We all make mistakes. Sometimes they are meaningless little “whoops” types of mistakes, but other times they are pretty bad, and the consequences of these kinds of mistakes can be utterly devastating. Other times, huge mess-ups have luckily had very little blowback, letting us breathe a sigh of relief.
Whether we've all been there or not, These redditors gave their most cringeworthy mess ups for our own amusement, so let's be grateful we’re all still here to talk about our worst mistakes.
“I think we all wish we could erase some dark times in our lives. But all of life's experiences, bad and good, make you who you are. Erasing any of life's experiences would be a great mistake.” —Luis Miguel
42. Forgetting to Lock The Tiger Away
Once I left a door to a tiger's enclosure unlocked and let the tiger back in after I was done cleaning. Walked by a couple minutes later doing a lock check, realized my mistake, and nonchalantly placed the lock back on the door and kept walking past coworkers while internally freaking out. Could have gotten myself or someone else mauled by a tiger that day.
41. Baby Mistakes
I shudder just typing this one out.
At the start of a 450 mile road trip home from my in-laws' place, I strapped my baby daughter into her car seat and put the seat into the car. Finished packing a few small items and set off.
We stopped just over 2 hours later and I went to take the baby out of her seat. The seat hadn't been secured, it was just sitting on the back seat. You're supposed to fasten it in place with the seatbelt and I had somehow in my sleep-deprived state forgotten to do so. We'd travelled almost 150 miles where one emergency stop or careless driver rear ending us could have had dire consequences.
I am not going to tell my other half.
40. Ninja Puker
Woke up at 3am on my friend's couch after a late night of drinking and pizza. Within about 10 seconds I proceeded to vomit what I estimated to be a full large pizza and whatever cocktail of liquid mistakes. A massive amount of vomit and most of it went on the coffee table, which had a recessed groove around it so that a glass top could sit within it. Meaning crevices full of soggy cardboard pizza puke.
I had to drunkenly clean up that mess. And take the trash out. Lift the 4-5 foot glass top out of the coffee table. Miserable accident.
Meanwhile a friendly German Shepherd pup was attempting to help me clean with his own method of trying to eat it all.
Friend didn’t know until i told him. Idk how.
39. Cutting The Entire University’s Internet
I once was configuring the network firewall of the university I worked on and accidentally and without realizing toggled a switch that effectively cut all internet access of the university. I realized it only when someone in the room asked another person about the Internet being weird, then it hit me. My heart started racing as I went back and corrected the configuration setting.
I cut off the University from the world for about 5 minutes, it probably affected about 150k people, at the very least. "Internet glitch" was the official diagnosis.
38. Feeding Classmates Cookie Cooties
When I was in first grade, I was carrying a Tupperware tray of cookies into the school lobby for a class party. Mom had taken me to school early rather than the usual bus ride. A few feet into the school, I tripped and the cookies scattered all over the lobby floor.
The school principal was the only witness. I was mortified and started to cry. He quickly picked up all the cookies and placed them all back in the container, and told me "It's all right. Nobody will ever know. Go on to class!" I did. My classmates and teacher ate all the cookies, complete with high-traffic lobby cooties.
Sorry, Mr. Kinnison, I just couldn't hold our dirty little secret to my death like we agreed. Now we'll both die in prison.
37. The Laundry Basket Is Not a Toilet
One night during my sophomore year of college I came home drunk and really needed to go to the bathroom. I shared a room with two other girls who were both sleeping at the time. Instead of going into our bathroom, I went into our closet and peed into my one roommate’s laundry basket. The weird thing was I was aware that I was doing so but didn’t think it was a big deal.
The next day I woke up and completely forgot until I went into the closet. Before she woke up, I took out all her dirty clothes, which were now covered in pee, washed them, and disinfected her laundry bin. Luckily it was plastic so it was easy to clean. Although she’s my best friend, it’s been about 4 years and I’ve still never told her. Waiting for the right time.
