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This is a question Expensive Mistakes

coopsweb asks "What's the most expensive mistake you've ever made? Should I mention a certain employee who caused 4 hours worth of delays in Central London and got his company fined £500k?"

No points for stories about the time you had a few and thought it'd be a good idea to wrap your car around a bollard. Or replies consisting of "my wife".

(, Thu 25 Oct 2007, 11:26)
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Car Crushed
I saw an expensive forklift mistake. I watched a warehouseman use the wrong forklift for a job and lose his load (so to speak)

Instead of getting the correct attachement he used the 30tonne forklifts squeeze motion (brings the forks together) to grab a coil of wire. Not 100m, but somewhere in the region of about 2 miles of wire. the whole thing weighed about 7 tonnes. Usually a couple of forklifts move it aroung until the big fork can get is cable reel attachment to go through the middle of the reel and grip it, before loading up.

This time, they just grabbed it and lifted and drove off. All was well for about 30m, out of the warehouse and across the car park to the loading bay.

Now this is where it happened. Whilst he stopped to work out how to load up, the forks decided to have a little hiccup and loosened for a second (they aren't designed to work like this). The reel shifted and with this new found momentum started to roll out of the forks and towards the car park.

Things like this happen in slo-motion. 7 tonnes of copper on a massive 12 foot wooden reel rolled towards the car park and we were all powerless to stop it.

Even better, it managed to pick out the depot managers new Vauxhall Cavalier GSI2000 (white with spoilers!).
Basically it was destroyed. It was like a cartoon with a flat front end and the reel kinda wedged somewhere about where the back seat started.

The manager simply didn't believe us - he thought it was a another work floor prank to get him outside and laugh at him. 45 minutes of pleading did get him outside and his face was a picture.
All credit, he laughed. And kept laughing, almost maniacally. He got a new car on company insurance, no-one mentioned to the insurers we weren't using the right bits.

i bet he cried when he got home. i would have.
(, Fri 26 Oct 2007, 12:00, 1 reply)
What you needed
was a giant kitten to play with said bobbin of copper wire!!
(, Fri 26 Oct 2007, 14:46, closed)

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