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

I don't think this counts but I was there when my buddy found out his 401k was in a cash account and not invested in anything. Technically a 7 year mistake, but it took about 10 seconds for him to see it.

A warehouse coworker thought it’d be funny to stick his foot out at the last second into the path of an incoming forklift. You could hear the crunch over his screams.

On a very big lake in north Idaho, a random guy decided to let his eye candy bring in his Scout boat* to the docks - I assume to tie it off so he could trailer it out of the water.

She got confused ¯_(ツ)_/¯ and rammed the Scout boat into two other vessels (one of them an expensive-looking cigarette boat), a few jet skis tied to the docks, a kayaker who was paddling for his life to get the hell away from her, and finally not one but both docks themselves.

When she was done doing that - because I guess that wasn't enough damage - she then made the executive decision to open it up full throttle and run the boat up onto the concrete boat ramp. The squealing, grinding, and popping sounds made everyone on the busy boat ramp/beach suck in their breath and go ooOOOooo in unison.

That man was screaming himself an apoplectic purple before it was all said and done.

*don't know offhand what model *the boat was, but it was one of the ones that was easily a half million dollars or more new.

The amount of crypto bros I saw during my time in college during the late 2010s when Bitcoin exploded... So many of those idiots lost thousands of their savings by trying to invest/buy a bunch of crypto currencies without knowing what it was to begin with.

I was in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan. It was the fault of the pilot who happened to be the CO of the squadron. Was a class A mishap. Millions in damages. They covered it up for him too.

Adding to the gambling posts, was in Vegas a few years ago for NYE and while waiting for a food buzzer to go off, I saw a guy whip out a stack of $100 bills at a roulette table, must've been around $500. He put it down and got the chips then put it all on 15. When it didn't hit he pulled out another $500, again on 15. When it didn't hit again, he pulled out another $500, again on 15. Then again, and again. This went on for a few minutes until my buzzer went off and I got my food. I went and sat at a high top table and saw him walking away with a frustrated look on his face. Never saw someone blow through that amount of money that quickly ever.

I watched a guy doing donuts on the flight line at Minot Air Force Base slam the truck into the side of a B-52.

Working on a boiler; new to the job. We got it depressurized and I get send to go pull the probes and check for build up and whatever, my trainer goes to pull the element, which is held in by these 8 big nasty bolts. As hes yelling through the little window deal to tell me to be careful not to strip out the probe ports or we'll be there all night I hear a snap followed by profanity. One of those bolts just disintegrated on the way out. We WERE there all night. So was the welder, and the hospitals biomed and the fire inspector and and and.

Edit; also, just to say it; those bolts were NOT properly installed(loctite, not anti sieze. Big, BIG difference.)

A coworker once accidentally deleted the entire production database during a routine update. No backups. The company lost years of customer data and had to rebuild everything from scratch. Cost them well over a million dollars in lost business and recovery efforts.

Wasn't really expensive for me per se, but submitting my PR with code that entirely broke production for a major national insurance company was a pretty big mistake lol

It worked on my machine and test regions, so I just. Put the code in. Seemed fine to my lead, so it was reviewed and approved.

Turns out, the QA guy that usually took my tickets was out on vacation that week, and nobody in his team actually bothered to test my code in whatever way they wanted to test it. So it just got packed up nice and neat with the rest of that sprints code and shipped into prod.

Which promptly broke completely, and shut down all navigation on the company policy backend sales interface. Nobody could adjust, edit, or create new policies, even for online purchases of policies.

That was a fun Monday morning, getting pulled into a meeting with c suite execs and every regional manager in the company to explain what happened LMAO

We just rolled back the update, and I was informed of the fact that we have specific tags we're supposed to implement that make it so major changes can be turned off if need be once they reach prod. Nobody had informed me of that during training sooooo... Oops? I got congratulated for becoming a "real dev" and told to fix the thing properly, which ended up being a like 4 month project on my end apparently I cost the company at least several hundred thousand dollars, if not more, in lost sales over the handful of hours it was shut down.

