Had a VM that batch processed files but some reason a couple of the files comming in was causing the procedure to crash and Gigs of files to get clogged.
I was moving big chunks of those into the host tmp Dir (only place I knew was ok to throw rand stuff) to try and catch the offending files. TMP was actually a RAM disk, so I filled all availability memory and crash the HOST system (including multiple other critical VMs) and lost weeks of data (because you know I put it in a RAM disk ...).
At 7 years of age I was collecting the grass coming out of my neighbours lawnmower. I was tossing it in the air at my dog who was having great fun jumping into the air catching it.
Cue my neighbour running over my foot with his lawnmower. I didn't feel much pain as it shredded straight through my runner and skin.
I was rushed to hospital and somehow they saved my toe. It took about five years for me to regain feeling in it.
Was working in a deli department of a grocery store. I think it was my second or third week there, and i was slicing balogna for a customer. Went to peel some of the casing off and got the tip of my thumb instead. Still think the lady who unkindly yanked my stitches out at the urgent care caused the lil flap to come off.
It was 2009 and I'm actually impressed i got some tactile feeling back through the scar. I swear it fucks with the touch screen though.
I worked in a deli without protective gloves and am lucky I have all my fingers.
You know how the end of the meat or cheese would sometimes not fall through the slicer? Well, one time it just got stuck. I absentmindedly reaching in and flicked it out. With the blade on. It's a good damn miracle I didn't hit it.
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.
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.
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.
Way back as a line cook I was on saute and it was the season for soft shell crab. I had a full rail of tickets, and 2-14in. saute pans with oil heating up on full blast while I knelt down to grab the crabs from my prep cooler across from the range.
The 'roided up chef stepped over me to get to middle to expedite the rush, and grabbed one of the pans with now very hot oil in them...realizing that they had oil he stopped his motion but Newtons law kept the oil flowing, down onto my bare forearm, hand and how I was positioned my ankle.
The grill guy immediately took a pan of water and splashed my arm with it, rolled down my sleeve and soaked it....and as a bonus being a dumbass I finished the shift before driving myself to the ER. Some good blisters but fortunately no scarring, very little pain because it was kept covered.
Bonus bits: The hotel/golf resort just implemented a drug policy, and if you were injured or did 200 USD of damage you needed to take a drug test, which I did. Policy also stated that you wait 3 days not working for the results.
This was the start of a very busy weekend with a car show on the golf course, etc, and every warm body was needed, I went in to work the next day and if they wanted to send someone else for a drug test because they caused the accident, I suggested the ill tempered redheaded café chef...my results were discarded later.
Bonus bonus, right after the policy was put in place, a manager dropped a chandelier & walked away from his job after 5 years working there instead of taking the drug test.
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.
And there are ways of having that entry removed from the list of options entirely, and not just shifted to the drop-down menu. Makes it harder to physically shut down, but its absence can be a WTF big enough for you to realize which machine you are working on.
I don’t bother doing that to VMs, which can be trivially restarted, but their Hyper-V hosts? You betchya I do it to those.
Years ago, when projectors were common in conference rooms. Someone was giving a practice presentation before the real deal in front of 80+ audience members. It was just our team of 8 or so the room for the dry run. In the middle of the presentation, there was a terrifyingly loud POP sound as the bulb blew out in the projector. It scared the shit out of everyone in the room. We all laughed after the initial shock wore off.
One of my coworkers stepped up on a table to take a look at it. I was near him and I waited for silence in the room while he was fucking with the thing, and clapped my hands together very loudly, simulating the previous scare. He let out a shriek of terror and clutched his chest. Everyone laughed. Eventually he laughed as well, but said something like "damn, that scared me." Within a week he had a legit heart attack.
He was ultimately okay, but I still think about it. I know I didn't cause it, but for a long time I couldn't shake the guilty feeling that I contributed to it. Oops. Sorry Ken.
I worked for an online money exchange company. On one occasion I made a wrong operation: I chose the wrong bank and although the account did belong to the client, it was blocked and there was no possibility (supposedly) of reactivating it. I ended up making the company lose the equivalent of 3 times my salary (the equivalent in, say, Dollars is not much, but here in Venezuela it was more money than I ever had in my whole life). After paying half of the debt (since the other half was charged to my supervisor, even though I proposed that I would assume the entire debt) I resigned immediately, I did not want to deal with the stress of making such a mistake again and that it would get worse.
We were told from the beginning that any mistakes we made would have to be paid for, and that the work was "informal" (unregistered), so my ex-employers, in their words, "could do whatever they wanted with us". That and the fact that in general the whole business was poorly run from the beginning were among the reasons for my resignation.
"But why did you take such a job in the first place?" Simple, I "needed" the money.
In most western countries any unintentional mistake made by the employee is considered a cost of doing business… after all, if such a mistake is doable, there is a problem in the business processes that needs correction.
Now don’t get me wrong, many shady business owners will still try to pin things on employees and take it out of their pay. But that is illegal here.
A put a hole in the side of a helicopter that left it grounded for a week.
I accidentally tapped it with another piece of the helicopter. I'm happily working on helicopters that are made of metal now, so no more of that nonsense.
Edit: also, honorable mention because it wasn't my fault, but I made a helicopter drop an external fuel tank when it took off... by replacing a light bulb. It was on the button that makes the helicopter drop the external tanks, but there are failsafes so it will only do it in the air. Apparently the internal switch got stuck, so the second the weight was off of the wheels CLONK... and a tank was laying on the active runway. Excellent.
A couple of things come to mind. Nothing really happened with either, but I can't think of anything worse:
First, years ago, when I was active duty army as a 15B Aircraft Powerplant Repairer (in the guard now), I was clipping blades on the first stage of the compressor due to damage. There's 20 blades in the first stage, and you have to clip the one opposite as well to maintain balance. Well, I counted wrong and clipped the wrong blade. The GE rep (representative from General Electric, who makes the engine) was right there and must not have been paying attention. It ended fine, though, just extra work I had to do.
Second, less years ago at my current job as a Diesel Technician, I was doing a warranty repair for a service bulletin. I was still pretty new here, and warranty jobs pay less time, but this was like the third one I had done and was making good time, so I was trying to hurry. It was cold that day, and people complain when you have the bay doors open, so I had it just open enough to raise the cab, which meant the door was almost all the way open anyway. When I had done as much as I could do with the truck in the shop, I lowered the cab so I could pull it out and use our forklift to remove the part. I had forgotten about the door and ran into it. Didn't get in any trouble though, just had to take a drug test per policy, and the door doesn't close right to this day.