Although this wasn’t the worst, it most certainly could have been, and always comes to mind when questions like this are brought up.
I was on a job site. A half dozen houses were being built simultaneously. I walked too close behind an excavator, which abruptly turned. I nearly got hit in the head by the back end of that thing - which is all ballast and has tremendous mass. I almost got myself sent to the emergency room, and it would have been 100% my fault.
At the moment, I was just glad that none of the guys on my crew saw me pull such a rookie move. I didn’t think about it seriously until I got home that day. That excavator would’ve shattered my cheap plastic construction helmet like it was an eggshell. I could have died.
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.
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
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.
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.
Nothing major. In my country when people are fired they are entitled to recieve some money based on how long they've been an employee. One time I overpaid a dude who was fired by some 5k USD or so (converting from my local currency) which is nothing major but my boss was pissed. Luckly I just called him and asked him nicely to return the extra money and he did without being rude or anything.
Edit: just as a comparison at the same company once one of our (corporate) clients sent us the payment for a service twice by mistake, some ~200k USD that they had to pay 1x we ended up recieving twice. By comparison 5k is nothing.
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.
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.
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.
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 ...).