What's the dumbest thing you've done at work?

[simplydamon]

As for me, I generally don't screw around at work too much (depends on how you look at the word "screw" ).

I did, however, make a mistake at work once that was rather embarassing because it was a completely avoidable situation IF I paid attention to what I was doing.

Here's what happened:
1. A customer sent me an email about an issue with his account.
2. This customer, as it turns out, was doing some questionable activities with his account.
3. A coworker of mine also received an email from the same customer.
4. The coworker saw that I was working with the account and asked me what was going on.
5. I had both emails open (customer and coworker) in Outlook at the same time.
6. I typed in: " I know who this guy is. He's f***ing with us".
7. I sent the email.
8. I then thought, " Did I send it to the correct person?"
9. I checked and I sent the email to the customer by mistake.
10. I tried recall to get the email back. As many of us know, recall doesn't work as well as we would like it to.
11. I received an email from the customer fifteen minutes later. He was, as you can imagine, not happy with me (he really was screwing around with the company in a manner that was not kosher).
12. I had to backpedal and explain that the email was meant for my coworker on another account.

**We ended up leaving the customer's account as is because the customer was really involved in some questionable activity.

Note: I did tell my boss moments after I realized it had been sent. My boss was cool with it because I rarely make mistakes like this (this was, after all, one mistake out of tens of thousands of emails over four years). If you make a mistake, it is probably best to honestly tell your boss what happened - you don't want to be caught trying to cover for a mistake.

[kd5145]

I actually have a similar story. One of the nurses e-mailed me and asked me to mail her a box of things that she had ordered. I went to forward the e-mail to a co-worker and said:

"Why the hell would I mail this to her? What a waste of money that is when she works down the street. She is so wierd."

Yea, I hadn't hit forward, but reply. I tried like you to recall the message but that was a waste.

I was mortified. I didn't know the woman all that well so I had no idea how she would react. I called her supervisor and the supervisor was all freaked out because she said that the nurse was sensitive and it just might make her quit.

I e-mailed the nurse and she replied that it was no biggie and that she had thicker skin than that. It all worked out in the end.

[George]

Your lucky your not the person who accidently reply to an email instead of forwarding it to her friend which led to that email being forward all over wall street and eventually posted onto fuckedcompany. Here is the summary to it. Guy: email a girl to ask her what shes doing on the weekend and if she wanted to go out.
Female: Instead of forwarding this email to her friend she reply with the following: You want to get some free drinks this weekend? I got a guy who we can use to get free drinks. etc....
Guy: Gets the email and was piss so he email it to everyone at her work and than it eventually spread like wild fire all over.

Can't remember the link to this. It was real funny. I'll post again if I find the email.

[kd5145]

That's gotta hurt.

[oriondarkwood]

I shut down a production database for 2 hours during the middle of the day. This database was the marketing database for a Fortune 500 company (ie 15K + users). Strangely enough I didn't get fired but you could have parked a semi in my arse after my boss got thur chewing it

[Jeremiah]

While working at at tech company as a UI designer,

a friend who runs an import model (bikini) website asked to create some banners. (not appropriate for the environment)

I went into work to do that, and my female coworker came in on me photoshopping bikini models

OMG very embarassing...

[simplydamon]

I actually had another experience....

1. I was having troubles with my home computer.
2. I asked one of the IT folks to check it out.
3. I, unfortunately, forgot that my brother typed in the word "Nipples" as a rotating screensaver.
4. The IT person, of course, was a female.
5. When I picked up the computer, she said "Nice screensaver".

I was very fortunate that I was a friend of the IT person. If not, I probably would have been in big, big trouble.

What's the web site?

[Jeremiah]

there aint' nuttin wrong with the word nipples...it could have been refferal to 'male nipples' for all she knew!

Shoot, it could have been my dog's nipples!


The site was for Phil Yeh, who runs a lot of asian parties in the bay area..

http://www.philyeh.com/

The photo was for some bikini model...i forget her name...was it esther hwang?

dunno...it was back in 2000, and in internet years, that was over 25 years ago!

[simplydamon]

"dunno...it was back in 2000, and in internet years, that was over 25 years ago!"

True, true I've aged about 25 years simply working in the internet industry PayPal took a lot out of me!

[Jeremiah]

Hehehe yeah, I know..I experience a FULL business cycle at Exodus in 3 years!

[George]

I thought working at any kind of startup keeps you young.

[QuestorTheElf]

Prior to switching careers to marketing, I too was in UI. I've always liked being close to customers. Several bosses told me they liked how I made sure the company always would look good, especially to irate customers.

So I hated being caught with my programming pants down.

When laying things out on the screen, I'd code some things to purposely look different if the program got in limbo. These things were never supposed to make it to actual production releases. Another interface designer told me that by purposely putting in off-the-wall colors during debugging, he'd be alerted to things not going well and could fix them very early. However, I had forgotten to turn off my debugging devices everywhere prior to shipping.

Months later, my boss asks me if I know anything about a red blinking 57. (We had about 50 error codes assigned, and 57 was out of range, so it was my personal way of seeing right away something completely unexpected was happening.) He said a customer on the East Coast kept calling about how to get rid of that. My boss asked me if this had anything to do with Heinz ketchup.

My face blushed just as red.