Not as exciting as the server story earlier
but a guy in my team managed to bring one of the major clearing banks to it's knees one sunny Thursday afternoon.

After ignoring consultation with the rest of us on the team, this chap decides to run a particularly dodgy command as the server is running abit low on free space.

This totally spazzes the interactive system, and prevents anybody new from signing in to the application. Unfortunately, 2 weeks previously the application had been "upgraded" and was now incredibly flakey - signing people out on a regular basis.

Cue much gnashing of teeth and the bank being in limbo to the BoE to the tune of £1.4 billion as it missed the cutoff times for £ payments at 4pm. Not sure what the overnight rate was on £1.4 billion, but I'm pretty sure it was a fair whack.
(flamangathon is not local, Fri 26 Oct 2007, 3:28, Reply)

If I was to say...
Sexy blonde, sexy time, man-fat-attack, child, CSA payments - would that count?
(Give me the cheese you cocksucker No board sig in protest., Fri 26 Oct 2007, 3:24, Reply)

Now,
being an Austrian, I had to do military service last year, which all in all was ok. I got trained as a guardpost (glorified security guard with a big gun), and guess who gets the new year's eve shift? Yes, me, at some godforsaken military storage thing of no importance whatsoever.

Me and the guy I was on duty with had our own little office and because there obviously wasn't anything going on, we basically did what we wanted and discovered the "party button" (should have put that in best of graffiti - never mind), a little red button underneath the desk. Every couple of hours or so a high-grade NCO would come in and check if everything was ok, that we weren't getting pissed and, credit to the guy, watch the fireworks with us on the roof at midnight (great view of the city where we were).

We entered casual conversation and I asked about aforementioned button, to which he lets out a strong laugh and says "don't do it."

Apparently the year before the two stupid bastards who were there did this 10 minutes before midnight, and 15 minutes later the place was swarming with very PISSED OFF special forces operatives who'd been having their own little party on watch - and the brigadier who was on duty came later as well.

I don't know what the operation will have cost, but the two conscripts were fined the rest of their wages (4 and a half months worth), which amounted to about 1200 euros. So they basically got paid to do their basic training and then cleaned military offices for free.

OOOO I was so tempted to go press that button

length? 24 hours on duty with 4 hours sleep, a day off and the cycle restarts :)
( morrybyte made a subtle namechange at, Fri 26 Oct 2007, 2:36, Reply)

i dicided to rent a movie last weekend,
after about an hour of diciding what movie to rent from the store(it takes me a while to dicide on which movie to get cause Im poor) I went to the desk to rent it. the clerk said I couldn't rent that movie "why not?" I asked "because you owe us $457" apperantly I didn't return a movie so I owe them alot, not that I'm going to pay them.
(Rated Arrr for pirates and nudity, Fri 26 Oct 2007, 2:00, 3 replies)

The Bank
Two months ago i changed banks. They told me my money would be safe, and that i would even earn interest, looks like Northern Rock has twatted me right up.
(InGear Slipped this one in on, Fri 26 Oct 2007, 1:13, Reply)

When trust goes wrong
I was in a theatre group as a crew member last year at the end of high school. I bought a sweatshirt and some t-shirts (cash up front, very important to remember) from the head of it, who I never pegged to be the dodgy sort.

After much excuses and a promise to mail it to me still nothing has came, it is the end of October and I ordered it in June. $52 right down the loo.

Not funny or a substantial sum of money lost, but it still irks me that I trust someone (rare as it is) only to have them take the money. And at the end of the year show a month prior to this the cunt gave everyone on the crew an award of recognition except for me. Most of the people there sat around on their ass talking before shows and I was the one to do a lot of heavy lifting (some of which were sharp because of metal)

btw My first qotw (and post) Cheers all!
(Skooma, Fri 26 Oct 2007, 1:08, Reply)

Free drink voucher
for a lapdancing bar in Riga. Had our free drink, then the girls sat down... "Drink for the lady?" Yeah, why not. Was offered a very tempting service involving a shower but politely declined (as it was wayyy to expensive.)
Then we were presented with the bill, for our 2 free drinks & 2 lady drinks it worked out about £75! Cue much shouting of, "You can fuck right off!" and, "There's no way I'm paying that you piss-taking bastards!" until the bouncer moved his jacket and showed us his gun.
Yep, I payed. Ok hardly thousands, but fucking annoying!
( Sunburn Go on.... It's character building!, Fri 26 Oct 2007, 0:47, 2 replies)

