A custodian at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute unintentionally destroyed twenty years of biochemical research when he reset the circuit breakers at a university lab. I’ve made some professional mistakes, but nothing on this level. A friend of mine, however, once broke the door on an airplane during her not surprisingly short airline career. Don’t do anything stupid today, Deadsplinters. But if you do, please tell us about it!
One of my biggest work blunders was trying to give (unsolicited) advice to an inept leader on actual leadership. Why? I wanted to make my life easier… LOL I was/am a fucking idiot.
For “some reason” he didn’t appreciate the advice (no shit) and went after me (warning letters and suspension.) Turns out, he thought he was fucking amazing.
I’ll bet your advice was spot on and that probably rankled more than if it had been wrong.
Unfortunately, my assessment was almost dead bang on. I learned yet again “No good (really fucking stupid) deed goes unpunished.”
I survived barely, but I learned to keep my mouth shut except when asked (it happened once.)
There’s always a “who’s going to bell the cat?” aspect to those situations.
I have what I call the Cassandra Syndrome. In mythology Cassandra always accurately foretold the future, but was cursed so that no one believed her.
I can’t count the number of times I’ve told management at various companies why they shouldn’t take a certain action and exactly what the outcome will be. I am rarely incorrect, but I’ve never once been believed. Instead, they look for ways to blame me for the failures. Interestingly, the vast majority of these companies no longer exist, largely for precisely the reasons I outlined.
I’ve slowly learned to keep. my. mouth. shut. They don’t care and every time I speak up I pay a high price for doing it.
Yup. My older sister calls me Cassandra for that reason and makes fun of that.
It is a personality characteristic I share with my mom (it doesn’t help her either.)
Oh my. I have had two in recent memory, both due to my failure to read the room, quite publicly. One was the featuring of a webinar meant to showcase ways to support employees when budgets couldn’t support raises – people were not amused. It sparked a small Twitter controversy; it also tripled the week’s sales. Another was a feature headline (these are written months in advance) that didn’t take current events into play, and if not taken verbatim was interpreted as callous or tone deaf. There were three emails of complaint. In my defense, it passed through five people as part of the creation and editing process, and none of them ran up a flag. But I own the errors, and trust that the sector within which I work will be quick to let me know of poor wording.
Budgets, ugh. I see both sides of that issue. And it’s really hard to stay current when information is relayed so quickly these days!
One of the things I do, and here I’ll be a little more candid, is work on books, in various capacities. I just finished one. It could not have been more tedious.
I submitted the one previous to this one and said, “This was extraordinarily clean. Here’s my invoice.” And my controller wrote back and said, “I’m always suspicious when books are this clean. But we’ll release it, and then maybe we’ve all screwed up, and we’ll get angry emails, which we will ignore and move on. Thanks for getting this in so early!”
From this article, the cleaner who reset the breaker is “a person with special needs.”
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/major-research-lost-custodian-flips-switch-lab-freezer-lawsuit-claims-rcna91160
The lawsuit is saying the cleaning company didn’t provide him with enough training, but I have a feeling failure to secure the circuit box is going to be a big problem with the suit.
I thought I read somewhere that they had a note up telling people not to mess with the circuit breaker but that doesn’t seem to be quite enough.
This article talks about a sign on the freezer door, but I bet it would be hard to convince a jury this was sufficient if the case doesn’t get settled sooner.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/06/27/rpi-lawsuit-janitor-freezer-research/
I’m sure the university is suing a big insurance company, or the insurer is trying to dodge part of their responsibility, and they’re all going to the press to get leverage over the terms of settlement. Total losses were probably many times more than $1 million, and they’re probably arguing over what percentage of the losses the insurance company will swallow.
I work in the media, so I have made a few very public mistakes over the years, and it always sucks. Nothing too bad, but when you see a headline error in big font size, you really feel like an asshole.
But my story is on a much more personal level — I had a really good friend in college who was a seemingly nice guy but was all thumbs in the significant other department. Every girl he dated was just awful in some way (including one who later went on to commit arson at her ex-boyfriend’s house after a breakup. I honestly wasn’t surprised.) He dated his last college girlfriend for a few years after graduation — we’ll call her “Addie” — and she was unpleasant. They kinda suddenly broke up and within a few months he’d met someone new at work and when we met her, we were shocked to find that she was an absolute delight. A few months later, Addie apparently had a change of heart and came to him looking to rekindle. We went out after work one night and he said he wanted to talk with me about it and I did the stupid thing and basically said “Addie sucks, don’t go back” … and he went back, of course, and then he and I didn’t really talk much more after that. (They got married. And then got divorced a few years later. Again, not surprised.) But had I just kept my mouth shut, maybe we’d still be friends.
