What's your biggest screwup at work? I mean an instance where you can blame no one but yourself.

I used to mix chemicals at a production plant in these huge metal containers. One night I did not close a valve all the way and when I came back an hour later I found a lake of chemical solution a couple of inches deep all around the mixing room! Boy, did my co workers tease me for years after that...

What are your screwups at work?

Having a relationship with a coworker im no longer with....bad idea and should've known better. Still work in the same company, different departments, but awkward nonetheless.

never had any huge screw ups, worst was accidentally tipping over a crate full of glass.

I had a bunch of close calls that would have become situations gone nuclear. like when i worked at a lumber yard, i accidentally nudged a huge metal rack and it began tilting over a cliff edge that goes over into a river. It was precariously balanced by the tips of my forklift and me and a manager stayed an hour late after closing trying several ways to get it to lean back upright with out it falling into the river. the rack weighed several thousand pounds btw.

I don't have an interesting story, but I know a good one. Before I was born, my dad was working with chemicals. he's an engineer/chemist (extremely qualified, mind you.). Well, it turns out someone screwed up badly. something that was supposed to be one thing, must've gotten confused because it turned out to be a different thing, but it was sent with the label suggesting it was the first. So they started mixing the chemicals like they had done so many other times.

My dad was the only one that lived. It was apparently quite the explosion. Obviously I wasnt there for it, but the skin grafts all over his body are pretty good evidence. Yeah, he totally won the lawsuit.

Where does one draw the line between 'having a relationship with a co-worker' and 'using staff breaks and bathrooms inappropriately?'

I was working refurbishing PCs for a company, after applying a fresh coat of Thermal Paste I was supposed to make sure no Capacitors were blown, but I forgot.. needless to say once I was trying to install Updates and it kept freezing i felt like a total idiot..

another time I was getting an old HP Laptop running, where cables from the Display had to be attached to the Wireless card.. after replacing the wireless card as it was not working, I accidentally popped off on of the connectors from the display to the card.. and since i already assigned a COA to that machine, I had to do paperwork to reassign it I would rather not have had to go through

Well http://space.stackexchange.com/questions/1783/was-the-noaa-n-prime-satellite-really-dropped-on-the-floor wasn't me, thank God, but it happened at the "other" company down the road from where I was at the time. That's a bad day. Ever since then, I figure no matter what I do it ain't that bad.

Hopefully my boss agrees

At my new job? So far so good. *Knocks on wood*

At my last job, I was filming some car footage for a client, and apparently never checked to make sure he got into one of the numerous chase vans we had following the shoot. He was back at basecamp, and was really angry. We had to play all the footage for him, and I think he was unhappy about it out of principle of leaving him. Anyways, we had to do the shoot over again and it ran us an extra $40,000 over budget.

Hmm. There was the summer job loooooooong ago at Sam's Club. Could likely place some responsibility on them, though, since the guy who was supposed to show me the ropes was late & they shoved me out on the floor right away...... doing the overnight restocking in the liquor aisles. Not really knowing how to handle pallets of precariously-balanced open boxes of wine bottles, I ended up tipping a bottle over.

And tried to catch it before it hit the ground.

Important safety tip - don't do that. My hand got there just a second after it hit and broke. Was very lucky - only ended up with six stitches in the tip of my left pinky. But it was still an accident that left a puddle of wine, blood, and broken glass on the floor, half an hour into my first night on the job. (plus missing the next week or two, since I couldn't work with the injury.)

And then the hack at the emergency room gave me great stitches, so I have a pretty good scar to remember the whole thing by.

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Of course, the guy two weeks later, who missed with the forklift, and dropped half a pallet of 2-liter soda bottles to the floor from 20-30 feet up? Yeah, that was a good one, too. Exploding bottles of soda, bouncing all over the damn place.

No huge screw-ups, just a couple of minor ones come to mind for individual incidents. I work as a chemist at a pharmaceutical company. One time I was using a piece of machinery called a Parr hydrogenator. Part of it involves a tube running from a hydrogen tank into a reaction vessel which contained, among other things, palladium on carbon and methanol. When I was done running the reaction I removed the tube then released the remaining hydrogen in the system through it. However, there was a bit of palladium on carbon left on the tip of the tube, and that stuff can spontaneously catch on fire when it becomes dry. The flow of hydrogen evaporated the methanol, the dry palladium sparked, and the hydrogen stream burst into flame, creating a mini flamethrower about 2 feet from a decent sized hydrogen tank (incidentally, having the tank so close to the hydrogenator was something a fire inspector had insisted on- idiot). Fortunately I was able to shut off the flow of hydrogen before anything got too crazy and I wasn't injured, but it was a bit hairy for a few seconds. Ultimately just had to submit an incident report to our EH&S department and also updated the rest of my department on what happened and what practices should be followed to avoid something like that happening again. Learning experience for everyone.