36. Insulting Your Teacher's Country
In my Spanish class, we had to do presentations on a country. My partner and I did ours on stuff like politics and modern stuff on the country we were assigned.
Another partnership presented before us, and they did theirs on Honduras. They introduced their country as HONDURAS, THE MURDER CAPITAL OF THE WORLD. After extensive slides of murder and homicides and crime, the teacher asked for culture. They said OK, so they had to scroll through around 10 more slides of the drug trade in Honduras. And my teacher, who is pretty strict and has a short temper, is Honduran.
Apparently the project had to be exclusively on culture and history. Luckily we didn't talk about the stuff happening in Argentina or else she'd lose her mind. We had time to redo it while the teacher had a grudge on the other group for the rest of the year.
The teacher's daughter, who is also fluent in Spanish, was there that day because she had no school. So yeah, imagine two high schoolers talking bad about your country in the presence of your daughter.
35. Pool Problems
Used to work a pool cleaning route. Had a customer whose pool sat at a higher elevation than its pump system. Being 19 and forgetting everything I had ever learned about physics, I opened the lid to empty the pump's skimmer basket and a ton of water just starts pouring out through this pump. I frantically start twisting valves to no avail, I briefly consider calling my boss and asking for help but think "screw that" because he was a jerk, so I just put the lid back on the pump.
The water was coming out with a lot of force because the majority of a 50,000 gallon pool was trying to come out through this mini geyser.... So I just sat on it. I got the lid back on and surveyed the damage which actually wasn't bad considering at least 500 gallons had spilled all over this dude's backyard. His neighbor whose yard was downhill from my customer's property probably got a little flooded but nobody ever complained. I just filled my customer's pool back up to the proper level and threw some extra chemicals in (on the house, of course) and nobody ever knew.
34. Wrong Car
When I was in high school, my parents had a VW Golf and a station wagon. I had keys to both cars, although I normally drove the Golf because it was a GTI and a hoot to drive. Our local mall had the movie theater, arcade, and food court all near one particular entrance, which was normally my preferred place to park.
One Saturday I didn't have much going on so I got up, drove the station wagon to the mall, played some games, tooled around for a bit, hung out with friends, then got in my car and went home. When I got home both my parents were gone, which was weird, but I thought, "It's cool. I can watch what I want to on tv." So I grabbed a bag of chips and started watching some movie on HBO.
About an hour or so into the movie I realized.... "hey wait a minute, I didn't drive the Golf to the mall. But I drove the Golf home..... oh crap!" I realized my parents had driven to the mall in the Golf and used the exact same parking area I used. When I got out of the mall I must have seen the Golf, just got in it, and absent mindedly driven home. My parents were still at the mall, had been for over an hour (which was a record for my dad), and I was certain my father was in the midst of calling the cops to report a stolen car.
I jumped into the Golf, drove as quickly as I could back to the mall (had my mother seen the way I drove, she would have killed me). By some miracle the EXACT spot my parents had parked in was available, so I parked the car. I then walked the couple rows over and got into the station wagon and drove home.
My parents came home like 30 mins later. I asked them how the mall was and my father started complaining about how my mother made him shop for a new bedroom set or whatever. But other than that, it was fine.
I didn't tell them that story until I was into my late 20s.
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33. Yeah...It Was Totally Your Mistake, Dad
Okay not mine but a mate. Basically when he was a kid him and his brother were fooling around and throwing things at each other in the yard. A wayward throw sent the projectile right onto the windscreen of his dad's car, cracking it.
They decided not to face the music and just went inside without saying anything. The next morning the dad before leaving for work comes in and says, "You wouldn't believe it. I was hosing the ice off the windscreen and it bloody cracked it"
32. Losing Your Bird
I am a veterinarian. The office I work at is open 24/7, but there aren't many workers around from about 2:00 to 4:30 am. One night it was Christmas Eve and I offered to stay. I was there with two other people and it was about 4:00 am, the two others went out to get some coffee, I stayed back and watched the animals while they were out.
