A $5 Million Typo, And 26 Other People Who Really Really F*cked Up At Work

17.

“As a young engineer In the late ’90s, I used to work for a large tech company that made telecom equipment. One day, I was assigned to help one of our customers (a very large European telecom company) with a trade show in Canada, where I would be setting up a demonstration of a new video phone system (like a prototype of Zoom). I arrived the evening before and set up their demo at the front of their booth. It needed to be connected to an off-site system to demonstrate its video-over-IP capabilities, and my company had a server set up back at our office that ran a continuous promotional loop for the product that we typically connected to. I offered this connection to the customer, but they declined for marketing reasons. Instead, they had a server back in their office in Europe that broadcast a local TV channel over IP, and they requested that I connect to their system.”

“I was able to get the connection up and running and I watched their local news while I finished the job. The trade show started at 8 a.m. the next day, but I had completed my task and wasn’t needed unless there was a problem, so the customer’s reps graciously said that I didn’t have to come by and they’d call me if there was an issue. 

The morning of the trade show, I stopped by anyway to see how things were going. I approached from behind their booth, where there was a stage and curtains blocking my view of the floor. I found the customer rep that I was working with and asked how my demo was performing, and he said, ‘Amazingly well,’ and that it was drawing huge customer interest. I immediately felt a pang of panic since every other trade show I had set up had only drawn minimal interest. 

I peeked out from behind the curtains and saw a crowd of maybe 200 people watching the video demonstration. So, I walked out to see what was so interesting and was greeted with an extremely graphic porno playing on my monitor. I was beset with an immediate wave of panic and suddenly realized that in Europe it was about 1 a.m., and at night their TV stations often showed porn. So I did the only thing I could, I walked up and pulled the plug, to a wave of jeers. 

I’m not sure that the customer knew what was happening because they were short on staff and I don’t think they had time to visit the front of their booth that morning. I knew I would be fired from my well-paying corporate job if news of this made it back to my office, so to make sure that didn’t happen, I took all the customer reps out and paid for all their drinks for the entire evening. They all got very intoxicated for free, and I never heard a word about it.”

—Anonymous