Not me but a friend
Rachelswipe will sympathise. My friend was a junior solicitor at a very large law firm in London. Junior solicitor was one cog in the wheel of a very large transaction involving the refinancing of an international hotel chain. The money involved was in the hundreds of millions. The transaction was due to complete and all was good so she just carried on doing her thing as instructed and completed the task that had been set by her superior (a slightly larger cog in that machine). She filed all the 403s for all the hotels in the UK part of the chain (of which there were dozens).

A 403 is the form you filed to release the mortgage a bank has over its corporate borrower's assets. That's fine if the transaction was going ahead because a new bank was stepping in. Problem was the deal had not gone ahead and my friend had just removed those hotels from that bank's list of assets - about a £500m pounds worth of security. Imagine your mortgage being written off in one fell swoop the multiply that by several thousand... I don't think the bank was very happy seeing its security disappear overnight.

Of course it all happened on a Friday night so there was a very anxious couple of days while every favour to be called in was called in and apparently a relevant judge was found on a beach in Cornwall on Sunday morning to give an emergency order to reinstate the mortgages.

Needless to say, it got my friend noticed by many of the more senior members of her firm... She kept he job though.

TL;DR overpaid overworked solicitor makes a mistake
(Gusofnavarone always makes a map of france from sarnies, Tue 17 May 2016, 18:06, 4 replies)

urrrrrrgh so easily done
after working 2 days without going home or sleeping, I once transposed 2 digits in a sort code and very nearly missed the transfer deadline for a £30,000,000 acquisition. when I clocked it I felt as if i had swallowed an ice cube. I rushed off and told accounts; they said it might be too late to fix it that day. I had the meanest supervisor in the world, so I just asked him all casual and trembling, what would happen if we couldn't complete that day.

he said nothing legal, as the contractual deadline wasn't until the next day. then added, "but the client has its celebration party at [top swanky nightspot] tonight, so if it didn't complete, I would find out why, and I personally would make that person's life a living hell."

nice.

anyway, accounts fixed it, and it went through and all was fine, but fucking hell, such a tiny easy blurry eyed mistake can have such big consequences!
( rachelswipe with a fork, Wed 18 May 2016, 9:34, closed)

If your friend was carrying out the task she was assigned,
surely the mistake lay with someone further up the chain?
( monster munch person, man, woman... camera... TV?, Wed 18 May 2016, 11:12, closed)

Yep - her immediate supervisor got a bollocking and a half
It was more down to her supervisor who had set her sailing off but didn't actually think to stop her when the deal aborted. Don't think the powers that be were too concerned in the early stages to work out what had gone wrong - just that it had.

To be fair, it's a pretty major thing. Bit like a junior doctor told to turn off the life support. You would perhaps think to double check before actually doing that: "still OK boss?"

And then the post-mortem...
(Gusofnavarone always makes a map of france from sarnies, Wed 18 May 2016, 14:57, closed)

How can you be overworked and overpaid at the same time?

( jonbob loves you, Wed 18 May 2016, 21:56, closed)