Buying a House and Getting Married
... the bill is just beginning to mount up.

The final act will be when the divorce lawyers get their noses in on the action.
(Biff..., Thu 25 Oct 2007, 15:37, 3 replies)

When working for a large insurance company
I managed to bring down their entire computer system for a day, at 8am just before all the users got onto the system, over 1,000 employees doing nothing all day... I think it cost them over a million £££

and all I can say is hahahahahahahahahaha
( umbongo I vote for Evil Lu as Mayor of /talk, Thu 25 Oct 2007, 15:28, Reply)

expensive mistake
my expensive mistake was trying to emigrate to america when i was 18. Cost me £3000 and i was home in less than 2 weeks.
(free scooby !! bad grammar an spelling since 1985, Thu 25 Oct 2007, 15:22, Reply)

Damn you housing market
In 2001 I had the chance to buy a tiny 1 bedroom detatched house in the posh part of town. I could have bought it for £80K, I had £15K saved for a deposit but on my wage at the time I couldnt get a large enough mortgage. My parents offered to help but I made the costly mistake of deciding to wait until I had saved some more money.

Costly because the housing market went absolutely fucking mental. Que the next 5 years desperately saving everything I could, doing everything short of sucking cock to raise money only for the goalposts to shoot out of sight again and again and again...

I have finally managed to get a house in the crap part of town just in time for house prices to crash.
( Colonel Dracula Two manky hookers and a racist dwarf, Thu 25 Oct 2007, 15:19, 3 replies)

Conned
Isn't this the same topic as last time?
(frankspencer, Thu 25 Oct 2007, 15:17, 13 replies)

More drunken decimal points...
The Revolution highlights one of the easiest and most dangerous pitfalls of modern business.

I work for an ad agency and one Friday afternoon I was putting together the final version of a schedule for the client (a fairly well-known charity) to sign off. Needless to say being a tad inebriated already and wanting to get everything done so I could return to the pub I didnt check my formulae as carefully as I should've.

Coming back in on Monday to find that only half the budget had been approved was a mild shock to the system to say the least. Since the campaign was starting that week we needed to find another £60k very quickly. Not much to some companies perhaps, but to a charity that's no small change.

In the advertising tradition we spent the next couple of days 'amending' some files and set up their marketing team and the TV sales people to take the blame. Obviously we could've just held our hands up, got a slapped wrist and saved 2 days worth of endeavour but where's the fun in that...
(Milo Minderbinder, Thu 25 Oct 2007, 15:10, Reply)

Forlorn
I took out my wallet; a couple of quid and some shrapnel. That wouldn’t buy me an authentic Yorkshire grousing bonnet. I could withdraw the cash from my local bank, but could I justify doing so? I stared into the shop window longingly. It was a fine bonnet. My hot breath clung to the icy cold window like kittens to the side of a bus on a one way journey to nothingness. The bonnet was hanging in the window display like a beacon; a beacon of hope, of promise, of temptation. The colours in the fabric seemed to swirl and dart and I was reminded of my mother’s eyes. The fabric of my trousergroin touched the glass. I walked on.

“There must be a better way to make money than cod-fettling,” I said to myself.
“There is!” chirruped a reply from beneath a nearby tree.
“How did you hear me? I’m talking to myself!” I said to myself. “I’m a deaf-mute!”
“Then how can you hear me?” said the squeaky voice.
There was only one way to speak to a cocky character like this. “Show thyself, thou shrill treeshelterer of this grim afternoon. Emerge ye from thy shady lair and let mine eyes feast on thy undivulg’d form.”
Silence.
I was enraged. “EMERGE YE!” my mindlungs clattered.
I stood for a moment, staring at the tree trunk. At first there was a small green finger, then a whole hand, and very shortly after there was a stout frog, or maybe a toad, standing only three lemurs and a shark’s length away from me. I crouched and held out my palm. The plump little fellow hopped onto my hand as happy as you like. We were soon engaged in a frenzied amphibio-mammalian union, the likes of which would give David Icke horrific nightmares, or maybe an erection.