That herbert hoover?
he was a cross-dressing head of the FBI?
(Lurkaloid awarded wanking black belt on, Fri 26 Oct 2007, 0:30, 3 replies)

One employer two tales
I worked for IBM back in the early 90's in a huge production plant. I started 'on the line', and it was a good laugh, until i was asked to go to the 'label room'. This was a very small with 4 pc's and 4 thermal printers for printing off the serial numbers to get stuck on th eback of the desktop pc's. It was a very boring job, in a small room, all by myself. So i decided to root about on one of the pc's, fucking about with the serial number printing program, changing values, generally making a nuisance of myself. I then got a call asking to print off 1,000 numbers for such and such a model. I set it to print and it stops after just a 100 or so, and would not print any more. The serial numbers were logged to some degree and once past a certain number, stopped. One of the line managers stormed down and tried to print off the serial numbers that were crucial to the build. He couldn't. This meantr that production had to cease and about 100 wokers went idle for the best part of 2 days. Woo.

A few months i was back on the line, i was positioned beside the server line, where they built massive servers that cost a fucking bomb, the hard drives in particular were VERY expensive, and each server had several. I was plucked from the line to help with a one off order of these fucking servers. My job was to screw the hard drives into a cradle that would then slot into the server all lovely and snug. The cradle however was slightly magnetised and any time a put a screw near the screwhole it would flick to the side and stick to the cradle making it a very, very difficult and annoying job. The upshot of this was i would slam the fucking hard drives about in a fit of temper, knowing full well how fragile they were. Shift over, i had managed to do the 60 drives, i then went home. Came back the next day to see ALL but 3 of the drives in a big box. All ruined. Bashed to fucking death by me. So that was all the drives and all the time and effort of my fellow employees to fit and test the fucked stuff. Wooooooooo me.
(Cancer Joy was short lived, Fri 26 Oct 2007, 0:22, 4 replies)

Whoops! That toilet is in the wrong spot.
Back about 10 years ago, I worked for an architectural firm. We did a lot of government work, and a lot of schools. Well there are lots of things that are just common knowledge that you just come to know. For those in the UK, here in the States, we have something called ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act), meaning there are certain design criteria that go into designs for public buildings such as schools for those who are mobility impaired, such as people in wheelchairs.

Well, I was drafting on the PC, doing detail plans of washrooms. Now the standard dimension for a handicapped toilet is (the big one at the end of a row of them) is to be 18" from the face of the wall. The stall is usually big enough to have a 5 foot turning radius inside.

I know that. All drafters know that. Well apparently, a set of plans gets sealed and approved for a high school outside of Philadelphia. The actual dimension on the plans read 2'- 4 3/8". Significantly more than the dimension required. About 3 months later, one of the principals of the firm comes to my desk and asks me:
"Whats the dimension for a handicapped toliet from the face of a wall?"

"18 inches" says I.

He rolls out the plans, and points to the bathroom. And my initials on the corner.

"The contractor just called and they actually installed the toilets at that dimension, and it cost over $300,000 to remove and replace (along with the associadete plumbing riser, tile work, walls, and assorted things) at the correct dimesion"

What saved my ass, is that an architect signed and sealed the drawings, so he had to take the heat for not checking. For what its worth, I did work on those drawings, I cannot remember if i corrected the dimensions or not.
(Subway Riding the rails underground, Fri 26 Oct 2007, 0:03, Reply)

Not me.....
But I was involved....
A Long Time Ago in a neighbourhood not too far away I worked for a set design company, and they had just recieved a MASTER copy, on VHS, of the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film,(c1990) this was before the USA release.
Commuting to Brixton, from my neck of the woods was an absolute nightmare, and so some of us would sleep at the workshop, whilst others would be working furiously to get out the next piece of fake imagery.
One night two or three of the locals decided break in and see what was available to steal and sweeping aside the VHS cassette, they decided to nick a bloody VHS cassette player.

