What's the worst you've damaged equipment at a job and not gotten fired?

[ed_dingle]

Hi all,

I just got home a bit ago after having a horrible day at work; I blew up some test equipment in spectacular fashion (we're talking mains voltage into places it didn't belong and literal KABLAMO! bad) and felt the worst I have felt in some time. I haven't been at my job very long and so this worries me. The TE that I damaged was not terribly valuable, but still... How worried should I be?

Hence my question: what's the worst y'all have messed up at a job and been ok? Blowing fuses, meters, scope front ends, etc...

[rx8pilot]

I tipped over a $100,000 TV camera and did not get fired. The repair was about $10k or so, but the real expense is that it shut down production.

 

[Rick Law]

(Kinda guessing your mind, so I answer a different question you may have you in your mind...)

Worry not about the size of the blow up.  Worry only about what you learned from it.  Mistakes will always be made.  If you are not making mistakes, you are not pushing the envelop.  If you are not pushing the envelop, you are not maximizing your potential.

This was from a business book: An SVP when up to the CEO sheepishly, admitting to a $10million mistake.  After giving the boss a snap shot of the situation, he ended with saying... "I guess you will fire me now."

The boss replied: "Are you kidding, we just spend $10m giving you an education!  Now go make the lesson worth-while."

It was almost 20 years ago when I read that book.  So, I forgot the name but never forgot how a good manager should view an employee's mistake.

[Brumby]

The lesson is key.

When I had my first full-time position, I got a very early promotion as a computer operator - and, boy did I make some mistakes.  They weren't all that many that caused real problems, but I made some of the common ones, plus I came up with some new ones of my own.

I never tried to cover anything up and the issues were explained to me, so, thankfully, I never repeated the same mistake.

[ed_dingle]

I tipped over a $100,000 TV camera and did not get fired. The repair was about $10k or so, but the real expense is that it shut down production.

[...] thankfully, I never repeated the same mistake.

Unfortunately, this fell into the same class of mistake that I've already made and damaged other equipment previously... Both mistakes involved rather convoluted/non-obvious shorts to ground through ground leads.

When I had to share labs with undergrad students, none of the DMM fuses were working, and none of the lab techs nor students got expelled.

Thankfully I haven't blown any current fuses yet!

Worry only about what you learned from it. [...] Mistakes will always be made.

Good advice... I could do a better job of forgiving myself for my mistakes -_-

[NiHaoMike]

I once managed to brick a thermal control unit, but I wasn't at fault. I was debugging a setup that wouldn't work, and tried changing the control unit to rule that out as the culprit. Ran a script to set a temperature and the display went blank, which a power cycle would not fix. After swapping back the control unit, the real problem turns out to be a cheap USB to serial adapter that apparently was outputting garbage.

[Harb]

I have pretty much made good on anything I have been responsible for breaking.......I couldn't sleep at night with guilt otherwise....but thats just the way I am.....I worry about stuff like that, hence I am very very careful doing things and if I am suspect of a fail, I make that very clear to the owner of the gear I am not comfortable with what I am about to do......I am a safety freek with people and equipment.

[bd139]

I destroyed a company van.

I topped the company transit van tank up half a tank with petrol and it was a diesel vehicle. This vehicle was made before they introduced the filling caps that make this difficult. Got about a quarter of a mile and the engine started knocking badly so I pulled over. Just as I was pulling over, there was an explosion as the fuel pump gave out, pissing petrol inside the engine compartment. This caught fire. Front tyres had melted to the road before the fire brigade had got there. Fortunately this was on the way back from a hardware drop off as it had about £100k of HP C7000 kit in it about 30 minutes before that 

I owned up after about a month and they pissed themselves laughing because the insurer had paid out for a new van 

[bd139]

They knew it went up in flames immediately, just not that I put petrol in it.

[alanb]

This one has to be the most expensive damage

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=15189

[Cerebus]

(Kinda guessing your mind, so I answer a different question you may have you in your mind...)

Worry not about the size of the blow up.  Worry only about what you learned from it.  Mistakes will always be made.  If you are not making mistakes, you are not pushing the envelop.  If you are not pushing the envelop, you are not maximizing your potential.