Another time I'd been synthesizing a fairly large molecule that was to serve as an intermediate, but along the way one of the stereocenters in it got scrambled. I should have transformed the intermediate into a compound we had an authentic sample of to confirm something like this hadn't happened, but I didn't. Only after 20 or so compounds were made from it did we start wondering why none of them were behaving like we thought they should, and finally the intermediate was made via a different route and we found the compounds were two different things. Quite a few structural revisions in our database and re-synthesized compounds were necessary. Definitely taught me a lesson about properly confirming just what it was I had made. These days I tend to be the one catching these kinds of problems instead of creating them, so at least it seems to have served as a good learning experience.

On my previous engineering job, right near the start of my time at the company, I made a spreadsheet error on some tables for a presentation we were giving to land a fairly large contract with a county government. My error was caught by the client, when our numbers turned out to be way out of whack with the numbers our competitors were giving. If not for the VP making the presentation going into overdrive to salvage the situation, I would have probably lost my job then. As it was, we ended up getting the job anyway, and I escaped with just getting written up.

I bet your heart was pumping really fast!

Oh yeah. I was certain that when I went in the next day, my supervisor would be waiting for me in the lobby with the dreaded cardboard box.

Mine is actually a series of biggest screw ups, so I'd have to post back when I narrow what I consider the biggest or the biggest lol.

Kind of going this through, but she was a ex for now 15 years. I got her a job at my store recently since she was having major trouble getting one. Having to raise a kid and all.

At least you didn't boink your boss's daughter not knowing it was his daughter and get caught in his house...I liked that job too. Easy money, easy work, fun people.

I cut myself unpacking a set if kitchen knives I had delivered to the office because a few packages had been stolen from my porch so receiving packages was more secure at work. It was the end if a long day and I didn't see the big warning labels about exercising care when unpacking them. Ended up with a two inch long, quarter inch deep incision in the palm of my hand. Our COO ended up driving me to the ER for stitches. It was pretty embarrassing being that clumsy with kitchen knives in the office.

15 years is more than a good amount of time for things to settle if things didn't end so terribly as it did in my case. That drama got brought to work and I almost left because of it, but my boss didn't want to lose me and I really respect him so I stayed. Rarely see or even talk to her now in the office and have since gotten happily married. Does the ex know about it? Hell to the NO.

Last name screening needed here...either that or you're movin too fast

They shared a fairly common last name and I am not going to ask who her dad is, it would be weird...at least nowadays, especially when we are both over 20 years old lol. Besides, typically people don't think too well in those kinds of situations.

I once misjudged the strong downdraught coming from the leeward side of the mountain when landing an aeroplane in Crete. Came down at a rate of more than 3Gs and had to delay the flight for over an hour while engineers checked that the landing gear wasn't broken. Oops!

My first month at my current job back in 1999, I was just a bag boy doing routine office/customer service area cleanup. There was a trash bag full of product that I thought was trash.. because it was sitting there.. in a trash bag. And there was some pie shells in it that I thought was no more good. So I dumped it. I didn't notice that I was being followed by the security guard either. 5 minutes later, I'm called to the office by the store manager.

Security guard walks in and dumps the contents of the trash bag on to the managers desk(I don't know if later the manager told him not to do that again, but he was visibly annoyed by the act). I'm being accused of throwing away fresh product and I stated that I thought it was trash. If it were good product, why did someone just leave it there. It had to been sitting there for a good hour or more. The store manager said that he normally fires people for stuff like that, but he could tell that I was being honest and gave me a warning, and next time to check with someone first if I'm not sure its safe to dump out any bags at customer service.

I'm still confused by this because it's 7AM, and there weren't any shoppers in the store. So who the hell left that there?

Anyway, still with the company and while I was fired twice since then for different reasons, I probably would be unemployed still today if I was fired for that particular reason.

Oh we're having communications problems right now, seeing as we were trying to get back together, and to my displeasure the reason we broke up(I broke up with her) long time ago, is still there.

I should add - it does feel a bit awkward but we don't bring the issues to work. Right now, I prefer to not be seen by her, or see her.

Every screw up I've had can be directly linked back to some incompetent jackwagon in my office. So have over screwed up? Sure. Am I at fault? Nope.

Getting fired.