My mistake in all this was NOT getting the original comic for £5 from Forbidden Planet when I knew this film was going into production


(my first length joke...) about 93 minutes
(lordy lordy, Thu 25 Oct 2007, 23:57, Reply)

Junior Engineer
My first proper job, junior manufacturing engineer in a local factory making bits and pieces for jet engines.

Now, cos what we made was so specialised, you can't really buy the equipment we need to make our bits. So we had to make our own.

We had a factory within a factory custom making all our machinery and fixtures and stuff with some very skilled old-school manual machinists, some of whom don't have a lot of patience with a young engineer without a lot of experience.

'Look, I've fooking told you I'm not wearing my fooking safety specs, fook off...'

Ahem.

They were very skilled men, and could do incredible work and knew all the old school tricks of the trade to make the job easier.

Which stopped the day some bright spark couldn't fit the small chuck he needed onto his lathe, as the lathe he preferred was a big model and it wouldn't fit. So, old school style, he put a big chuck on, held the small chuck in the big chuck, and then held the work he was machining in the small chuck.

This is insanely dangerous, as he discovered when he spun his machine up to 2000RPM and the small chuck flew out of the big chuck and caught him under the chin, decapitating him.

There was a lot of blood splashed, and a lot of people being sick.

Sometimes you make a mistake you don't get to learn from yourself.
(inflateable, Thu 25 Oct 2007, 23:15, 4 replies)

The Time I thought I was in Final Destination.
The following paragraphs may seem to jump from one non-sequitur to another. Believe me, it all works out in the end.

I was working behind the bar one evening. I believe it was Summer 2006 and there was an England World Cup match on. Naturally, it was a bit crowded and it happened to be with one day of the British summer that was slightly warmer than the other ones. Being a nice pub, we pulled out all the stops and installed fans and air conditioners around the place.

Some of these air conditioners were put behind the bar (if you work behind a bar, you probably know how hot it can get there, even on the coldest of days).

Also, for the hot summer days, we had just recently installed a system in the cellar that would make the beer "extra cold". This was a system of two motors, both connected, that kept the beer chilled between 1 - 4 degrees celcius.

There were also some non-drinkers in, so we had to keep a lot of ice going for cold soft drinks.

After some time, everything started going wrong. The Ice Machine was maxed out, and the dishwasher began to leak and then ultimately break. This meant that some of the workers that were having a day off had to be called in to wash the glasses by hand in the cellar.

Lucky me. It was my day off.

After an hour or so of not watching the football, I started getting a bit pissed off in the cellar. I was putting a lot more vigour into my work (ie, kicking random boxes and buckets out of the way). One of these buckets landed in the sinkfull of water we were using to wash the glasses my hand.

Oh shit.

As the bucket flew in, a fuckload of water came splashing out.

Oh bollocks.

The ice machine, still running but producing no ice, was covered in a torrent of water. The electricity travelled through the water that was all over the floor due to the dishwasher leaking.

Oh fucking fuck.

The dishwasher prominently exploded, crashing into the two motors that were making the beer extra cold, which fell on the compressed barrels of beer. Said barrels blew their lids and beer frothed everywhere.

My co-worker got hit in the head by a barrel lid, but luckily survived. The damage was in the five-figure sum.

Hmm.
(__, Thu 25 Oct 2007, 22:57, 4 replies)

Hiss, rumble, BANG!
When I started out in haulage, I had an HGV licence, and fuck all knowledge of how a 38 tonne truck actually works. One morning, I hooked up a trailer. To do this, you attach a red airline (emergency supply) a yellow airline (brake), primary and secondary electric and the ABS lead. Until the yellow line is attached, there is NO trailer brake, so the tractor unit handbrake MUST be on. I know this now, because the whole outfit rolled across the yard and totalled the cab. £15000.

That was 18 years ago, and people still do it. Two in our yard in the last 3 months, and lucky they didn't die.
(all my scars face forward possesses 2.5% of a hyperalloy combat chassis, Thu 25 Oct 2007, 22:33, 1 reply)

4.54pm on a Friday afternoon........
....and I'm temping for a company that makes pine furniture. Without fail Friday afternoon meant loading a truck with predominantly custom made furniture to go out to three local stores. This was a thankless task. The furntiture had to be loaded in a way that meant it came off in order at the stores and some of it weighed a sodding ton.

