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Here's a discussion topic that will spur some cringeworthy memories for some readers … or memories of secondhand embarrassment … or even some schadenfreude (I love that word): What is the biggest mistake you've made at work? How did you recover from it?
It's been quite a while since we last talked about how to get over a mistake at the office, so we thought it'd make a great topic for an open thread.
Some examples of mistakes, big and small, that readers shared in the comments on that last post included overlooking major errors on a report that was sent to a large number of clients, leaving a message for a client at the wrong office (and later getting an angry call about it), failing to catch typos (that's certainly a common one!), and sending an reply-all email as a bcc'd recipient. A few readers explained that they've put their work mistakes into perspective after talking to friends and family in the medical field or the military — after all, most of our errors on teh job aren't literally life-and-death.
While some people can recover from mistakes easily and move on, others find themselves reliving work mishaps long past the point that coworkers have forgotten about them. Harvard Business Review recently had a helpful article called “How to Stop Obsessing Over Your Mistakes” that shared tips like these from a former clinical psychologist:
- Label your negative thoughts and feelings about yourself as just that — rather than facts. One specific self-talk line the author shared was “[I]nstead of saying ‘I’m inadequate,' you might say, ‘I'm feeling like I'm inadequate.'”
- If you find yourself dwelling on your mistakes too much, try to be productive about it: Think about what you can do to make sure you don't make a similar mistake in the future.
- When you're stuck in negative thought patterns, distract yourself by choosing an activity that requires a certain amount of focus but not a lot of brain power — the example the article gives is the act of filling out an expense report.
So, readers, let's commiserate: Tell us about the biggest mistake you've made at work and how you recovered from it. Did you ’fess up right away? Try to fix the situation yourself first? Never tell a soul … until now? Have you ever gotten fired (or fired someone else?) for a major mistake?
Stock photo via Stencil.
Anon for this
I once filed a lawsuit against a firm client (in my defense, I was way down the totem pole, but I should have confirmed that the partners involved had actually done a conflict check). I took responsibility, apologized, and helped us work through the issue. It actually all ended up fine. I think the partners impacted (not the ones who missed the issue) were impressed with how I handled the debacle. But yeah, not a good day.
Anonymous
We had a junior lawyer once commission documents for someone who was suing a major client (an actual town lol). I have no idea how that could happen since a conflict check should have been run as soon as he walked through the door. It was hilarious (mostly because it didn’t involve me)
Anonymous
I once sent a PowerPoint presentation on our corporate strategy (which included the release of some of our vendor partners) directly to the vendor partners who we were releasing – just completely attached the wrong PowerPoint and pressed “send”. I was a pretty junior employee at the time and I think I was forgiven for that reason – but yeah, not good.
Ellen
I once made a different kind of Powerpoint mistake. When I was researching a topic for the manageing partner’s CLE, I found a powerpoint on the internet that was very close to what I needed. So I downloaded the powerpoint from the internet, and then edited it to fit what he needed at the CLE. I thought it was perfect when it was done, so I emailed it to the bar association, and they included it in the written materials.
What I did NOT know was that there was some stuff in all of the footers that was NOT on the screen; nameley, the name of the law firm that did the original powerpoint. The ONLY way I would have known this is if I had printed out the slides before I sent them in, which I did not. So the people who got the written book of materials (and looked at the presentation at the CLE) could clearly see that the materials looked like they were written by a law firm in Kansas City Missouri, when in fact, I did the slides for the manageing partner based on that firm’s original slides, which I did not see. When the manageing partner was questioned on it, he said that I had worked up the slides with the assistance of said law firm, but I never ever even heard of that law firm! I now know to check the footers on all documents that I copy from the web. FOOEY!
Anon
Two things come to mind, both in Big Law…
1) We interviewed a bunch of foreign counsel for a case and picked one. I accidentally cc-ed one of the people we’d interviewed and rejected on the engagement letter with the person we hired. There was no confidential client info in the email so it was awkward more than anything but the partner was (understandably) really upset and I felt horrible.
