Way back as a line cook I was on saute and it was the season for soft shell crab. I had a full rail of tickets, and 2-14in. saute pans with oil heating up on full blast while I knelt down to grab the crabs from my prep cooler across from the range.

The 'roided up chef stepped over me to get to middle to expedite the rush, and grabbed one of the pans with now very hot oil in them…realizing that they had oil he stopped his motion but Newtons law kept the oil flowing, down onto my bare forearm, hand and how I was positioned my ankle.

The grill guy immediately took a pan of water and splashed my arm with it, rolled down my sleeve and soaked it…and as a bonus being a dumbass I finished the shift before driving myself to the ER. Some good blisters but fortunately no scarring, very little pain because it was kept covered.

Bonus bits: The hotel/golf resort just implemented a drug policy, and if you were injured or did 200 USD of damage you needed to take a drug test, which I did. Policy also stated that you wait 3 days not working for the results. This was the start of a very busy weekend with a car show on the golf course, etc, and every warm body was needed, I went in to work the next day and if they wanted to send someone else for a drug test because they caused the accident, I suggested the ill tempered redheaded café chef…my results were discarded later.

Bonus bonus, right after the policy was put in place, a manager dropped a chandelier & walked away from his job after 5 years working there instead of taking the drug test.

Nice try, HR.

Accidentally hitting reply-to-all on a company wide email and more or less stating that I wanted to be transferred to another team.

There was a new team forming elsewhere, and in fairness, it was a great opportunity in a lot of ways. But… I didn’t get the transfer until another batch of jobs opened a few months later.

That… was a long few months.

Missing my first shift at a large retail store because of a misunderstanding. When I showed up the next week, the manager was furious. Not the best start

Most recent, but not the absolute worst, was ripping my pants at work. I bent down to pick something up and heard the rip. It was over my crotch region too. Thankfully I had boxers on but was still pretty embarrassed.

Thankfully my boss was cool about it and I just drove over to Costco down the street and got a new pair and changed in the back of my car. He make a joke when I got back which was fine.

Worst thing in the office place was when some idiot left their window open in the middle of Winter, temps fell below 0F with high winds, and froze the 2" sprinkler pipes running over their office. Flooded most of the 2nd floor then started running through and raining out onto the 1st floor (and then into the basement). And it happened during covid lock-downs so it was fortunate anyone was even in the building to report it.

My own personal oopsie was checking network cabling in a small room, bent over to check things low and then wandered out to check elsewhere… Then noticed there was a LOT of commotion on the sales floor. Turns out I hit the power switch on one of the phone cabinets with my ass and shut down half the phone lines.

Tripped and hit my arm on the maple syrup canning machine that heats a water jacket to 200 f and got a 2 inch diameter blister.

The one I still feel guilt over was a time when i found out someone had left an animal trap loaded when they left for vacation. There was a live raccoon in it. I know I shouldn’t’ve carelessly opened it, but I should’ve done something. Even killing it would’ve been kinder. I carry that one with me, to remind me to act when I can. I’m still bad at it, but I try.

The other day I told a customer I could smell gas in her apartment, and even though I feel like a dumbass because it wasn’t a leak (probably lingering smell from them moving an appliance and hitting it on and off by accident), I don’t regret mentioning it. Sometimes I just am going to be an obnoxious jackass about that stuff.

There were three women who were best friends, took their breaks together, etc. And in the Christmas season they wore matching knit sweaters and would walk down the hall side by side so it would read “Ho! Ho! Ho!”

But one day when I was leaving the break room, they approached… and one was out sick. Before I could stop myself I asked “Where’s the other Ho?”

Might’ve gotten a visit to HR from it if I hadn’t looked so shocked at myself.

I didn’t actually delete the data but for a solid 1min I thought I had deleted an entire production db of data.

I made a delete then I hit refresh and nothing came. I refreshed again and no records panic started to set in and I refreshed again and still no records. I knew that changes replicated over to our quick backup every min so I picked up the phone and when the guy answered I said I need you to turn off the replication right now I think I just deleted the ministry of health.

After a bit of troubleshooting it turns out the data was fine and my delete worked as intended. The issue was in my client and we checked a few things then gave up. I went for a long lunch after that.

The biggest actual mistakes I’ve done were all caught by a really good manager i had and so I can’t even remember them because they never blew up.

Pushed to prod

Was relocating a $10k piece of networking hardware and dropped it into another 10k VM server. Server was fine, network hardware was not. It was during a project that was a real mess, thought it was a stupid mistake though.

We were able to work around it, though we did lose the contract we were trying to make. Honestly though given how rushed and panicked that whole three months was though, we were lucky nobody suffered anything worse. Real shitshow.

A couple of things come to mind. Nothing really happened with either, but I can’t think of anything worse:

First, years ago, when I was active duty army as a 15B Aircraft Powerplant Repairer (in the guard now), I was clipping blades on the first stage of the compressor due to damage. There’s 20 blades in the first stage, and you have to clip the one opposite as well to maintain balance. Well, I counted wrong and clipped the wrong blade. The GE rep (representative from General Electric, who makes the engine) was right there and must not have been paying attention. It ended fine, though, just extra work I had to do.

Second, less years ago at my current job as a Diesel Technician, I was doing a warranty repair for a service bulletin. I was still pretty new here, and warranty jobs pay less time, but this was like the third one I had done and was making good time, so I was trying to hurry. It was cold that day, and people complain when you have the bay doors open, so I had it just open enough to raise the cab, which meant the door was almost all the way open anyway. When I had done as much as I could do with the truck in the shop, I lowered the cab so I could pull it out and use our forklift to remove the part. I had forgotten about the door and ran into it. Didn’t get in any trouble though, just had to take a drug test per policy, and the door doesn’t close right to this day.

1. Put down a bottle of bleach a little too quickly, a little spurt splashed exactly straight up out of it when it hit the floor and somehow hit me right in the eye. Washed it out in the sink and finished my shift with my eye bright red, instead of, IDK, going to the fucking doctor like I probably should have, because I was young and exploitable.
2. Not me but a coworker: Found a handgun in our customer’s stuff, started messing around with it. You know the punchline. The bullet went through a few walls, cops got called, he made up some story about how it went off on its own while still in the cabinet which no one believed, somehow still didn’t get in legal trouble. He got fired over the phone before he had even left the customer’s premises.
3. Got hired to a startup to fix the intranet slowness, started work as everyone was leaving, instantly fucked the router and broke the network completely for the whole floor, couldn’t fix it for hours and stayed there in a panic until about 3-4 in the morning when I finally figured it out, and fixed the network and the slowness both. Never told them anything except the ending, and they liked my work and hired me full time.
4. Fucked the partition table to the main production server and my boss who was sitting right next to me had a mini panic attack while I reconstructed it from my notes and all the filesystems came back. Keep a notebook, it’ll save your ass.

I haven’t had any big mishaps myself, but I worked in a wafer fab and apparently the person who came in to replace me after I quit, dropped a whole box of wafers like a month into the job. Shit worth like $1M.

That said, massive fault on the company for a lack of better procedures handling those, and afaik the person didn’t even lose the job as it was an honest accident.