sell them a shit-load of assembly management & control software to hopefully safeguard against doing things like that again. It might sound daft to need to use software to make sure they remember to bolt a satellite down before turning it upside down but these systems can have thousands & thousands of components & many operations involving a lot of different people. There is a huge potential for expensive mistakes if no proper control & management is in place.
This was the fella.
 
In 1983 I was working in the office of an office cleaning and floor maintenance company based in Exchange Buildings under the Tyne Bridge on the quayside. One day the sales manager came in looking particularly smug: he had won the cleaning contract for Lamb And Edge, a property company in Newcastle whose office had a beautiful highly polished floor as it's centrepiece. On the first day of the contract panic broke out in our office. The lad operating the floor cleaning/polishing machine had somehow swabbed strong hydrochloric acid on the marble floor. The chemical reaction that followed was CaCO3 + HCL -->CaCl + CO2 + H2O. That is to say, the floor was fizzing. When the mistake was realised and the reaction had finished Lamb And Edge had a matt finish marble floor as its centrepiece. Our company spent nearly a week restoring the polish to the floor and then promptly lost the contract.
 
Did one . Bout 5 years ago . Investigation blah blah . Money down drain .
Cant say more . They never found out.
Lied and bullshitted my way out .
Proud of myself .

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