$500k in surgical supplies due to a young construction worker drilling a hole on a wall that had a pipe behind it.

Storage room below was a cardiac supply room full of heart valves.

I don't know what the final cost was, but I worked in a factory years ago where the boiler operator on-duty decided to take an extra smoke break and didn't want to tell his backup to keep an eye on things while he was gone so he wouldn't get caught... and the boiler exploded while he was gone.

Nobody passed away (somehow) but several workers working in the factory at the time were injured and the boiler blew out the entire side of the building. We were shutdown for months while everything was fixed and rebuilt as well. I'd have to guess the cost of everything was well into the millions if not tens of millions of dollars, all for an extra 10 minute break.

A high school aged part-time coworker at the farm supply store i used to work at took down an entire metal end cap shelf, because he took the turn with a palletjack too tightly and caught the corner of it. The end cap was fully stocked with car batteries that all came crashing down. We had to clean up an acid spill and all the batteries were damaged, but thankfully no one was hurt. Kid was mortified. He didn't get fired though.

Early days of computers, like 1992, IBM mainframe, tech comes in to replace a coms board and forgets his grounding strap, restarts machine, nothing, shutdown, put old board back, throws new board at door and says here’s your new $10,000 door stop, and left the building!

I work in the film industry and the UPM (unit production manager) of our show emailed the full films budget I’m talking directors pay actors etc. etc. to the whole crew…. (This was about 12 years ago btw).

Refinery operator forgot to enter a decimal point on a valve set point they were adjusting. So instead of 5.0% change, they made a 50% change. It caused a huge pressure surge that knocked a compressor offline. Once that compressor went offline it became a domino effect which knocked another one offline, then another, etc. until the entire facility was no longer operating. Now the thing with refineries is that you cannot just suddenly turn things back on. It can take hours (in an absolute best case) to multiple days before everything can be fully up and running again. This particular facility was generating around $12 Million per day in revenue. So every hour it was offline represented around $500K in lost revenue and if I recall correctly it took around 12 hours before we were able to get it up and going again. Surprisingly he wasn’t fired.

I was putting a Rolls-Royce Phantom in the showroom of the dealer I was working for. I asked two coworkers to hold the doors as it was windy and the doors would pivot quite a bit. One guy was on his phone when we got a heavy gust of wind that pushed the door enough to make the back part of the door just far out enough to put a nice 8-inch gash in the right passenger door, down to the actual metal. $30,000 later the door was fixed and that coworker never came back because he was going to get let go. The same coworker was pressure washing the Bentley Convertibles with the tops down and was told to put the top up before spraying the cars down by the owner of the company(NOT the GM, the actual dealer owner) His response “don’t tell me what to do” so he was already on thin ice.

So this is probably not the most expensive, but it's decently original and definitely a stupid mistake.

During our annual sprint kayak games at our local club, two of my friends wanted to test out their new K2 (two person boat) that they got from their sponsors and were supposed to use at the Olympic games in France.

Well, sadly they tipped over just about 500m from the dock. No biggie, we'll just pick them up with our motorboat, grab the K2 by hand and drag it along, happens all the time. However, the driver approached the dock too fast and on the wrong side (the K2 they dragged with them was now between the dock and the motorboat). Next thing I heard was a loud crack as the hull gave in and the K2 got bricked.

It wasn't completely unusable after that and my friends got a new one, but the damage was permanent and estimated to be a few thousand bucks at least.

Drilling a few bolts into an asbestos floor in an IT room. $8 million in damage.

I worked in a food manufacturing plant while I was in college.

Salt and auger were stored in huge silos.

A guy erred by unloading a rail car of salt onto the sugar silo.

It wasn’t discovered right away.

The plant had to recall 3 shifts worth of production, Much of it was already in transport via trucks and rail cars to distribution centers and customers.