57 Times A Single Slip-Up Turned Into A Massive Bill, As Told By The People Who Watched It Happen Live

My first day on the job, a manager asked me to help move a piece of equipment worth about $40k on a cart. I took a corner too fast in the parking lot and it fell off. We both just stared while it shattered into a million pieces. Remarkably I'm still at that company ~20 years later.

My friend works at SIAC, the tech company behind the NY Stock Exchange. He pressed 'deploy to prod' instead of 'deploy to test' and made the news that night.

Forklift tipped over a crated multimillion dollar metrology tool, guy was pretty near instantly fired, tool was damaged and had to get shipped back to Germany to see if repairs were possible. We never got the tool back.

I was working on a particle physics experiment in South Africa. I watched a colleague troubleshooting a piece of custom hardware accidentally short the power to some other pins on a custom FPGA. It released the magic smoke. The board itself was several 10's of thousand in hardware. But more importantly there was only one. Like, in existence. There was a whole team of us there to do an experiment using it so all the flights, accomodation etc wasted. Along with the hire of the facility we were using. We got drunk and went swimming.

My friend was sleep deprived and hit the wrong button at his pipeline job and ruined $200k worth of product.

Edit, context: Im no expert just relayed what he told me. He was moving petroleum products to and from large tanks through pipes. It may have been a series of mistakes but the end result was having to throw away everything in a tank and have it cleaned. Not sure if it was a physical button or mouseclick on a computer. He was fired and essentially blacklisted from the industry. Probably wasn't very good at his job before that either.

Receiving a delivery of $10M worth of IV medications. Some genius double stacked it on a pallet instead of sending it on 2. The poor delivery guy brought it with the motorized pallet jack to the lift to bring it down off the truck. It was teetering as the lift started bringing it down. We all backed up. It fell. The sound of hundreds of expensive vials of medications shattering is really quite something.

Nobody wanted to answer any phone calls about it. Had to have managers calling managers to get it picked up and taken back.

Instead of resending a new shipment on 2 separate pallets. They sent like 80 cases of medicine via fedex.

When you’re a valet driver, it’s very important to put the parking brake on in supercars because they do not have a standard shifter with a P selection.

McLarens (some of them) for instance have their parking brake next to your left knee. The car will roll away if you get out of it and don’t hit that button.

My old valet manager on a very busy evening forgot to put a Ferrari Spyder in park, got out, ran to park another car, and everyone on the front drive watched a very expensive car roll and hit the lip of the very expensive courtyard fountain.

Cherry on top was him trying to blame another valet for not informing him that it wouldn’t automatically come on if he opened the door.

I used to work as a cleaner at an exhibition centre. Back when the Motor show used to be regularly every 2 years. 

One year they were moving a very expensive sports car onto a platform (during setup), but it wasn't getting up the ramp.   

He reversed a small amount and failed again.  

More people watching telling him he was in wrong gear but he kept reving and trying. The smell was that delicious clutch smell. Anyway about 30 seconds later something breaks and the car wont even move. 

Turned out he was in 5th gear not 1st gear. Destroyed the friction plate in under 1 minute.

When I was a kid, in middle school, my class went on a field trip to the local paper to watch them print it one morning at like 3am. I don't know who thought that was a good idea. Anyways, we were all walking along the length of the printing press watching paper shoot through it when a girl ahead of me reaches over and presses a random bottom on a panel.

We all heard a very loud BANG and some whirring noises, and that was the end of the field trip. I don't know what broke or how expensive it was, but they had it up and running by the next morning.

New guy we hired was about two weeks into his employment as an entry engineer. One day, he presumably finds himself needing a volumetric flask (sometimes we work with chemical solutions). He ends up finding two flasks filled with clear solution.

What does he decide to do with said solutions? Pours them straight down the drain. What were those solutions you might ask? A special polymer coating used in our detection instruments. Our executive manager, upon seeing him wasting $300-400k worth of solution, immediately grabbed the solution out of his hands and shoos him off.

Guy was unemployed within a few days of that event.

Our captain dragged a $200K sonar head used for seabed mapping across an underwater rock. I looked at the data afterwards, and we managed to collect about three feet worth of map data before it happened. Ended up staying in port for a week while waiting for a new sonar, so not just the sonar, but one week extra for the boat, captain, crew and stupid amounts of beer.

Freight company delivering a VAX-8800 got in a hurry with the forklift and dropped it six feet onto a concrete planter, bending it slightly. Sort of boomerang-ey, not bent double.

$960,000 in 1986, about $2.9M in current money. It did not "buff out".

Personally, I was in the last week of tomato hauling season so I had a $3000 safety bonus coming.
In five seconds I flipped my back trailer spreading 20,000 lbs of tomatoes across the road.
Goodbye safety bonus.

Aramco is the Saudi Arabian oil company. They run terminals with tanks that hold 1 million barrels of oil each and have 4 ft diameter pipes between them. In the 1970's they had a European company build then a pump that cost several million dollars. The pump was built in place (it was 2 stories high) and went through extensive testing before being handed over to Aramco in a formal ceremony with all the big-wigs watching.

The hand-over document was signed and the pump was now Aramco's responsibility. The Aramco operator started up the pump but pushed the buttons in the wrong sequence and the over pressure created destroyed the pump. It had been in service for about 2 minutes.

The pump couldn't be fixed and was just abandoned in place.

Promotions person at a casino I worked at was sending $50.00 slot play to our high limit players. Forgot the decimal. $5000 free slot play went out.

Every slot machine in high limit had a player on it and jackpots were hitting everywhere. I heard they lost over a million because of the mistake.

My dad worked at a warehouse and a guy drove a forklift straight into a shelf full of flat screen tvs. whole row came down like dominoes. like 15 grand gone in one dumb turn.

I worked in the auto industry and the construction industry so I have a few.

Favorite from my time as a technician, I was doing an oil change on a vehicle that needed to leave ASAP and I realized right before I turned it on that I didn’t tighten the oil filter all the way, I had to re-rack the car, take the skid plate off yada yada…

manager came out screaming at me about the car taking too long, told him I wasn’t going to send out a car without a oil filter cause the motor would explode and it would be a 20,000$ job on our pocket. He told me I should have sent it out as is so the guy could come back to pay to get the engine replaced.

I asked if he was serious and told him I was there to fix cars not wreck them on purpose. He told me if I didn’t like it then I could go work at another shop, I quit on the spot and reported him to corporate. He was fired less than a week later.

This was at the biggest Toyota dealership in California about a decade ago.

I was working at an airplane engine overhaul shop- P&W 4056-3’s big engines, 96 inches in diameter at the widest. We had these big overhead hoists for moving the engines and the heavy parts of the engines around as well as all the heavy tooling used in assembly/disassembly. Two hooks per hoist, one for the front and one for the back of the engine. One day we had just put the last heavy piece back on an engine, and a guy went to move the tooling used out of the way, forgetting the front was still hooked up to the, now reassembled and freshly overhauled engine. He moved the hoist north/south, when he should have moved east/west. Took the entire thing to the ground.

You ever see a multimillion dollar piece of equipment bounce on the concrete? I have.

The guy ahead of me left his sunroof open on his BMW going into the carwash. It was one where you had to get out of the car and watch from another space while it went through. He was on his brick the whole time, loudly so we all knew he had a portable phone. When the guys opened the door to do the interior, water poured out. They ended up pushing the car out of the way to keep the line moving.

I saw the aftermath of a $2M IMAX projector after it was dropped during lifting operations for installation. They sent it back to the factory (where I worked) to see if it could be repaired. It could not.