There weren't many animals but there was a parrot. A few minutes after the other workers left, the parrot started screaming. It started making these hideous wailing sounds so I went to see it, and it had gotten its toe stuck in the latch to open the cage. I opened the door to free it and it flew out.
I chased after it but then I LOST it, it was being quiet so I couldn't hear it and it refused to come out. Then the other workers came back and I went into full panic mode because I had just lost a very ill bird that was supposed to go home at 7:00 am. Just as they walked in I made up some bull excuse as to why I couldn't chat with them and I went looking for the bird. Luckily it screeched again and I found it and put it back.
Nobody ever found out but I panicked a little when someone came in to do X-Rays a little later and yelled out, "why is there bird poop on the computer?"
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31. Trusted With Too Much Responsibility
Started an apprenticeship in IT and was woefully under-qualified. I was given the responsibility of maintaining the intranet site for our whole department, obviously given a role that's internal so I couldn't mess up customer facing things. They underestimated my power. On one cheery Friday evening when half my department had gone home early I was experimenting on the site, creating and deleting test pages in a hidden area.
I got two different delete buttons (on the same page) mixed up and accidentally deleted the whole site... there is no undo. I didn't have access to the change log. What I DID have was another tab open with the same site on it in edit mode that I forgot I had. I hit "save changes" on that page and voila, everything is back! After changing my pants I went home and spent the whole weekend terrified that my boss would find out. They never did.
Fast forward two years, I've been training hard and now I design systems for our staff. Never messed up that bad again. Yet.
30. Stealth Help From Mom
My mom is a very soft spoken, gentle woman. Only heard her curse once in my life. Very old fashioned, super kind. So innocent, she's amazing.
As a teenager I was rebellious and always up to no good. I had a best friend whose parents were super religious, (we met at Christian private school), and we would get into mischief with each other.
One time we were out around 2 am and went to another friend's house we hadn't talked to in years who went to the Christian school with us. We knocked on his window and asked him to sneak out, but he said he couldn't. He then in turn apparently told his parents about it, and his parents contacted my friend's parents. If we got into any more trouble together after that we weren't going to be allowed to hang out anymore.
So one night my friend and I rode one bicycle about 10 miles to go to this girl's house, taking turns sitting on the handlebars. We had a reason for wanting to go but we didn't stay long, so after our long arduous journey, we set out on our return trip.
Not 5 minutes after embarking, a cop pulls up and stops us. It's around 4-5 in the morning and I hadn't even thought about curfew being a thing. He called up both our parents, and my mom came to pick us up. He wasn't able to reach my friend's parents so he left a message on the machine.
Knowing this was the inevitable forced termination of our friendship, I convinced my mother to drive to his house on a covert mission. He lived out in the boonies, so when we arrived at his house, she had to turn off her lights and drive stealthily down his country road of a driveway.
He snuck inside while his parents slept, deleted the message off the machine, and we escaped scot free.
Till this day I still can't believe my mother did that for us. Super OG, totally uncharacteristic of her. My friend and I are still in contact decades later even though he lives in Thailand. Thanks mom.
29. Cat App
I'm a freelance app developer.
I was preparing to submit an app to the store for this client. The build was ready, and I was just about to upload it.
"I'll just install it and do a final check," I think, and I'm glad I was paranoid about it.
The app name was something like "psihgdfhgdlgh"...
My cat used to have a bad habit of jumping on my keyboard when I wasn't looking. He actually managed to send a Skype message to a client once, full of gibberish. I was in the process of training him that he's not allowed on the desk.
I can only imagine what my client's reaction would have been if the app got released with that name...
28. Mom Always Knows
Friends and I decided one night (at 14 years of age) it would be a fun idea to "borrow" one of our mom's cars. It was the first night I drove a car, and...the first time I crashed a car. Drove it home and cleaned the dirt off. Painted a rock blue and threw it at the mangled bumper.
Friend's mum reportedly came home that day with a story about how some jerk must have hit her in the parking lot at work and driven off.
