<p>Like Shrinkwrap I refuse to tell some tales. The hand story reminded me that a long time ago I would reassure patients who asked that having a problem with their anesthetic was like being hit by a car while crossing the street. Highly improbable as precautions are taken… The patient told me she HAD been hit by a car, that ended that example for me. I had checked the chart and asked about past surgery- nothing for that so the injury wasn’t that bad. A few times after that I then would say “I used to compare…but then had a patient who actually was…”</p>
<p>No physician is willing to publically admit any medication or other orders/actions in error because of the threat of a lawsuit, even years later. Hard to be in a zero tolerance position. It can happen that something that shouldn’t be significant can be the one thing that tipped the balance- you don’t want to dwell on those possibilities.</p>
<p>Along those lines- we could do the “screwed up” thread about raising our children. The real incidents, not the ones they accuse you of scarring them for life ones. Sorry if people hijack this thread because of this comment, folks. Maybe someone will start that thread, if I do it will end soon the way things go for me with thread starting.</p>
<p>I have always thought that a pharmacist could get fired for a single mistake…or have I just seen *It’s a Wonderful Life *too many times? The pharmacist at our local drug store has made multiple mistakes…three I can think of right off the bat…on my prescriptions alone. Yet I’ve never complained because I didn’t want him to be fired (none were potentially fatal.)</p>
<p>““screwed up” thread about raising our children. The real incidents, not the ones they accuse you of scarring them”</p>
<p>^^ I just HAVE to tell one of those. Had my very young son peering under the gas grill while I turned it on. Flames lept out and singed his eyebrows and eye lashes. To hear him tell it, my reaction was WAY more traumatic.</p>
<p>BTW, yes pharmacists make mistakes, but they have saved my butt more than once!</p>
<p>I was working as the Director of Development at a women’s shelter when I completely blanked out about a grant application that had to be in the mail by Friday. It was Sunday afternoon when I remembered and, oh my goodness, did I ever panic.</p>
<p>My boss was not pleased, of course, but I was not fired.</p>
<p>The story has a good ending in that the foundation gave us the grant anyway, even though they had a reputation of not accepting applications after the due by date.</p>
<p>I’ll tell tales on my former boss. She had a bad habit of using speakerphone for everything. She’d hit the button to hang up, but it didn’t always work. We worked for the public schools. Once she was very polite on the phone leaving a message for a parent, hit the button to hang up, then turned toward me and said, “What an <em>ss</em>ole.” Except the phone wasn’t really hung up, and a few seconds later we heard the “beeep” signalling the end of the recording. Oops.</p>
<p>You’d think that would have taught her, but no… she did it again. And again. She did this to her father, among others.</p>
<p>And yet she was never fired or even reprimanded for it…</p>
<p>My mother was the head payroll clerk for our town. Back in the day, she had to manually readjust everyone’s salary over the summer. She made a mistake on one teacher and gave her a huge raise - like 20%. It was nearly a year later when she realized it. She had to call the teacher and ask for the money back - like $8000. She realized the mistake one afternoon and was sick all night before calling the teacher the next day. The teacher ended up paying it back in installments.</p>
<p>I ALWAYS listen to the message until the end, and always listen to the messages where I was called by mistake and hear a bunch of car or conversation noises. I have learned a few things, that’s for sure.</p>
<p>In a prior job at a health care corporation one of the things I had to do was work with the tax department in sending out a memo to each of our hospitals notifying them how much they needed to reimburse us for their share of taxes. The guy from the tax department drafted the memos jokingly reading that they were to wire the money to him and me and that we would then be leaving for Brazil with the cash. I laughed, but was horrified later when that memo actually went out and upper management was not amused.</p>
<p>Fallgirl, it seems like every spring there are stories of high school yearbooks that went to the printers with jokes or place markers that were supposed to have been taken out.</p>
<p>For the past several years the secretary to the Principal has made so many mistakes that no one can figure out why she is still employed. Among her responsibilities is sending the mass e-mails to faculty and staff. Several times a week we get : XXX would like to recall the e-mail WWW (subject line). Often many of these are things we are suppposed to print. What a waste of paper.</p>