Do not use a surgeon who thinks like this. 

[Cerebus]

Hence my question: what's the worst y'all have messed up at a job and been ok? Blowing fuses, meters, scope front ends, etc...

Let me put this from the other perspective. In my time as a manager I never fired anyone for this kind of mistake, I never fired anyone for something that was in the 'insurable' category (e.g. bust equipment etc.). A bollocking was always a possibility, but not a firing. I only ever fired people for grossly inappropriate behaviour towards co-workers or customers, or for behaviour (like persistent serious lateness) that didn't improve after fair warning and time to improve.

Don't sweat it. If you've a reasonable boss you're OK, if your boss is unreasonable you were better off without him/her - better you found out now rather than latter when something important was on the line.

[Cerebus]

... but I made some of the common ones, plus I came up with some new ones of my own.

When fscking things up it is always important to inject some novelty, panache and style. If management are too occupied with being impressed by how magnificently you bolloxed up, or too busy laughing, they have less time to  be cross with you. 

[LaserSteve]

7500$ Glass-ceramic  laser plasma tube during install into its 36" long magnet.  I broke off a 7 millimeter diameter glass window stem. The professor I was working for heard me scream from his office.  Told him I had a hand tremor, which was the truth.  Got told to drive 750 miles each way to the factory, go get a new one, and have it in by Monday evening.  The accident happening on a Thursday.  Filled out a travel voucher, and he had the paperwork done for the finances by the morning. 


My friend at the factory was waiting when I arrived, and had got a call from the professor..  I expected to witness them test the tube, pull it from the test rig, crate it, and I'd head back immediately.   New plasma tube, lunch, speed boat ride at the lake, dinner, and short flying lesson  in private plane was waiting.  I went back joyful. No one wants a stressed tech breaking two expensive tubes in a week!

     When I asked, after the new tube was in and the tedious four hour mirror alignment was done, why I was not fired, he said " You have saved us so much money and achieved such excellent system uptime, that to fire you would be a major mistake".   Once the tube was in, he told me to take a few days off..  It seems less that less then  10 minutes downtime per week with no output power dropouts was a world record for such systems running 24/7/365. That and the fact that I had spares laying around and trained the grad students to do a hot system swap in under ten minutes.

Good employees are hard to find.  Hard working tech employees who explore the limits to improve productivity or get a product out are even harder to find.  Great  managers are even harder to find.

In many cases the  instruments  you broke are probably depreciated under tax law, in other words already considered worthless.  A repair probably cost around the same as the annual calibration.  If there is not a major loss of production, what is the point in firing a trained staffer...

Steve

[abraxa]

This one has to be the most expensive damage

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=15189

Was there really no one fired? I'd be surprised, given that I'd call NOT checking for the presence of those 24 bolts "gross negligence".

[Lord of nothing]

This one has to be the most expensive damage

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=15189

the cose more than a cruise ship (+ Salvage)?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Costa_Concordia_disaster#Background

EDIT:

7 millimeter diameter 
750 miles   

[Cerebus]

7 millimeter diameter 
750 miles   

Oh FFS get over it! This is the second message of yours I've read in an hour where you're complaining about units because you're too mired in your own culture to make allowances for other people's. People in the US travel miles they do not travel kilometres and they never will. Also they will never convert miles into kilometres just for your convenience.

[Mr. Scram]

Oh FFS get over it! This is the second message of yours I've read in an hour where you're complaining about units because you're too mired in your own culture to make allowances for other people's. People in the US travel miles they do not travel kilometres and they never will. Also they will never convert miles into kilometres just for your convenience.

Can you both get a room?

[Lord of nothing]

 

your own culture to make allowances for other people's.

should i benign to start with German Words you might not understand? What is that for an Forum culture when people are often rude?

[Cerebus]

Oh FFS get over it! This is the second message of yours I've read in an hour where you're complaining about units because you're too mired in your own culture to make allowances for other people's. People in the US travel miles they do not travel kilometres and they never will. Also they will never convert miles into kilometres just for your convenience.