We lay on the grass in a post-coital embrace.
“Did you enjoy that, my smooth green lover?” I thought to him.
“Did you?” he replied in a telepathic mindcroak.
“I certainly did!” I telereplied.
It was then that my heart was broken.
He leapt to his devious green feet with gusto. “Haha! You owe me five hundred and thirty-three pounds!”
“Why?” I asked through my mental skullbone.
“It’s the law! If a man penetrates any amphibian of the order Anura and then claims to have enjoyed it, he automatically forfeits a sum of money directly proportionate to the difference in height between the two participating specimens, multiplied by the duration of the aforementioned act of penetration.”
The whorefrog laughed gleefully. How could I have argued?

I walked to the bank forlornly, withdrew the cash and handed it over. The pondstitute promptly disappeared behind a tree trunk. It was only then that I realised the entire existence of the deceitful pleasuretoad had all been in my mind and I had just given my money to a passing she-truant. It truly was an expensive mistake!
(stusut79, Thu 25 Oct 2007, 14:56, 11 replies)

Listening to Teachers
I wanted to do a maths degree, but as my predicted grade for Psychology was better, I was "advised"* to apply for that instead.

Three years later, I got a 2:2 in Applied Psychology from a an ex-poly.

As you can imagine, I was the most employable graduate in the world **

10 years later I'm an accountant, which I would have achieved a good deal earlier if I had done a maths degree.

In summary: A piece of paper which neither impresses nor has any use: cost £16000.

I really ought to work out 3 years of billable time as well here.....hang on....

{Brain whirrs into Life}

260 working days per year
3 years
£88 per day
£68640

Plus the £16000 it cost me for my silly education

£84640 (pre-tax)

Oh dear, I've upset myself

*read: pushed into
** Sarcasm overload
(Jugular, Thu 25 Oct 2007, 14:55, 8 replies)

Glass and Magnets
During my undergraduate years, there were various practical experiments to be done, but us spotty students weren't let near the good equipment for very obvious reasons. However, in the final year, each of us did a research project, doing proper research for one of the professors in the dept. Which meant that we needed to use all the cool stuff.

A friend of mine had a project, involving the synthesis of a protein from various building blocks. Not a particularly interesting project, just a proof of concept - looky here, we can make this protein from bits of these six other proteins!!! OMG Lego blocks in molecular form. Wow! etc.

Quick bit of background - Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) is a really cool technique for looking at the structures of various chemicals, and if you have one that works at a high enough frequency, you can even deduce the layout, connectivity and mother's maiden name of something as complex as a protein. The NMR machine is basically a supercooled superconducting set of perpendicular uber-electromagnets with some very good sensors that detect changes from within the sample tube as one of the magnets is alternated. As you might imagine, the higher end machines are *very* expensive and analysis time on them is like gold. Using it even briefly depleted your research grant by hundreds.

The setup: Dissolve your unknown stuff in a certain solvent. This goes into a fine glass NMR tube, attach a magnetic ring to the top. This is placed inside the reactor, where it hovers due to the ring.

Four months of painstaking work, and my friend has created his protein. He dissolves a sample, puts it in the tube... and has a problem. He's never used an NMR machine before, but that's OK, he's knowledgeable! He's a final year student now! He books time on the most powerful machine in the dept (the 800Mhz beastie, costing nearly £2 million). And he does what he's watched everyone else do, drops the tube into the machine and sets the program running, and daydreams of sugarplums and carbon atoms dancing in sequence.

...a few minutes later, someone queries why the magnetic ring is still on the preparation table. He'd forgotten to attach it. Rather than hover in the middle, the glass tube fell straight through and broke at the bottom.

When you take one of these machines apart to retrieve the glass shards, you have to totally disassemble it, and you lose a lot of very expensive liquid helium, and about the previous year's worth of tweaking and calibration getting it just right.

It took a week to be taken apart and put back together, and five months for the calibration to get back to the level it was at.

So my friend got crappy results for his project (would you let him use another of the decent NMR machines after that cockup?), earned the hatred of half the department and of course screwed up a multi-million pound machine.

I'm impressed though. Something no bigger than a stack of three £1 coins lead to that.