It wasn't until about 7 years later she apparently turned to him one night and said "hey you know how my car got damaged a while back...was that you?" He confirmed, and she replied "oh well, at least insurance covered it."
27. Moving the Car Into The Neighbor's Yard
Being a young inexperienced driver, my mother asked me to move my sister's car so she could back out. Well, 14 year old me goes casually walking to my sister's car. I get in and crank it up with no problem, check my mirrors, and buckle up like a good driver.
That’s when things got real. I put the car in reverse, slowly backing up until my heel slips, causing me to put all my weight onto the gas pedal.
Sending this 2001 Monte Carlo flying out of the driveway, across the street, and into the neighbor's yard. Luckily in the craziness I was able to brake and come to a complete stop.
Realizing I was ok I laughed my ass off, but then fear set in as I got out to inspect for damage. And HOLY CRAP! There was none. Nothing knocked loose and the vehicle ran smoothly.
So I casually moved my sister's car out of the neighbor's yard and off to the side where I intended to go. And to my surprise no one in the house heard it and I went about the rest of the day thinking I was sly.
26. Mistaken For Diesel
I borrowed my brother in law's Ute while moving some things. I accidentally filled it up with diesel because I stupidly assumed it was a diesel engine (definitely sounded like one). Had to get the thing towed and flushed out that night but luckily no damage was done. Returned it with no one the wiser, but could have been pretty bad if I had mixed the fuel the other way around.
25. There’s Always a Chance to Turn It Around
My sophomore year of college I was failing 3 of my 4 classes near the end of the semester due to too much partying and not enough working. I was able to drop two, fail one, and pick up a “flexible learning” course that counted for that semester but I had 16 weeks to complete. Had that not all worked out I would have lost my full ride and probably would have had to move back home to the community college. I still had to appeal my scholarship, and was on academic probation for a year, but I got back on track and just completed my masters.
24.Wax on, Wax off
I spilled red wax all over cream carpet when I was about sixteen. Then carefully cleaned it all up using printer paper and an iron (you lay the paper over the wax, iron on low heat, and it transfers the wax from the carpet to the paper).
What made it harder was that my mom (one of those really particular, house proud people) was napping in the next room the whole time. Had to do all of it without waking her up.
When we moved out, there was a tiny stain still there, but she never picked up on it until then.
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23. Double Check Your Texts
When I was in high school, I was dating this guy for a few months. I decided to send him a nude while I was getting ready for school. I took the picture, attached a detailed sext (even though the most we had ever done was over the clothes touching...) and hit send and finished up getting ready.
5 minutes later, I'm in the back seat of my mom's car and I opened my phone to check for a reply. I realized I sent it to my mom instead. I silently freaked out before I realized she obviously hadn't seen it yet or else everything wouldn't be so calm right now. I saw her purse on the console between the front seats, phone peeking out with a text notification. I grabbed it as quickly as I could, she asked what I was doing and I just said "I'm checking to see if I'm getting texts." I deleted it, TRIPLE checked, and deleted all evidence from my own phone too.
I'm almost 24 now and I still am super cautious any time I send anything even slightly questionable to anyone. I won't text my sister something with a curse word in it unless I check the recipient box twice.
22. Cake Drop
I made a cake for work, and accidentally swapped sugar for salt. As I was prepping it in the staff lounge, I cut myself a small bite and tasted it, it was horrible! People were already arriving for lunch, and being known as someone who bakes amazing cakes, people were excited to have a slice. Not knowing what to do, I picked up the cake and, using all of my acting abilities, "stumbled" and dropped it on the floor. Left a huge cake mess, but saved my reputation!
Best part was that the boss felt so bad for me (and perhaps disappointed at not getting any cake) that he told me to head down to the local bakery and pick up a cake, and he'd wire me the money to cover the expense!
21. It’s Fine, Just Don’t You Ever Do It Again
When I was 17 I worked for the city's newspaper, and one of my jobs was to add up all the orders for the next day's papers so they could print what they needed.