Can you both get a room?

I'm just hoping that if I whine at him for a while, the way he whines at anybody who uses non-metric units for anything he might get the hint. It's getting a bit tiresome in terms of signal to noise ratio. I don't mind people wandering off topic (if it's interesting), I don't mind people injecting jokes, I don't even mind people's hobby horses when there's a point to them, but to just robotically post facepalms every time some says miles, feet, pounds or some other non-SI unit contributes nothing but noise and annoyance.

[Richard Crowley]

Back in the mid-1970s, I was tasked with moving a big Norelco (Philips) PC60 color broadcast camera (with three 1-inch Plumbicon image tubes).  I had the camera head sitting in the rear luggage compartment of a vintage electric golf-cart to drive across the campus.  I was parked at the bottom of the ramp up to street level.  When the golf cart jerked forward (because of the primitive tapped-resistor speed-control on the accelerator pedal), the camera head just tumbled right out of the cart and onto the concrete driveway.  I should have secured it with bungee cords. 

There was significant sheet-metal damage to the case, but miraculously, the internals (including the three Plumbicon tubes @ US$2K each) were intact.   A testament to the heavy-duty industrial-strength construction of the product. So I had to carefully remove the three tubes, and the color-splitter prism and the deflection yokes and the circuit boards and the wiring harness. Then we hauled the metal case over to the auto shop where they repaired the sheet metal damage and re-painted the case like new, except they couldn't exactly match the special Norelco hammertone silver-gray paint. 

I re-installed all the internal components and re-connected the 81-conductor camera cable and connector (as big as your arm).  Alas, I forgot to put the cable through connector shell and I had to remove all 81 pins and re-terminate it again.     But it worked just like new when I was done.  Which means that the horizontal sync-lock circuit was still very touchy and temperature-dependent which was apparently a congenital design-flaw.

These days, at my present employer, we have plastic FOUPs (front-opening unified pod) full of 25 silicon wafers (300mm/12in diameter).  Even blank they probably cost thousands of $$. But by the end of the processing, a FOUP is likely worth approaching US$1M.  In years past, my perception is that at least one case was dropped every year.  But now, especially in the 300mm era, we use automated material handling systems (AMHS) with magnetic-propulsion robots on overhead rails. Because a 300mm FOUP is too unwieldy and heavy to carry around in your arms because it is an ergonomic hazard, regardless of the value of the contents.

[richard.cs]

A colleague of mine regularly tells a story about someone he went to university with. This guy had a 1-year placement halfway through his course and managed to destroy a whole production line at a steel mill taking months and millions of pounds to repair/replace. The instructions he was given were "take all those control cards out, clean the contacts, and put them back", what they should have been was "take all those control cards out, clean the contacts, and put them back in the same place". Unfortunately no-one checked his work before turning the machinery back on.

He was the only person on his engineering course not to be offered a job at the end of his placement.

[Cerebus]

your own culture to make allowances for other people's.

should i benign to start with German Words you might not understand? What is that for an Forum culture when people are often rude?

You regularly post 'sinus' when you mean 'sine' so you're already doing it. People just guess you meant sine and carry on, without comment. Would you like someone to post a facepalm every time you do that? A facepalm is an implication that the thing being referred to is so stupid that it causes one to put one's head in one's hand, is that polite? Please, just leave off the kneejerk posts every time you see a non-metric unit. Are you really saying that you cannot understand something in imperial units? I think not.

[Mr. Scram]

I'm just hoping that if I whine at him for a while, the way he whines at anybody who uses non-metric units for anything he might get the hint. It's getting a bit tiresome in terms of signal to noise ratio. I don't mind people wandering off topic (if it's interesting), I don't mind people injecting jokes, I don't even mind people's hobby horses when there's a point to them, but to just robotically post facepalms every time some says miles, feet, pounds or some other non-SI unit contributes nothing but noise and annoyance.

As far as I'm concerned you're doubling the problem

[bd139]

Hitler! Nazis! Godwin's law invoked.

There we go, that subthread ended ... back to the damaged things