I'm referring to his brain of course, the magnetic ring is the size of a single pound coin.
(calamarain just invented dehydrated water, Thu 25 Oct 2007, 14:39, 7 replies)

Ok not in the thousands but....
I am a women and the amount of expensive crap I've bought thinking I'll wear it at some point...you wouldn't believe.

I spent £175 on 3 hand made silver bangles that are really too big and I've never worn them. £100 on a bag I hated after 2 weeks....need I go on.
( girlinthehole, Thu 25 Oct 2007, 14:31, 2 replies)

TVR Cerbera
It was fantastic, souped up totally so it could be raced on a track. I bought it for just a little under 20,000. Fire came out the exhaust for god sake when you changed gear.

2nd Day I realise what a mistake I had made. 55 quid to fill the tank and wouldn't get me 100 miles.
In the first month had 4 new batteries in it, the security alarm had to be rewired and had to be picked up twice by tow truck whilst out and about.
Sold it back to the dealer I bought it from 3 months later for 3000 less (Total Barstool).

I loved/hated the car.

Bought a Subaru WRX for my next car, brand new though, I'd learned my leason.
(Opanoid Look sweats dripping off them, Thu 25 Oct 2007, 14:30, 6 replies)

PlayStation 3
Enough said.
( Bob Todd whee, Thu 25 Oct 2007, 14:21, Reply)

Psion... how many?
(1996). "Shall I just buy 1,000 Psion shares at £1 dear or can I put all our £30,000 savings on them? They seem a very good bet!"

"Better play it safe dear... just the £1000."

"O.K, whatever you say."

(2001, March, peak of the market). Potter, CEO, starts the rush for the door with a big sale. I phone my broker. My £1000 is now worth something like £60,000 and I unload the lot. Lovely eh? Like fuck... my best hit on the Stock Market ruined by wondering how £1.8 mil would have felt.

2007 House is paid for, cars paid for. Debts? None. Bank account? Empty. Soul? Gnawed at.
(Roger Darce sold his birthright for a mess of pottage, Thu 25 Oct 2007, 14:16, 4 replies)

I worked for a cable TV provider..
.. back in my days of lacklustre employment.
I was partnered up with an arborial looking chimpanzee of a man called Carl.

Carl used expletives at every other word and had an aversion to deodorant or male grooming.

Our job was to splice into the street cable and run a spur into the subscriber's domicile, presenting it inside in the form of a wallbox into which the site team could cable up the Set Top Box and tune in etc.

Carl had decided that he wanted to spend the afternoon in the pub, so we had rattled through our morning job in 1.5 hours, and had driven like starsky and hutch over to our second job, run the cable and Carl was drilling through the wall of the house to run it inside.

I was walking up the path when Carl came running out of the house shouting "The f-fuckin' fish, man, the f-fish!!" and ran out of the gate, jumped in the van and disappeared at speed over the horizon.

I went into the lounge of the property to find the carpet slightly wet underfoot and some of the owners tropical fish flipping wildly on it.

And then it clicked. In his haste to rush off to his afternoon's libations, Carl hadnt bothered to check where his drill hole would come out and had indescriminately drilled into the outside wall, and pierced the owners tropical fish tank, which had exploded outward onto the carpet draining the tank of it's water and robbing the fish of their home.

The owner was angrily telephoning customer services and threatening all flavours of legal action as I walked quietly out of his house and up the garden path.
(Vic Flange, Thu 25 Oct 2007, 14:16, Reply)

Hospital equipment costs!
Worked for far too many years in the Theatre Sterile Services Unit at Addenbrookes Hospital in Cambridge.

our job was to collect the instruments from the operating theatres, clean them, re-pack them and sterilize them in whacking great big autoclaves. Was a lovely job, indoors, and the claves used to peak at 136 degrees c so got stunningly hot by around 6.30am! these things ran from 6am to midnight every day not including call-outs.

Anyway, all of the power drills used in theatres are air powered, so have to be washed by hand rather than go through the cleaning machines as they will break.
Over a few years dropped 2 in water resulting in £25,000 of equipment being royally screwed, pulled the hose out of another 4 (Well, you try removing dried blood from a slippery hose using just a jay cloth at 11pm) that had to be sent off and took weeks to repair, meaning we had to hire more to cover the gaps at an eye-watering amount per week.