2) I was on a case that had a whole bunch of midnight filings that I had to oversee as an associate. One time I really screwed up the filing. I don’t remember now if I filed the wrong thing or omitted the exhibits, but I know we had to seek permission from the court and opposing counsel to re-file (which we got). This I blame myself for less…obviously I messed up, but I also think it’s insane when partners sign off on documents with 20 exhibits at 11:53 and you have to have them filed by midnight. If nothing else there can be technical glitches with the court system (which also happened to us once, although not when I was responsible).
Irish Midori
E-filings are the source of many awful moments in my life.
Anonome
I was at home on a conference call at night (multiple time zones were involved) and my husband mixed up what day it was…so he started playing an incredibly profane HBO show at full volume in the next room. I dove for the mute icon but missed, so a bunch of people heard me shrieking at him to “turn that shit off”. He now leaves the house before I log in to Skype.
Anon
That’s hilarious and barely even counts as a “mistake” – I would just be amused if I witnessed that.
Panda Bear
At my first job out of college, I just… didn’t know that bcc existed. I had never used it for my personal or college email correspondence. So I sent out my first client newsletter cc’ing about 400 people, and got what felt like 400 emails back yelling at me for not bcc’ing them. I was completely clueless. Thankfully a kind colleague explained things to me. A few years later, I was the kind colleague explaining the same mistake to a new college grad who did the same thing. Circle of life.
Equestrian attorney
I’ve definitely had the bcc issue. They need to teach this in college!
Anonymous
“I’m feeling like I’m inadequate” wouldn’t be enough for therapists. They insist that expressing feelings in indirect statements is a way to sneak in a thought, and “inadequate” isn’t really an emotion. The next step would be to get at the emotion (whatever it is) and name that.
Anonymous
?
Anonymous
“I think I may be inadequate” means something very similar to “I feel like I’m inadequate.” We often use “feel” to express thoughts tentatively. But big goal in CBT is to distinguish thoughts from feelings.
Inadequacy isn’t really an emotion. Some people are inadequate; a person’s inadequacy can be debated as a matter of fact. Emotions belong to us and aren’t debatable. I’m not sure what the emotion would be. Maybe the feeling is something like worry and disappointment?
Anonymous
I thought that was an odd suggestion as well. I get the gist, you want to change from your identity (I’m bad) to a controllable action that can change (I did something bad). But I agree-pairing that with “inadequate” seems like it’s not quite right.
KS IT Chick
Everyone has heard the saying “To err is human; to forgive is divine.” I always tack on “To really screw up requires a computer.”
I deleted the test environment of our information system. My DH’s parents had died 19 days apart the previous month, in between which we had a major system upgrade. The old test environment was set up for deletion. I fat-fingered and got the new/current test environment. I tried to stop it, but no dice. It happened on a day that our vendor didn’t have full coverage for non-emergent problems, so I had to wait until the next day to get the system restoration started. When I told my boss, she just looked at me for a moment then said “Well, it wasn’t live. We’ll be okay.” We were, and it allowed us to test the backups and prove that our system restoration processes worked.
The next one was when I was trying to merge record numbers in a SQL database. The programmer assisting me didn’t set a reset point before running the routine. He then proceeded to set every record number in the database to the same number, the one that we were trying to get rid of in the first place. We had to reload the database over the course of about 15 hours to get it back to functional. (The programmer was told to go home and the vendor/his employer would call him. The next phone call a few days later was that his employment was terminated.)
Another time was triggering a bug in a mission-critical system that caused every document request to be printed 101 times instead of 1 time. On a Friday afternoon about 15 minutes before we were supposed to go home. The programmer who would normally have resolved the issue was at his wife’s mother’s funeral and would be out until Tuesday at the earliest. Even though we didn’t have 24-hour or weekend support, the available staff worked on it for the next 24 hours until they were able to get us up and running again. The boss, who had already been with me through the other two errors, told me that I wasn’t allowed to do maintenance on mission-critical systems on Fridays or holidays anymore.
Curious
I once over-purchased about $1M in inventory and had to personally call each of the sellers to cancel as much as I could. That one was fun.
MagicUnicorn
Not my mistake but humorous: the office supply vendor for where I used to work once sent us a pallet of staples instead of a single box. They only charged us for a box, and then refused to accept the return of the rest of the pallet. I suspect that office will never need to order staples in the lifetime of anyone working there.
anon
That makes me think of something off point. I ordered 1.5 dozen tamales from a staff member here (yummm) and ended up with 18 dozen – somehow she read my email wrong or told her mom wrong or something. I paid her for the full amount because I felt too bad that they had gone to all of that effort to be uncompensated. We were handing out tamales by the dozen. It still makes me laugh.