On this particular friday, 5.00pm is fast approaching, there's a lovely new girlfriend interested in some weekend fumbling and I'm desperate to go home. I finish loading the truck and pull the material curtain on the side closed. I don't seal it with the straps mind- whilst I had done in some previous weeks surely the truck driver would do the honours before leaving.

Alas, two hours later as I'm readying myself for a night of lager and ladies, I see on tinpot local news that an awfully familiar looking lorry has shed its load on the A34. At rush hour. Yep the driver had set off with the curtain unsecured. The tightly packed, interlocking cargo of boxes had made a bid for freedom as the truck accelerated and at least half the contents had burst out of the side into the road. I am pleased to say that there were no serious injuries which makes it easier to relate the story a decade or so later.

Now absolute blame rested with the driver but it would have been easy enough to mention that I'd not secured the curtain before buggering off. I believe that about £60,000 worth of furntiture became a splintery road block that day.
(Leonard Hatred briefly did some work on, Thu 25 Oct 2007, 22:29, 2 replies)

oops
I work on a financial transaction network, a few years ago I made an upgrade to one of our external settlement links. 3 months later, I noticed every transaction we had processed on that link, had in fact been billed at zero pounds due to a slight 'oversight' on my part during the upgrade. We are talking losses in the double digit millions. Career ending brown trousers time. I could taste the greasy air and was rehearsing my best "would you like fries with that sir?"

Oh how we laughed when the card/settlement provider said "Thats ok, we will pretend it never happened. Heres the money"
(shamen Geekius Maximus, Thu 25 Oct 2007, 22:17, Reply)

Engineering
Anyone who works in any discipline of engineering has made expensive mistakes. You only get experience just after you need it.

I have this quote on my desk.

"It is a great profession. There is the satisfaction of watching a figment of the imagination emerge through the aid of science to a plan on paper. Then it moves to realization in stone or metal or energy. Then it brings jobs and homes to men. Then it elevates the standards of living and adds to the comforts of life. That is the engineer's high privelege.
The great liability of the engineer compared to men of other professions is that his works are out in the open where all can see them. His acts, step by step, are in hard substance. He cannot bury his mistakes in the grave like the doctors. He cannot argue them into thin air or blame the judge like the lawyers. He cannot, like the architects, cover his failures with trees and vines. He cannot, like the politicians, screen his shortcomings by blaming his opponents and hope that the people will forget. The engineer simply cannot deny that he did it. If his works do not work, he is damned. That is the phantasmagoria that haunts his nights and dogs his days. He comes from the job at the end of the day resolved to calculate it again. He wakes in the night in a cold sweat and puts something on paper that looks silly in the morning. All day he shivers at the thought of the bugs which will inevitably appear to jolt his smooth consummation.
On the other hand, unlike the doctor his is not a life among the weak. Unlike the soldier, destruction is not his purpose. Unlike the lawyer, quarrels are not his daily bread. To the engineer falls the job of clothing the bare bones of science with life, comfort and hope.
No doubt as years go by people forget which engineer did it, even if they ever knew. Or some politician puts his name on it. Or they credit it to some promoter who used other peoples money with which to finance it. But the engineer himself looks back at the unending stream of goodness that flows from his successes with satisfactions that few professions may know. And the verdict of his fellow professionals is all the accolade he wants."
- Herbert Hoover
The Profession of Engineering
(inflateable, Thu 25 Oct 2007, 22:06, 5 replies)

Ever wonder why it took so long???
I used to be a surveyors assistant at a well known stadium in London that took far too long to build... now there were all kinds of reasons for this, strikes, death threats from the russian maffie etc (!!!) but the real reason is general incompetence.

Many times that we were sent out to do final checks on stairwells, escalators and the like, it was obvious even before the instruments were set up that something was wrorng.