Opthalmics instruments are as you can imagine very very small. dropping a set on the floor, and then treading on it does not improve the condition of the instruments!

Decent bone screws used to cost £20 - £80 per ONE! so order the wrong pack accidentally and it can get expensive, and the metal plates just cost stupid amounts. Anything remotely scissor / clamp / blade like started at the £100 and most were double or treble, so every tiny drop on the floor that blunted or bent the instrument, or the surgeon didn't like the cut of its jib was rejected, repaired or replaced costing tens of thousands of pounds a year.

You soon see where the money vanishes into the giant maw that is the NHS when a basic operating kit cost £16,000 and we had 30 of them, some of the impressive trauma kits weighed in around the £40-50,0000 mark!
(Halfy By light alone, Thu 25 Oct 2007, 14:15, 1 reply)

FORMER TRAIN DRIVER
Not me but a local part-time labour councellor who was also a train driver. One day coming up to a West Lothian railway station he had an hour to wait while he had his lunch. He wandered into a field and ate his sarnies - sadly for him his parked (? does one park a train?) train was too close to the level crossing that blocked the main road. For an hour no car could get over a very busy main albeit rural road - tailbacks, bad tempers and the soon after sacking of said train driver.
He became a full time councillor after that. We do indeed get the politicians we deserve....
(beaverwastemanagement a real company. I want to work for them!, Thu 25 Oct 2007, 14:10, Reply)

Drunken decimal point disaster
A few years ago I worked for a construction consultancy and as a fresh faced graduate I was given the task of looking after the finances of a very prestigious landmark development in the north of England worth several hundred million pounds.

Now there tends to be a hardcore drinking culture amongst consultants so it was normal to have more than a few pints at lunchtime and then the afternoon would be spent sobering up whilst not actually doing any important work.

Unfortunately I had fallen behind on my work one day and had to catch up with the accounts for this project after a liquid lunch. This led to me putting a decimal point in the wrong place, instead of £15million I ended up adding £1.5million and was quite impressed with the fact that the project looked to be well under budget .I then neglected to do the relevant checks that our quality assurance system had in place to prevent such cock-ups and decided to leave early as it was a “nice sunny afternoon and I thought I’d make the most of it.” As “Oh shit” moments go; the next days realisation of what I’d done is up there with the best fuckups in my life.

I have since decided that construction is not for me.
(Rev O'Lucian will unfortunatly age on, Thu 25 Oct 2007, 14:07, Reply)

Truck drivers
Years ago I used to assist with the management of a haulage firm. Anyhoo, we had a contract to shuttle car parts from a depot Crewe to Purfleet docks, with five trucks on the job double manned and running as often as driving regs would allow.

To allieviate the boredom of running the same route, twice a day, five days a week, there was some occasional (and understandable) tomfoolery. Two of our esteemed chauffers used to try and beat each other out of the depot on a Monday morning.

One particular morning, neither chap was prepared to heave to in a combined 76 tonne charge toward the depot gates...

*smack, kerrrunch!*

Our heroes were a tad sheepish while they furtively surveyed the £78,425 of damage to two brand new Scania trucks and their cargo.

Neither driver was still employed the following day.
(Bicycle Repairman "you're also a bit of a wanker", Thu 25 Oct 2007, 13:55, Reply)

Click, click, scream.
Working on a problem caused by a certain company's inability to write software, they asked for a log extract to ignore to make it look like they were doing something about it.

We had been running the system in 'Debug+verbose logging' to try to get to the bottom of this. Policy was to copy the file off the live network onto a standalone PC and open it there to get the relevant bits. I wanted to single-click the file and then CTRL-C CTRL-V. As you do.

Being hassled as I was by some button monkey who had somehow managed to get into the Engineering area I DOUBLE-clicked instead. Cue 3gig of logfile trying to open itself on a live, time critical machine IN NOTEPAD! Understandably, the machine then began declining all other requests made to it ... such as what commercials it should be playing out on several TV channels which had just gone into a break.

Being me, and not wanting to have to make someone else trawl logs for what was, essentially, User Failure on my part I put an entry into the incident report (after cleaning up the mess from all the Ops who had just shat themselves) which basically said 'PEBKAC'.