Aunt Jamesina
What a delicious problem!
Anonymous
Reminds me of something my boss always says: The only way you never make mistakes is if you never do anything.
Jenn
I was an intern in one of the European law firms outside the U.S. The lawyers gave me a bunch of administrative tasks to do, for example, translating their marketing material, making envelops for their new year cards, sending 2000+ email invitations template to clients for an event that they are organizing, etc. I was supposed to send the emails in the name of the partner, but something happened in the email system and I didn’t pay attention, I sent all the email invitations in my name.
The lawyers were really mean and scolded me the last day of my internship, saying I should work in the government because I am not competent for a law firm. Honestly, it was really harsh and I am not sure if I recovered from this experience. Every time I thought about this I felt so sad and it took away my confidence.
Anon
This wasn’t me, but I haven’t done anything to top this (and in comparison, everything I screw up seems manageable):
Senior associate, partner, and I (super junior associate) split up sections of an appellate brief. Senior associate took the lead for the brief and set up his own Word document for his brief. The day before the brief is due, our firm gets attacked by ransomware, and we all lose a day of work. We all start redoing our work. Next day we realize that again due to the ransomware, nothing we did the day before saved, so we redo it again. Somehow, around 5pm, the evening the brief is due, Senior Associate deletes his brief. IT cannot restore it because they are dealing with the ransomware issue. Senior Associate finds a partial version in email and then a full version he printed and starts typing.
Senior Associate finishes around 8 pm, and our assistant starts combining the files. Problem is–our office used WordPerfect, not Word. Senior Associate had not told anyone he was doing the brief in Word. Assistant finally gets the files merged around 9:30 pm (brief due at 11 pm). Problem is– in the merging, every punctuation mark got changed to a square. So, we have an hour and a half to change every punctuation mark and also proofread the brief. Brief gets filed at 10:58 pm.
Side note– it was the partner’s anniversary, and he had left at 5 pm. He texted us a few times concerned that the e-filing hadn’t gone through yet, but I still don’t think he knows how close we were to not getting it filed on time.
LaurenB
I hired fieldwork to conduct a study across several major markets in another country where multiple languages are spoken without getting approval from the client exactly what cities I was going to, what languages were we translating into, etc. Basically I jumped the gun. It delayed our timing to the client by several months and my company had to eat $200,000 to fix it.
Mg
As a 1st year associate I didn’t know that requests to admit truly had to be answered in 28 days or they were deemed admitted. I just assumed they were like other discovery requests that nobody answered on time and required a consultation and motion to compel before court forced compliance. So I didn’t answer them… and received motion for summary judgment to the tune of $300,000.
I was saved by a local rule that required the other side to tender a financial affidavit prior to issuing discovery. To be fair, part of the reason I felt like we didn’t need to answer the requests yet was because we had not yet received the financial affidavit… but that was just my gut understanding and not based on actual knowledge of the actual rule.
Huge sigh of relief after a scary few weeks.
Eat your veggies!
I was leaving a practice group lunch with a full plate of salad to take to my desk (was skipping the lunch to get work done) and my supervising partner tried to help me with the door. I was stubborn and convinced that I didn’t need any help. He insisted (helping me with the door while still in his seat). I dropped an entire plate of salad on his head. He forgave me and is still one of the best mentors I’ve ever had. When I left that job, I gifted him a fancy salad bowl :)
NB
I was in charge of selecting and retaining experts for a very high-value med mal case going to arbitration. The biggest component of Claimant’s damages were for home health care into the future, and I retained an expert to opine as to the cost of hiring a live-in home health aide. She drew up the report and sent it to us and my partner was thrilled–the numbers were substantially lower than what we’d been getting from other experts. We reported on it to the client, only to find out that she had misunderstood me and had given us the costs for 10 hours per day, not 24. Multiplied out over the Claimant’s remaining 40+ year life span, the difference was millions of dollars…and by the time we’d figured that out, my partner had already started reporting based on her estimates in OTHER cases to OTHER clients. That was a fun one.