A good eample is a 20m high supporting column we were sent to check. From a good 50m away you could see that the column sections weren't straight, they were leaning out a good foot or so towards the centre! So the whole column has to be dug out, set out again and replaced.
What moron welder thought that would go unnoticed!
There were far too many examples of this to go into. Looks fucking great now though, and was a great place to work on my year out.
(Roopy all is not what it seams, Thu 25 Oct 2007, 21:10, Reply)

My Dad...
As I've mentioned before worked in t'army.

He designed tanks. And built stuff. Very well.

And was contracted to work in Oman for a few years. They Omanis asked him what they needed to house tanks. Dad told them that they had to have sliding doors (otherwise they'd be huge) and they had to have a certain height.

And so they built a fair few of these houses.

Dad turns up. Looks at them. Tells them they've got to rip the whole lot down and start again. Why?

Because they'd not taken in to consideration the runners for the doors.

Length? Well it was the height and an Inch matters I tell you.
(beatpig understands subliminalesbianmessagaying., Thu 25 Oct 2007, 21:04, Reply)

I.T. is a minefield for expensive mistakes
There's so many different ways to screw up. The best you can hope for in a support role is to be invisible. If anyone notices your support team at all, you can rest assured it's because someone has made a mistake. I've worked for three major investment banks, but at the first place I witnessed one of the most impressive mistakes I'm ever likely to see in my career. I was part of the sales and trading production support team, but thankfully it wasn't me who made this grave error of judgement...

(I'll delve into obnoxious levels of detail here to add colour and context if you're interested. If not, just skip to the next chunk, you impatient git)

This bank had pioneered a process called straight-through processing (STP) which removes the normal manual processes of placement, checking, settling and clearing of trades. Trades done in the global marketplace typically have a 5-day clearing period to allow for all the paperwork and book-keeping to be done. This elaborate system allowed same-day settlement, something never previously possible. The bank had achieved this over a period of six years by developing a computer system with a degree of complexity that rivalled SkyNet. By 2006 it also probably had enough processing power to become self-aware, and the storage requirements were absolutely colossal. It consisted of hundreds of bleeding edge compute-farm blade servers, several £multi-million top-end database servers and the project had over 300 staff just to keep it running. To put that into perspective, the storage for this one system (one of about 500 major trading systems at the bank) represented over 80% of the total storage used within the company. The equivalent of 100 DVD's worth of raw data entered the databases each day as it handled over a million inter-bank trades, each ranging in value from a few hundred thousand dollars to multi-billion dollar equity deals. This thing was BIG.

You'd think such a critically important and expensive system would run on the finest, fault-tolerant hardware and software. Unfortunately, it had grown somewhat organically over the years, with bits being added here, there and everywhere. There were parts of this system that no-one understood any more, as the original, lazy developers had moved company, emigrated or *died* without documenting their work. I doubt they ever predicted the monster it would eventually become.

A colleague of mine one day decided to perform a change during the day without authorisation, which was foolish, but not uncommon. It was a trivial change to add yet more storage and he'd done it many times before so he was confident about it. The guy was only trying to be helpful to the besieged developers, who were constantly under pressure to keep the wretched thing moving as it got more bloated each day, like an electronic ‘Mr Creosote’.

As my friend applied his change that morning, he triggered a bug in a notoriously crap script responsible for bringing new data disks online. The script had been coded in-house as this saved the bank about £300 per year on licensing fees for the official ‘storage agents’ provided by the vendor. Money that, in hindsight, would perhaps have been better spent instead of pocketed. The homebrew code took one look at the new configuration and immediately spazzed out. This monged scrap of pisspoor geek-scribble had decided the best course of action was to bring down the production end of the system and bring online the disaster recovery (DR) end, which is normal behaviour when it detects a catastrophic 'failure'. It’s designed to bring up the working side of the setup as quickly as possible. Sadly, what with this system being fully-replicated at both sites (to [cough] ensure seamless recovery), the exact same bug was almost instantly triggered on the DR end, so in under a minute, the hateful script had taken offline the entire system in much the same manner as chucking a spanner into a running engine might stop a car. The databases, as always, were flushing their precious data onto many different disks as this happened, so massive, irreversible data corruption occurred. That was it, the biggest computer system in the bank, maybe even the world, was down.

And it wasn't coming back up again quickly.