30 minutes later 'The Suits' arrived, I was taken into the corridor and told (in full earshot of everyone) how I'd just cost £35k in penalty payments, then, I was taken into a side office and ... well, I haven't walked the same since.

Length? Not as long as that verbal reaming seemed!
(Dionysian Aut viam inveniam aut faciam, Thu 25 Oct 2007, 13:51, 1 reply)

50% discount
In the five minutes I worked in retail, I got my sums a little wrong on the day this one chap came in and made an enormous purchase of all the dog food we stocked.

The tins came in pallets loaded six-by-four, which of course means there are 24 per box. Or, by my calculations: 12. He bought dozens, at a good 50% knock-off.

I later worked out that I lost the company some £2,000 and the manager got suspended while a bunch of stony-faced auditors investigated "missing" stock.

On the plus side, I helped the bloke - who must have known he was on the winning team -load the stuff into his van, and he gave me a twenty quid tip.

Aggravating factor: I was studying A-Level maths at the time.
( Scaryduck LIKES EGG, Thu 25 Oct 2007, 13:46, 1 reply)

Many Many Moons ago
I used to work in the Multi-currency routing department of one of our popular high street banks (formerly Midland Bank if your wondering). It was a real sweat-shop atmosphere and more often than not someone absolute cunt would come up and scream in your face for some bullshit mistake that you may or may not have made. Basically the job was to take currency routing forms and convert currency values from one currency to another and then figure out which banks to send it through. Needless to say because of the high pressure, tedious and repetative nature of the work it was quite easy to put a decimal point in the wrong place or route something through in the wrong currency. Usually these mistakes were spotted by the inputters but I do remember one particular occasion when someone processed a form which should have been in Italian Lira but ended up been sent through in US dollars. Ouch!
(Nitrous Nitrous, Thu 25 Oct 2007, 13:44, Reply)

Hangover
Drinking all that Stella Artois was a reassuringly expensive mistake.
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Thu 25 Oct 2007, 13:44, 4 replies)

The job-costing mistake of being a twat
When I was a kid, having just left school and on the ‘Rock & Roll’, I got a temp job in a car parts warehouse.

This job was fucking brilliant – the union truly had a firm, tight grip of the company’s bollocks (it was the good old days). We were fantastically paid, and my whole day’s targets could be achieved by 9am (I started at 8am). The rest of my day would be spent reading the p0rn in the toilets or playing my gameboy (I set up a league with my supervisors ffs). Our lunch times were at the nearby pub and every day we would all march down there and try to down as much as we could in the half hour we were given.

Life was good. I wanted to stay there for ever.

The problem was, It was just temping. 3 months here, then off for 3-4 months – then back on again. Sometimes the contract would be extended, but when it wasn’t, I always had to take miserable shit-brick jobs inbetween that I hated. Every time we were there, there would be talk of taking us on permanently (there was about 10 of us doing this). We worked our arses off to make a good impression, then hoped and prayed…and it never materialised. After about 3 years of this, I gave up trying and decided to devote my working day to full-time taking the piss.

We started a new temp contract, but this time with about 5 new guys in too. They grafted, the rest of us ‘experienced’ temps dicked about doing cock-diddley all. Turning up late and hungover, stupid notes stuck on people's backs, wrapping people up in bubblewrap and putting them in pallets 30ft up in the air. 30 minutes in the pub? My sweaty arse – call it 2 hours. Taking 2 or 3 newspapers in because one wasn’t enough? No problem. Going into work pissed and falling out of forklift trucks – brilliant. Who cares? The union always stepped in to stop us getting sacked – we had it sussed. The rumours started about the permanent contracts and we mocked the newbies and their new found motivation. We didn’t listen – we’d heard it all before.

What we didn’t hear is that the company interviewed then promptly gave permanent jobs to the 5 new jammy bastards who were on their first 3 month stint – leaving us to get to fuck, never to be invited back. Cunts.

So a couple of month’s fucktwattery cost me an easy job with great people and possibly an entire lifetime of salary at quite phenomenal rates.