Once I made a huge error and they printed off thousands of extra papers. I was very lucky, they covered up for me, quietly disposed of the extra papers and didn't tell the boss. I was just asked very nicely to never, ever do it again.
20. Premature Peeing
I once drove 10 hours to see a girl I barely knew in Washington, DC (we ended up dating). We went out on the town and got pretty drunk and had a great time. We went home and things started heating up in the bedroom. I figured we we're gonna do it. You know, it. I had to pee, so I went to the bathroom.
However, while in the bathroom I got INCREDIBLY nervous that I was going to disappoint this beautiful girl. I had a kit with a toothbrush and such that was in the bathroom. It also had a flask in it. So I chugged the whole flask of Grey Goose. Almost puked, didn't, and then brushed my teeth and resumed activities. I hung dong on her, it was great, and we went to sleep.
But then I woke up about 3 hours later having peed the bed. NOOOOOO! I panicked. I rolled her to one side, tucked the sheet under her, and rolled her over it and slipped it out from under her. Luckily she was in a dorm, so it had those plastic mattresses that are in every dorm, so it was easily wiped. I took the sheets and wet stuff and stumbled around, quite literally, the whole dormitory looking for the washer and dryer.
I managed to wash and dry the sheets, and make the bed under her without her ever knowing. It was a great trip.
19. Hiding the Crappy Evidence
One day after a night of heavy drinking, I woke up to find I had pooed myself whilst I was asleep. I was absolutely horrified, as you can imagine. I quickly showered and stripped the bed, taking extreme care to remove any trace. I was just finished when my boyfriend came home. He didn't suspect a thing.
18. Thinking With the Wrong Head
The day I learnt how to take apart a VCR and put it back together again will be forever in my memory.
I was 14, and like most 14 year olds, any excuse to yank it is enough. Found my dad's porn stash, home alone for an hour, let's do this.
After about 10 mins of my dads well-worn 90s bootleg porno, the tape decided to jam.
Cue me trying to eject the tape and making things worse.
Shoot.
Let's just say the blood wasn't in my brain at this point.
Grabbed a screwdriver and disassembled the VCR, carefully removed the tape without breaking the ribbon, and wound it back so it looked untouched. I put the VCR back together and re-hid the porno so my dad wouldn't find out, and I was never questioned about it.
The biggest kicker about it all is that my dad is no longer with us, and as an adult now I'd love to tell him this story as he would find it hilarious imagining me in a flat panic trying to repair a VCR mid-wank.
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17. Pulling Yourself Over
Late one morning I was going 68mph in a 35mph zone. Saw the cop on the side of the road and pulled over before he could even start his car or get his lights on. Came up to the window, said he's never seen someone pull themselves over and that he wished I ran because that would be more fun. 30 seconds later he gave me a verbal warning and sent me on my way... lucky!
16. Engineering an Explosion
As an undergrad in college I worked in a research lab for the school's chemical engineering department. My partner and I were making a reactor that could contain hydrogen gas; hydrogen gas is the smallest molecule there is, which makes it very difficult to effectively contain.
We made our prototype reactor and needed to test it to make sure it was sealed tight and could handle high internal pressure. To do this we submerged it in a 55 gallon barrel of water and kept pumping air into it to see if any bubbles escaped. We kept filling it with air and didn't see any bubbles and wanted to know at what pressure it started to leak so we kept pumping air in.
It didn't leak. It exploded, fortunately the explosion was contained by the water. But all that air being rapidly released blew all the water out of the barrel and flooded our professor's lab. There was no drain in the floor; in case of a chemical spill you don't want that hitting the public water supply. So we had to break into the janitor's closet and got the entire lab cleaned up. To this day our professor still doesn't know about it. And it wasn't even the only time we accidentally blew something up or flooded his lab.
And our project wasn't to design the reactor, the reactor was one component of the larger project.
15. No Limits Credit Card
I work for a credit card company. One day our main systems crashed so we had to use the old DOS systems to access the customers' accounts. So this lady calls and wants to reduce her limit from $3,500 to $1,000$. Easy. But what I didn't know, since we were basically using a system created even before I was born, was that I was supposed to delete the old limit and then put the new one. So because of my mistake, the lady had for a very brief moment a limit of $10,003,500.
