Feature

People are sharing their biggest workplace mistakes on Twitter

One journalist shared a particularly mortifying work moment involving singer and actor Meat Loaf.

Oops computer keyboard close up

People are sharing their biggest workplace errors, with hilarious results. Source: Getty Images

It doesn't happen very often, but when the internet decides to come together it can be a pretty funny and healing sight to behold.

Naturally, one of the few things we've all got in common is our fundamentally flawed human nature, part of which is a universal penchant for making embarrassing mistakes at work. It happens to all of us, albeit with varying stakes and consequences. So when Twitter user Steve Doherty asked his followers to share the biggest mistakes they'd ever made at work, it was always going to be a little cathartic, not to mention entertaining.

"What's the biggest mistake you've ever made at work?" Doherty tweeted.

He went first, sharing: "I once accidentally erased a section of the master tape for a Radio 4 Afternoon Play. It still haunts me."

The replies came thick and fast.
"[I was] 17ish years old and had a summer job as a summer scheme leader," one follower replied.

"In the first week we took a bunch of 6-10 year olds to a balloon festival. I counted them off the bus then back on and only realised when we got back that the small crying child wasn't one of ours."

Upping the ante, another wrote: "Years ago I left a cell in a spreadsheet empty instead of inserting a '1'. This led to eight million dollars being spent drilling an oil well in the North Sea that shouldn't have been drilled."

Yikes.

One journalist shared a particularly mortifying work moment involving singer and actor Meat Loaf.

"21 years ago I reviewed a Meat Loaf gig for a newspaper without attending the gig (I was ill/an idiot)," they wrote.

"An hour after publication the paper called to inform me that the gig had, in fact, been cancelled. I was sacked. The Sun wrote a piece about it. The headline: 'MEAT OAF'."

I guess the main takeaway here is that none of us are infallible - and sometime, maybe, the internet can be a place where we come together over our shared humanity. Even if only to laugh about how imperfect we are.

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2 min read

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By Samuel Leighton-Dore


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