Expensive Mistakescoopsweb asks "What's the most expensive mistake you've ever made? Should I mention a certain employee who caused 4 hours worth of delays in Central London and got his company fined £500k?"
No points for stories about the time you had a few and thought it'd be a good idea to wrap your car around a bollard. Or replies consisting of "my wife".
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chthonic, Thu 25 Oct 2007, 11:26)
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Apprentices eh!Many many moons ago I worked for a large British company that wil be nameless (but it rhymes with polls-poyce).
I was on rotation during my apprenticeship to a little backwater where we made the free power end of the gas turbine power generation thingies (still awake?)
Well! One day we had a delivery of stator blades, quite big and heavy, precisely machined HUGELY expensive bits of high-tech alloy that we'd been waiting for.
We loaded them by hand (to prevent damage)from the lorry on a wooden (also to prevent damage)hand-drawn truck type thing to be hauled into the workshop area. It came to pass that there was a slight slope from the loading area to the workshop so the bold Captain decided to ride the wooden truck type thing instead of pulling or pushing it. The cornering of the wooden truck type thing was proved to be "not good". Not good at all as ALL of the blades fell off in a heap!
Each blade? £2,400.00 (in 1977!!)
Rework of each blade to serviceable condition? Approx £1,800.00
Penalty clauses from the customer for contract overrun due to aforementioned rework? £20,000.00/day.
All in all the bill was close to £850,000.00!
My punishment? Jack shit as they shouldn't have had apprentices even HANDLING these blades unsupervised.
It was gratifying to hear the bollocking my supervisor got, and even more gratifying to recieve the written apology he (a 56 yr old PhD) had to give to me (a 17 year old arrogant snot).
Happy days.
(, Sun 28 Oct 2007, 15:46, 3 replies)
'sallright......I worked for the company that makes those hugely expensive vanes.
We had apprentices making them.
You wouldn't believe the scrap we let through, knowing that Royces couldn't check 'em properly anyway. We knew they were for CHP rather than flight, so we didn't care.
Although, we weren't overly concerned about the flight ones either, come to think of it...
(, Sun 28 Oct 2007, 22:23, closed)
According to this handy calculatormeasuringworth.com/calculators/ppoweruk/
That's about 3.65 million in today's money.
(, Wed 31 Oct 2007, 16:56, closed)
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