Despite the fact Karma has since stepped in and I realise my life would be totally different now if I had got the job back then, but I can't help but think about those times...Was it luck? Or my most expensive mistake?
( Pooflake braces for an onslaught..., Thu 25 Oct 2007, 13:42, Reply)

mustabindunsumwhair
I'm beginning to wonder whether marrying Heather might have been an expensive mistake.

Signed

P. McCartney

PS - Actually, my lawyer says she doesn't have a leg to stand on. Or, rather, that's all she has.
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Thu 25 Oct 2007, 13:40, 14 replies)

Years ago
I worked in a warehouse. I once saw a guy drive a forklift carrying three stacked pallets of TVs through a two metre high door.

I emulated him when I was trying to put a pallet of eight top of the range cookers in the racking. At the time I was under an archway in the opposite racking thinking I could just drive forwards. I raised the forks and the pallet rose into the air... where it hit the pallet on the racking above me which then fell onto the pallet I was lifting knocking that from the forks. Everything fell to the ground leaving me surrounded by some very expensive twisted metal and glass.

I topped it a few months later. I had been working with a diesel fork lift loading a lorry in the yard when the fork lift started smoking. I lifted up the seat and saw flames so I ran inside and called the fire brigade. Whilst I was waiting for them, someone from the warehouse ran out with a water filled fire extinguisher.
"You can't use that," I said, "It will just spread the flames and everything will be much worse"

The fire brigade turned up and sprayed water on the forklift but by this time it was burnt out.

Yeah, they spray water on it. And then one of them sees the fire extinguisher and asks
"Why didn't you use that? You could have saved it"

"erm..."
(bald old git was bemused and befuddled on, Thu 25 Oct 2007, 13:37, Reply)

Almost on topic
Not my mistake, but definitely theirs.

Work as a technician/researcher at a cutting edge researchy lab place, big furnaces, relatively clean area so no mess, no carboard, no dust etc.

Got really hacked of with others (re:scum!) not disposing of packaging and putting it all in cardboard boxes- place was a tip.

Someone Reported it and I was told to clean it up, so being a nice bloke and known to do anything for a wage, did so.(while grumbling)

Of course more packaging and boxes and stuff started appearing again, once again reported and this time I was told to purchase a bin.

Not my mess, not my problem, not my money so did I buy a normal plastic swin bin for a tenner?

No- Fully automated stainless steel rigid bin with automatic Infra red top opening sensor* for over £150.

Their mistake - Don't ask me to clean up other peoples mess.


*when it was delivered, found the sensor didn't work-so threw it away. Anyone want a £150 stainless steel bucket?
(kjk1976, Thu 25 Oct 2007, 13:37, Reply)

My old keyboard (of the synthesiser type)
was playing up. The power supply was dodgy. So I took it to bits to have a look and sure enough, discovered an iffy regulator.

Unfortunately, during the course of my investigations, my hand holding the meter probe slipped and I ended up shorting two contacts together, whcih caused a bit of a spark. (Turns out I'd sent 12V up the 5V line, which caused the logic circuitry to complain somewhat).

The keyboard then wouldn't fire up at all, and I couldn't find out what was wrong. So I sent it off to a proper repair place, who charged £40 an hour, spent 6 hours trying unsucessfully to find the fault (other than telling me about the 12V/5V thing) and phoned me to say it could take as long again and they couldn't guarantee to find it. or indeed be able to fix it if they did find it. So I cut my losses, sold it (described honestly) on ebay for about £200 and bought a new one.

Wouldn't have been so bad if had been a Casio Portasound but it was about 3 grand's worth!

(I had had 6 years and about 800 gigs out of it to be fair, so it paid for itself many times over, but it was still galling).

Apologies for lack of humour.
( K2k6 has a proper job these days, Thu 25 Oct 2007, 13:28, 7 replies)

No horseplay in the Airplane Hangar
A friend worked at a local airport. Forklift drivers were competing to see who could make it round the hangar fastest. One, driving with the forks yea-high, took a bad turn and scraped the radar nose cone off a passenger jet, to a cost of $3-million.
He was charged with negligence, but got off light by suffering a non-fatal heart attack prior to trial.
(TommyShanks, Thu 25 Oct 2007, 13:28, Reply)