14. (Almost) Melting Your Face Off
This is less a screw up and more a near miss.
One time, before I knew anything about cars, my '87 truck overheated on the way to work. I pulled over, walked into a gas station, and grabbed a gallon of water because I knew that when a car overheats you're supposed to pour room temp water into the radiator.
What I didn't know was that it needs to not have been running for a few before you attempt to unscrew the top. The superheated geyser that resulted missed melting my face off by a cool 6 inches or so.
Never did that again.
13. Bye Bye Website
I was Online Manager for an organisation about a decade ago.
I was super-tired and working late one Friday night when I screwed up and deleted their entire website. I threw up a "Were doing maintenance" message and spent the next eight hours trying to find another copy of the code... discovering along the way that the organisation did not have a single working backup.
In the end I went to the Internet Archive and saw that some of the text was there... so I went home at four in the morning, slept for a couple of hours, and was back in the office by 7am Saturday morning. I then spent the entire weekend locked in my seat grinding away to recreate the the entire website from scratch. Graphics, JavaScript, applets, forms, HTML etc etc etc. I walked out the door about 4am Monday morning... and then wandered in to the office by 9am like nothing had happened.
The only fallout was a slow stream of calls and emails over the next six months saying that "My page seems to have disappeared?" which I blamed on a succession of different made-up reasons.
12. No Hookah in the House!
Parents went out for the weekend, I wasn’t a bad kid so there was only one rule: No hookah in the living room. Easy enough, smile and wave, promise not to burn the house down, yada yada yada, I end up smoking hookah in my living room, which had been recently recarpeted. One of my friends goes to flip the coal, and I gave him a warning of how this was the ONLY rule I had, and if he dropped the coal, my parents would never let me live it down, plus I didn’t have enough money to get my entire living room recarpeted before they got back. He nods, and goes for the coal.
Next thing I know, the red hot coal falls onto the carpet, and starts sizzling a nice burn hole directly into the center of the rug. I jump for it, attempting to pick up the hot coal with my hands. I succeed in getting the coal back onto the hookah, but not before shooting a bunch of embers onto a floor mat by the door. (The floormat was a surplus section left over from the new rug, and luckily had the same wear and weave pattern as the area I had burned.)
Luckily, one of the friends I was with had a father who installed rugs professionally. On Sunday, George, who we now call the Carpet Whisperer, worked overtime on his hands and knees to patch the spot I had burned. A half hour before my parents got home, George finished up, promising not to tell my parents. He did leave me with the burnt section he cut out, which I still have tucked away for a special day.
11. On Foreign Soil
I technically invaded Iran.
I was serving in the Navy during the War on Terror, on my second deployment, and was in Navigation. Our Captain was a little... eccentric? And he liked messing with people. So one night he came on the bridge in his robe and fuzzy slippers and asked me to plot out 12 nautical miles from Iran. Which marks the shift from territorial to international waters.
My "mission" for the rest of the night was to ride that line. Either to let them see us on radar just outside of their waters, or just to give me something to do for giggles. So for the next few hours I was advising course corrections and doing everything I could to keep us close to but not inside that line.
Except for the little slip up of forgetting to account for drift once. Whoops. So for about... 10 minutes or so the US Navy had technically invaded Iran's territorial waters. They apparently didn't notice, and I corrected it quickly.
In truth it's probably not nearly as big of a deal as it sounds, but at the time 21 year old me was sweating bullets, thinking I'd just declared war on a foreign country or something.
10. Bumper Cars
I broke my parents' car's front bumper. Then, they didn't realize right away, drove the car, and totaled it. They never knew.
9. Druggin’ Doggie
Accidentally gave a tiny dog 10 times the amount of painkiller he was supposed to have after surgery. I was so freaked out when I realized and watched him like a hawk. He recovered from surgery just fine and probably felt pretty darn good to boot.