Sounds more of the “No Good Deed goes unpunished” variety.
That sucks, but you tried because you cared about the person (although he won’t see it that way.)
Yup, it’s something I’ve learned later in life, that people who ask for advice are often actually asking for approval on the choice they want to make.
Bingo. Which is why most people don’t ask me for advice because I always ask them if they really want to know what I think. After a pause, most decide against it and I say, that’s fine because at least we’re all being honest about our motives here.
That’s a tough one. You want to be honest with a friend but it there is always the potential it will backfire.
I remember trying to be tactful about it, but I’m sure he just wasn’t interested.
In fact, as it turned out, one of the things I know I told him is that she definitely wanted kids and he was unsure if he ever would (and as far as I know, still doesn’t). I have no idea if that’s what broke them up, but I do know she was remarried less than 2 years after the divorce and had a kid shortly thereafter.
Sometimes I want to scream at people, “get a journal!”
I’ve got a high school/college friend who’s gone through a string of awful husbands. She finds them and marries them as quickly as possible, and then realizes that they are creeps (as an aside, at our age, there are very few unmarried men, if any, that do not have … well, let’s just say issues).
Fortunately for my wife and me, she never introduces them to us or any of our friends until after they’re married. Which means I’m not required to tell her what’s wrong with them because it’s frankly too late, and she wouldn’t listen anyway.
She’s married her most recent husband and we’re supposed to me him in October. It will be an interesting exercise in observation and diagnosis if nothing else.
Some people get hooked on falling in love like it’s a drug (which physiologically, is not that far off!)
I actually think it’s more like some weird form of validation for her. Like she’s nothing without a husband.
It’s sad, really. She’s educated and has some family money, so she doesn’t need the financial assistance. Her need makes her an easy target for predators. The last guy made her perform at sex clubs (which is information my wife and I did NOT need and did NOT solicit) and she did it to keep him happy. I mean, I thought he was creepy but that was a whole other level that I wasn’t expecting. I think there’s a lot going on there and I wish she’d spend some time figuring out why she does this.
On the other hand I always wondered who went to sex clubs and now I’ve got some idea.
OK, wow, yeah, that’s next level.
I had a girlfriend like this in college. The fact that she went immediately from one BF to another and immediately to me should have given me pause, but I was still operating in a full blown trauma response from my first marriage so nothing registered. Needless to say, within a day or two of us breaking up, she had a new BF.
Exactly. Except with my friend, it’s back to the dating sites as soon as the divorce proceedings start. I mean, take a minute, for crying out loud. But no, she’s got to hit social media to talk about the new “love of her life.”
I’ve been to underwear parties if that helps. They were really big in the 90s. They weren’t sex clubs, per se. Just a bunch of men standing around in designer underwear. Although I used to go to this underground after-hours club in the Meatpacking District that had a backroom, but I never enjoyed its delights.
Oh, and Better Half returned from Fire Island and showed me photos from that party he went to on Sunday. What he didn’t tell me was that guests were required to wear nothing but fascinators (you know, those hats that women wear in England for formal occasions) and Speedos. Well thank God I didn’t go. There were men approaching 70 who looked like runway models. He pointed out one guy, who I think is in his 50s, who apparently is the equivalent of a Comptroller at some division of some Federal agency in DC. He’s a very high-level accountant at any rate. Apparently he and BH are now BFFs and I’ll be seeing more of him in the future. I hope he’ll be wearing a little more clothing.
wierdly enough i have no major fuck ups to my name far as work goes…just minor things
maybe i should take a more work like aproach to the rest of my life too…as i have fucked up pretty spectacularly in my own time more than once..
That’s me, I managed to keep my professional life fairly clean. My personal life? A MESS!
It’s only (our) money, Kath! The real story about this is that just recently she signed an order to shut down this whole boondoggle. Projected to cost $2.5 million, now at $64 million and counting. That sounds about right for New York. I guess Boston Consulting and Deloitte didn’t kick in enough to ole Pay to Play’s re-election campaign. That’ll teach ’em.