(OK, detail over. Calm down)

At the time this failure occurred there was more than $12 TRILLION of trades at various stages of the settlement process in the system. This represented around 20% of ALL trades on the global stock market, as other banks had started to plug into this behemoth and use its capabilities themselves. If those trades were not settled within the agreed timeframe, the bank would be liable for penalties on each and every one, the resulting fines would eclipse the market capital of the company, and so it would go out of business. Just like that.

My team dropped everything it was doing and spent 4 solid, brutal hours recovering each component of the system in a desperate effort to coax the stubborn silicon back online. After a short time, the head of the European Central Bank (ECB) was on a crisis call with our company CEO, demanding status updates as to why so many trades were failing that day. Allegedly (as we were later told), the volume of financial goodies contained within this beast was so great that failure to clear the trades would have had a significant negative effect on the value of the Euro currency. This one fuckup almost started a global economic crisis on a scale similar to the recent (and ongoing) sub-prime credit crash. With two hours to spare before the ECB would be forced to go public by adjusting the Euro exchange rate to compensate, the system was up and running, but barely. We each manned a critical sub-component and diverted all resources into the clearing engines. The developers set the system to prioritise trades on value. Everything else on those servers was switched off to ensure every available CPU cycle and disk operation could be utilised. It saturated those machines with processing while we watched in silence, unable to influence the outcome at all.

Incredibly, the largest proportion of the high-value transactions had cleared by the close of business deadline, and disaster was averted by the most "wafer-thin" margin. Despite this, the outstanding lower-value trades still cost the bank more than $100m in fines. Amazingly, to this day only a handful of people actually understand the true source of those penalties on the end-of-year shareholder report. Reputation is king in the world of banking (see Northern Rock for details!) and all concerned --including me-- were instructed quite explicitly to keep schtum. Naturally, I *can’t* identify the bank in question, but if you’re still curious, gaz me and I’ll point you in the right direction…

Epilogue… The bank stumped up for proper scripts pretty quickly but the poor sap who started this ball of shit rolling was fired in a pompous ceremony of blame the next day, which was rather unfair as it was dodgy coding which had really caused the problem. The company rationale was that every blaze needs a spark to start it, and he was going to be the one they would scapegoat. That was one of the major reasons I chose to leave the company (but not before giving the global head of technology a dressing down at our Christmas party… that’s another QOTW altogether). Even today my errant mate is one of the only people who properly understands most of that preposterous computer system, so he had his job back within six months -- but at a higher rate than before :-)

Conclusion: most banks are insane and they never do anything to fix problems until *after* it costs them uber-money. Did I hear you mention length? 100 million dollar bills in fines laid end-to-end is about 9,500 miles long according to Google calculator.
( chart cat has an itch, Thu 25 Oct 2007, 21:02, 8 replies)

I'm innocent...
I do know someone who did something that could have cost him his job.

His company was developing software for the original xbox. Some eight months before it's US release, he had one in the office to develop software on.

One bank holiday, he invited everyone round and bought it home. Plugged it in and bang.

It had a US standard power supply, and he'd forgotton to bring the transformer home.

The problem is, he had signed a Non-Disclosure Ageement, so wasn't even supposed to tell people about the xbox, let alone take it home and blow it up.
(Ok, I'll get me coat, Thu 25 Oct 2007, 21:00, Reply)

Vanity Publishing
I am one of the mugs who fell for the vanity publishing scam back in 1995. This was before vanity publishers had been exposed by a BBC investigation for the crooks they are but even so, I must have been living on Planet Gullible at the time. Basically, I wrote a sub-sub-Ben Elton "comedy" (I can't bring myself to look at it now, it's so gut-wrenchingly bad) and convinced myself I'd come up with a masterpiece.

So I answered one of those "Authors Wanted" ads that used to be in the Sunday papers and within a week got a "reader's report" implying that my book made Shaw and Wilde look like lightweights. (Guess that's why it's called vanity publishing.) All I had to do was part with £3,000 and the literary world would be bowing down before me. At that point there was a sensible and a stupid option, and guess which one I chose?

Since the book was crap, their "editing" made it even worse and they had my money so had no motivation to sell it, I managed to shift a total of about 100 copies thanks to the support of friends and family. Even then I had to threaten legal action to collect my royalties!