8. What Momma Don’t Know About the Dryer Won’t Hurt Her
Always growing up my mom told me not to overload the dryer. It was one of those fancy expensive ones and she didn't want it to break. For years she said this and I never took her seriously. Then one time after I moved out they had me house sit for a weekend. I brought literally all my laundry and washed it in a single load (stupid I know). Ended up breaking the dryer. They were coming home the next day (Sunday).
I went full repair man and took the entire thing apart, or at least getting the whole front off and getting into the meat of the thing. Turned out I snapped the band. Called everywhere and no one had the band. Ended up finding this random store downtown that specialized in washer and dryer repairs. Went in and bought a band similar to what I needed. Went home, put it on, and put everything back together. Took up my entire Saturday. It's been 3 years and my mom still doesn't know. Hehe.
7. Inside Jokes Are Not Outside Jokes
At work (on my personal email) I was emailing my best friend who was Polish, we often used “polak” as a joke. Me being part Italian I also referred to “greasy Italians.” Sent the email to my friend, looked again and realize I had typed it up in the wrong email window and had sent it to a client.
I instantly recalled the email and sent an email apologizing to the client saying it wasn't intended for them.
Thank god for old Microsoft Outlook's recall feature. It saved me that day. The client never got the original email.
6. Be Careful With Those Special Selfies
I accidentally sent a penis pic meant for my girlfriend to a group chat I have with my three sisters.
Luckily my service went down right before the picture was sent. Was so relieved to see a message saying my message was not sent, would you like to retry? No, no I would not.
5. Thank You, Facebook Robot
I was sending a porn link to my girlfriend and accidentally shared it to my facebook wall instead of in a message. I don't know how, I must have been tired or drunk or something. We're talking some really bad stuff here. I didn't even realize I'd done it until the following day.
I woke up to a message from Facebook telling me they'd auto-removed my post because it appeared to be spam (the message contained a link and my heart almost jumped out of my chest and ran away). I don't think anybody saw it, thank god. I've never been so grateful to a robot in my entire life.
4. Sorry, Mom
I was sexting my gf one day and my mom had texted during that process and I ended up replying to her message instead of my gf. I still get crap about it and it's been about 10 years. Yep, I told my mom I wanted her to sit on my face.
3. Taking the Fall
So, I work in a cnc workshop, and we often engrave stuff. This particular guy wanted a nice wooden jewelry box for their wedding anniversary with a custom message he emailed me. For some reason he chose to give the box to his wife at the workshop (not the most romantic place I can think of but whatever).
Wife starts to look confused and tear up: "you don't remember the date?"
Guy turns pale, looks at me, says: "no, I'm sure it's a mistake."
Me: "no, I've copied it straight, can't be wrooon...waaait a minute, omg, its my fault, I'm so sorry, I will redo it right away, no need to pay, please accept it as a gift..."
Wife gets angry a bit at me, but they leave with a different box and the correct date. Guy comes back next day and pays triple the original price without a word.
2. Dearest Ex Wife
I used to work at a call center for a popular gift company. This one couple calls up and says "we need to cancel our order!" I look it up, and tell them UPS already has the order to deliver it. They tell me, "You don't understand. We are sending this to our son and his wife. We accidentally put his ex wife's name on the card. It will ruin Christmas if they receive this gift!!!" I was finally able to call UPS and get them to not deliver the package. Not my screw up, but dang.
1. Always Check the Decimals
I very nearly injected a premature baby that had Down Syndrome with ten times the amount of Lasix I was supposed to give him: I had put the decimal in the wrong place when I did the math on the dose.
That baby would almost certainly have died if I'd given it to him. I had the liquid drawn up in the syringe and had the syringe actually in the port ready to push through before I looked inside the chamber and realised how uncharacteristically full it seemed. Paediatric IV doses of anything are simply tiny. I was supposed to give him 0.1 mls, and nearly gave him 1.0mls.
I needed a very large cup of tea after that.
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