11 hours ago
‘I accidentally printed thousands of photos of my colleagues': The most embarrassing office stories
We all have a bad day at the office from time to time, whether it's accidentally cc-ing your boss into an email you really didn't want them to see, or a printer that can smell fear.
But some people's workplace mistakes are a little harder to bounce back from. We're talking potentially career-ending fiascos – from evacuating the entire office to throwing thousands of pounds' worth of jewellery in the bin.
So if you've really messed up at work today, at least you can take comfort in the fact you're not alone…
One man's trash…
I had just started working at a top fashion PR company and one of our clients was a very high-end jewellery brand. They had sent us some really fine gold and diamond chain necklaces – worth around £3,000 – to be worn by a celebrity on a shoot. The jewellery was delivered to the showroom and had been signed for by an intern, but then we lost track of it. It was getting closer and closer to the shoot date and we still couldn't find the necklaces, so I thought I'd tidy up the showroom in the hope they would turn up. I remember finding a little jiffy bag-type envelope, giving it a feel and thinking there was nothing inside, so I chucked it in the bin. We ransacked the whole office and it was only when we checked CCTV days later that I realised what had happened – I'd accidentally thrown the jewellery away. I was so embarrassed I quit the job soon after. I still think about those necklaces lying in a landfill site somewhere because of me.
– Adrian, 31, London
Size matters
I was working as an assistant to a wedding planner and we had spent months planning a client's wedding at a big stately home in the middle of nowhere. She had requested 100 white, double-handled vases, filled with white lilies, to be placed throughout the venue, and I had finally managed to source these within the budget which was no mean feat. On the day before the wedding, everything got unloaded and the boxes from the website which I'd ordered the vases from arrived and were checked off the list. It was only on the morning of the Big Day that my boss suddenly asked me where the vases were. 'In those two boxes over there,' I replied. As I spoke, I realised that the boxes did seem extremely small to contain 100 vases. I opened them up with dread and dug through mountains of bubble wrap before realising my mistake. Yes, I'd ordered 100 white, double-handled vases. They just happened to each be 3cm high. I laugh about it now but at the time I actually cried about it.
– Alycia, 37, Leeds
Snack attack
I was working on a big summer campaign at a tech company where they had lots of perks, including a room where you could help yourself to free snacks. Or so I thought. One Friday night my family was driving to Cornwall and I thought 'Oh great, I'll stock up on snacks for our road trip'. I went to the snack facility and grabbed loads of chocolate bars, crisps, fruit, drinks – I really went for it. People even had to open the doors for me because I had so much food in my arms that I couldn't open the doors myself. Smiling happily to myself, I stuck it all in my bag and thought nothing of it. But on Monday morning I had a mortifying email from a very senior boss at my company – the global head of marketing – saying people had 'observed' me 'taking an unreasonable amount of snacks'. I was totally snack-shamed! I felt like I could barely show my face there again and never really recovered from the embarrassment. I now know that when people say 'Help yourself!' they don't always mean literally.
– Lotte, 43, London
Face off
I had been trying for years to get into the music industry and had just landed a job as a PA to a big exec at a massive record label. I would often entertain my housemates with stories about some of the eccentric people that worked in my office, and they begged me to show them what they looked like. This was before the days when everyone had a social media profile to stalk, so one day I logged on to the company intranet, and tried to print a couple of headshots of my colleagues. But I must have pressed the wrong button because I ended up printing out the pictures of everyone in the entire company. Thousands of people's faces were flying out of the printer in the middle of the office, with no way of stopping it. I was madly panicking, trying to get rid of them all, but the printing job was linked to my email. My boss came over to my desk and said 'Why are you printing out everyone's photos?' I couldn't think of a single reason why someone would do this, so I very meekly said 'To show my friends?' I didn't last long in that job for some reason.
– Malcolm, 45, Brighton
What a balls up
It was the summer of 2010 and I was the new boy on the news desk at a national newspaper. On the Friday night in question I had been in the office since 7am and was running on empty. Part of my job was to write short captions for pictures that came in late, and that night it was a photo of a woman at the Big Chill music festival. Keen to get out of the office, I turned to Wikipedia and did a bit of copy-and-paste to fill up the caption space. I forgot all about it until Monday morning, when it turned out I'd failed to realise that the Wikipedia entry had been hacked and I'd blindly copy-and-pasted that 'The Big Chill was founded in 1994 as the Wanky Balls festival in North London'. The mistake went viral. 'Reading and Leeds? We'd rather go to Wanky Balls Festival' read the headline in NME, #wankyballs was trending on Twitter, and the poor photographer had to issue a statement that the caption was nothing to do with him. I was mortified. But I later heard that a north London pub had plans to put on a real Wanky Balls Festival. I'm not sure if it ever happened.
– Simon, 43, London
Hold the line
As a web designer I've had a few major clangers over the years. The worst was probably when I was still a junior and I was dealing with the senior manager of one of our clients. She was being extremely aggressive and rude on the call and midway through discussing a design brief she said 'Give me a second' and appeared to put us on hold. I turned to the colleagues who were sitting next to me and told them both what a massive pain she was being, and it was only when I eventually paused for breath that I heard a cough on the other end of the line. My blood ran cold – she'd heard everything. Things got even more shouty after that.
– Alex, 38, Kent
Dress to unimpress
When I was in my early twenties I was working as a buyer's assistant at House of Fraser. Just before a big presentation, I was ironing all the clothes to make them look pristine and I managed to burn a huge, iron-shaped hole straight through the back of one of the key dresses. I spent the whole meeting praying no one would turn the dress around. Miraculously, I got away with it!
– Stacey, 37, London
First day from hell
During my first day at my first 'proper' job as a receptionist at a big recruitment company, I mistook the MD's wife for his daughter in front of the whole office. Even when he corrected me I refused to believe him and thought he was joking. Then, during my lunch break, I put some bread in the toaster, forgot all about it, and set the fire alarm off. The whole building, with multiple companies and hundreds of people, had to be evacuated. Thankfully things improved a bit after that.
– Isabel, 49, Surrey
Some names have been changed