I'm glad to say that Minerva Press have since gone out of business and I hope they're living on the streets. Most of the other crooks in the vanity publishing business have too, I think, as people are more wise to their ways.

This was certainly an expensive mistake, though wouldn't have been out of place under "conned" or even a QOTW entitled "How can someone with an IQ above 10 be so bloody stupid?"
(eesnahk, Thu 25 Oct 2007, 20:53, Reply)

I worked in a gym...mopping up...
and i once was so into my job i mopped the stairs for the first time.

Nobody told me to put a cone up...and it just so happened that a fairly well known england rugby player was training there that day, weeks before a major major match.

He slipped, broke bones, missed the game...

and i never got the blame. and they lost the match lost.
( MrGomez and David Bellamy's big pubey beard, Thu 25 Oct 2007, 20:33, Reply)

Job
I hadn't worked in a while and was really looking to get my hands on some sort of paid employment. The bills were mounting up and the missus was getting the increasing hump with my unemployed antics.

Thankfully I got a good paying job over at this new company that had started up. They offered a system as well of investing some of your paycheck into stock. Who was I to later realise after several years that the stock would crash, my employers would back out, and I would be left financially raped.

Never again.

Signed,
Disgruntled Enron Employee
(TheVomitingCavalier entered one image challenge and failed miserably, Thu 25 Oct 2007, 20:26, 1 reply)

"No such thing as a small mistake"
A lot have people have probably seen the picture of two sides of a bridge not quite meeting in the middle with the caption "In civil engineering there's no such thing as a small mistake" which looks far too perfectly wrong to be real.

Things like this do happen on occasion though:
There was a story of a local engineer who set out the corners of some council houses that were all L shaped. Unfortunately he put one the wrong way around and nobody realised until after they started building it. Apparently the engineer walked to the beach, to the sea and just kept walking and was never seen again...

While I was at uni one of the engineers I knew from the company I was working for in the holidays had been banished out on site. Among other things he was responsible for setting out start/end points and levels for sewers. Not your normal household sewer but huge ones you could walk through which required big deep holes and lots and lots of stone bedding. To save time one company started at the top and the other at the bottom but when they got to the middle they were about 1m out (he'd forgotten to carry the 1 or something). In the end a couple of hundred metres of this very expensive pipe run had to be taken out and relaid, some of it had already been backfilled as well.

Apologies for size, but they were quite big mistakes.
( thistle, Thu 25 Oct 2007, 20:09, 2 replies)

A flat in Eastbourne.
Was, all things considered, both expensive and a mistake.

Brief but true.

Blah, blah length.
( sir_spicious2000 Crap I've watched: www.filmplop.blogspot.com/, Thu 25 Oct 2007, 20:08, Reply)

I might win this one…
I’m a business journalist. A couple of months ago a company called me with a story about a project it’s developing in an unexplored region. It was a slow news day, so I did the interview.

This company was the junior partner in this project, so I called the other (much larger) firm involved to check out the rest of the story out. They gave me the same spiel, but did say “this is a pilot project that we’re looking forward to developing” – a quote I used in my article.

That, it turned out, was a bit of a mistake. Calling something a “pilot” project means you’re just trying something out, and to the larger company, this was technically true. However, for the smaller company, calling it a pilot accidentally gave this project the impression that it wouldn’t make any money, at least for a while – which wasn’t what they’d told their investors.

When my story came out the next day, using that one innocuous word caused the junior company’s stock to sell off by a third, leading to an ‘interesting’ discussion to say the least. Thankfully, I was able to prove it wasn’t my fault but theirs, as they hadn’t got their story straight with their partner and I had his quote on tape. However, they haven’t exactly beaten down my door to write about them again.

Total cost: $20 million, give or take...
(silencer, Thu 25 Oct 2007, 20:08, Reply)

The Lorry Driver...
Who called me a 'four eyed cunt', because he resented my car being in the way of his truck, found himself on the rough end of a very expensive mistake when I backed out and accidentally drove into him.

Well he saw my car coming and refused to get out of the way, I didnt see him coming - that happens when you stand in my blind spot like a slack jawed troglodyte.
(Vic Flange, Thu 25 Oct 2007, 20:03, Reply)