<p>Likewise, the secretary to one of the APs, sends the same letters out year after year, but never even takes the time to change the day, date or year. These are often posted on the school’s website. </p>
<p>This same gal on more than one occasion didn’t seem to notice that the labels she put on the report cards for mailing home had the school’s address.</p>
<p>This is in the funny mistake category: our university’s website for degree audits said “lick here” instead of “click here” until our Registrar’s Office brought it to my attention and I fixed my typo. We were all laughing pretty hard (and I didn’t get fired). I still imagine a student licking his/her computer monitor.</p>
<p>One of the coaches at school sent out a letter that included a typo that turned one word into a swear word. She has sent the same letter out three years in a row with the same vulgar typo!</p>
<p>I sent an email to our entire client base. I was supposed to send it “to” my boss, with a blind cc to all the clients. I sent it to my boss, but put all the other addresses in the CC instead of BCC. As soon as I saw the email with over a hundred addresses in the very visible CC line I knew what I had done. I still get really nervous before I hit “send” on emails going to large numbers of clients… or to the Board of Trustees.</p>
<p>Now for mine. It never put me in jeopardy of losing my job, but was embarrassing.</p>
<p>The first teaching position I had was as a semester replacement. Those poor kids had put up with a lot, but I had only just finished school (a semester early). After about a month of working them pretty hard, I decided to end one week with one of those fun tests I’m sure you have all seen. Stuff like “Is there a Fourth of July in England?”</p>
<p>One question was “How many fielders are on the field for a professional baseball in in any half inning?” One student answered that there would only be one. I responded asking him how a guy would play with himself.</p>
<p>Well, that set off the class, and even I had tears rolling down my ceeks (on my face).
Then I straightened my face and said that what happened in this room should stay in this room. Well, it didn’t.</p>
<p>The following Monday, throughout the day, various coaches took turns standing outside my classroom swinging an phantom bat.</p>
<p>I worked as a children’s librarian, and during a summer “walk-in movie” afternoon, I stopped the movie with about 3 minutes left to go because all the kids were running around like nutjobs and the parents weren’t (in my profound estimation) doing anything to stop it. And I said that it didn’t seem like anyone was interested, so we would just be done. Needless to say, I was not yet a parent myself. (Although I did have the sense to warn my boss about what had happened)</p>
<p>gloworm, I used to manage school cafeterias. At our hs on taco day, the lunch ladies learned very quickly to ask the students, “Crunchy shell, or soft shell?” because if they said, “Hard or soft?” the boys would turn beet red or burst out laughing.</p>
<p>Once my boss (she of the speaker phone goofs, above) said to a little boy in line at an elementary school, “Oh look, it’s Valentines’ day and you’ve got a heart on!” The teachers and lunch ladies bit their lips to not laugh. (Say it out loud if you don’t get it).</p>
<p>Not surprisingly, a few months ago my former boss was replaced by a management company (luckily, after I left for another job). She never could keep her foot out of her mouth.</p>
<p>My sister tends to be nocturnal, and isn’t always careful enough late at night. One night she responded to an email with some very derogatory remarks about a manager in her industry and mistakenly sent it to the list-serve for the state industry association.</p>
<p>This was not at a job, and it was my classmate: When we headed out to the US, most of us had never flown or had any experience with the Western way of life. </p>
<p>My classmate asked the stewardess for tea, and she promptly filled his cup with hot water and gave him a tea bag. Not ever having seen one, he did the obvious - tore it open and emptied the contents into the cup. She gave sigh, took the cup back and brought a new one with the tea bag inserted in it, and then asked if he wanted sugar. Again, we had taken sugar by the spoonful, and on occasion had sugar served in cubes. But we had our undergrad education at the local elite univ and could certainly be trained. He took the packets of sugar and like a pro plopped them right next to the tea bag…</p>
I still get really nervous before I hit “send” on emails going to large numbers of clients… or to the Board of Trustees.</p>