Worst thing in the office place was when some idiot left their window open in the middle of Winter, temps fell below 0F with high winds, and froze the 2" sprinkler pipes running over their office. Flooded most of the 2nd floor then started running through and raining out onto the 1st floor (and then into the basement). And it happened during covid lock-downs so it was fortunate anyone was even in the building to report it.
My own personal oopsie was checking network cabling in a small room, bent over to check things low and then wandered out to check elsewhere... Then noticed there was a LOT of commotion on the sales floor. Turns out I hit the power switch on one of the phone cabinets with my ass and shut down half the phone lines.
Tripped and dropped a box, worth approximately $220,000 today, of extremely precise tooling meant for a cutting die. I was on my way to my bench to wrap them up safely. Boss was not pleased that day.
Missing my first shift at a large retail store because of a misunderstanding. When I showed up the next week, the manager was furious. Not the best start
Worked, after hours from home, on a Windows Server and fixed and issue with the Database on there. After doing so i thought I'd go to bed and shut down the machine... only I hadn't yet left the RDP connection and shut the server down by Accident. Had to drive to work and start the server up again.
Was relocating a $10k piece of networking hardware and dropped it into another 10k VM server. Server was fine, network hardware was not. It was during a project that was a real mess, thought it was a stupid mistake though.
We were able to work around it, though we did lose the contract we were trying to make. Honestly though given how rushed and panicked that whole three months was though, we were lucky nobody suffered anything worse. Real shitshow.
I haven't had any big mishaps myself, but I worked in a wafer fab and apparently the person who came in to replace me after I quit, dropped a whole box of wafers like a month into the job. Shit worth like $1M.
That said, massive fault on the company for a lack of better procedures handling those, and afaik the person didn't even lose the job as it was an honest accident.
I used to have a boss that told me you never fire the person who made that expensive accident because you know that's one person who will never make that mistake again.
Seriously, it's way more expensive to replace someone unless they really suck. It's best to invest in the people you have whenever possible.
I work in a grocery store meat department, and part of my job is breaking down the newly-delivered pallets in the morning.
Ground beef was on sale and the warehouse had allocated (i.e., sent us extra on top of what we ordered) way too much. Each box has a production date and a use by date, but the text is very small, so I am supposed to write the day of expiration (excluding the month, since ground beef gets only 20 days on the shelf anyways; so a box that expires July 5th would get "5") in larger size and circle it.
I was very sleep deprived and on some of the boxes accidentally wrote the day of the production date (last month) instead of the expiration date, making it seem like they had 10 extra days. So the butchers ground other boxes before those ones, and the mistake was only discovered two days after the last two remaining (roughly 80-lb.) boxes had expired.
A funny mistake that's not mine is when a new hire, on his second day, was told to run our cart of fresh pickles. When he pushed it over the threshold from the backroom to the sales floor, the too-large, precariously-stacked cart completely collapsed, causing dozens of jars of pickles to smash (and to be clear, I did tell him how to push carts backwards over the threshold so that exact thing doesn't happen - he just didn't do it).
And to top it off, he wasn't wearing his slip-proof shoes (even though he had been told to multiple times), so when he was carrying a box of sauerkraut to the department to be written off, he slipped in the pickle juice on the floor and dumped sauerkraut all over himself.
