# Screwed up at work



## Ferg_AR (Aug 24, 2007)

So I'm really, really busy. Pretty much set up for failure, but we pretty much all are here. Anyhow, I just made my first mistake that I don't see myself getting out of. Remember, I've only been here almost a year.

A few weeks ago, an application engineer and account manager asked me to come up with a better dust cover for a customer. I looked at some of our current ones, read up on a study we did in the past, and hammered out a proposal. At the time, I did ask them to let me know which dust cover they were already using, but they never got back with me and I didn't think much of it, because I thought I made one with the tighter clearance than any of our other covers for this application. I sent them the cross sections (with no dimensions) a few days ago.

They came back and wanted to see the current cross section. So I asked them again which cover they were using. They found out for me and I had the designer make up a cross sectional view. During this, I found out that it has the same clearance as the dust cover I made. WTF. This was a common one too and I had looked at it, but I had it in my head that mine was 25% tighter.

So I just shot off an email to the app. engineer letting him know that the current is equivalent to what I came up with and that it's a pretty darn good dust cover already.

We'll see what happens. Hopefully, he hasn't shown the customer yet, because we're supposed to be meeting with them next week.

Anybody else have a story like this? It'd make me feel better if they did ;p


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## benbo (Aug 24, 2007)

Everybody has a story like this. If they don't, they are lying. People put them out of their mind, but they have them. My old boss said he didn't trust anyone who was not responsible for several thousand dollars of loss - they probably didn't do anything. I've got several stories -here's one-

At one of my old jobs I worked on a silicon wafer furnace. THere was a quartz "boat" which held a couple hundred silicon wafers. It would ride a little elevator up into a heating chamber. There was an automatic door on the heating chamber that would open and close- open to let the boat go in, close it off afterwards to let the chamber heat up. Now, obviously there was an optical interlock so that the boat would not try to push up when the door was closed or it would smash into the door and destroy everything.

I was doing some sort of programming or testing on the robotics, I can't remember except it was a very long day, and to test it I physically jumpered out the interlock (I would stick my business card in the optical interlock like a little flag). This permitted the elevator to go up and down even with the door closed. Well, I finsihed my testing but left the flag in and started a process batch - so the robot thought the door was open and pushed the entire boat full of wafers up into the door - smashing the boat and causing about $10,000 damage. Fortuneatley this was a test boat, because a boat of real wafers could cost upwards of $1,000,000 - depending where they were in the process.

I don't know if you understand what I'm talking about, but suffice to say, I've made many mistakes.


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## FusionWhite (Aug 24, 2007)

My first day of work at my current company I was reviewing some files on a project. I accidently deleted an SPCC plan we had prepared for a clients site. I freaked out. Luckily we had to completely rewrite all the SPCC plans to meet new regulations so it didnt really matter.


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## Wolverine (Aug 24, 2007)

Confession is good for the soul:

I was working in a power station once and similarly disabled the protection on the big breakers to perform a test. Worked fine. Then I went on to the next test and forgot to re-enable the protection. Screwed the pooch on that test and the main transformer started humming like a nest of very angry bees. Turns out two wrongs DO make a right though since I was able to unscrew the screw-up before anything tripped, and more importantly, before anything I was standing next to BLEW UP. I was a humbled and a much more conscientious young engineer after that.

I like both previous answers - everybody screws up and half the time it just goes away on it's own.

Once is okay. Twice is memorable. Three times is a reputation. But also remember HHGTTG: DON"T PANIC!


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## maryannette (Aug 26, 2007)

I've had my share, too. In designing power tools, the housings get pretty complicated. I had mistakes in complicated housings that needed to be changed in hard tooling many times. Thousands of dollars. I think the key is to acknowledge the mistake, accept responsibility, commit to not repeat the mistake, and be humbled by the experience. Humility will keep you on your toes. And, btw, one of the bosses I had always tried to belittle me for mistakes. He was a real jerk. There was no way to gracefully deal with a mistake when he was around. If you have to deal with that kind of situation, hold your head up and get through.


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## Flyer_PE (Aug 26, 2007)

My most expensive goof resulted in two wrecked air-start motors for an emergency diesel generator. The parts alone cost about 10 grand. We were troubleshooting a problem with the starting circuitry and I ignored an auxiliary tachometer that was indicating the diesel was turning 80rpm while it was shut down. I gave the go ahead to start the engine anyway. When I told my boss what had happened, his response was "I'd have started the f$%#er too.".

No matter how diligent you are, every once in a while, something will go wrong. The only thing you can do is try to learn from it.

Jim


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## grover (Aug 27, 2007)

My most expensive goof was on a fiber optics job that cost us roughly $1 million, and the project engineers still won't let me live it down- I keep countering that I didn't really COST us $1 million, I just underestimated material (&amp; subsequent labor costs) by $1 million, but that certainly wasn't any consolation at the time. I think the installers were just wasting cable on purpose, too- I've never seen someone waste 20' of cable doing a complete loop at 3' bending radius around a box to avoid a 6" jumper! Mostly, the conditions on-site just meant routing was circuitous and about 50% longer on average than we typically account for.

On the same job, I mistakenly transposed two numbers in the stock number for a $1 plug, which happened to be the part number for a related (but wrong) $15 T coupler. Not so bad... except we ordered 12,000 of them, and nobody caught it until they showed up on-site. Pallets and pallets full of the wrong couplers, lol... We were able to return it for refund and get the right parts, but all told, if that was the WORST that happened on that job, I was thrilled.


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## Dark Knight (Aug 27, 2007)

Mine was during an Ops Test at a substation this year, late March or early May. The last engineer who worked there (2003) left a caution tag indicating that sometimes the contacts did not reset and stayed opened. I did my testing and my circuit modifications and was ready to close that job and start with the next switch.

After performing my Switching Order I did proceed with the next equipment and when opened it, the next switch, hell broke loose. Two bus tie breakers closed, not bad, and our Service Center lost power at some areas(that was bad). That was the first cue. Called dispatcher and let him know something was fishy and indeed he told me the I(current) readings were off. My cell phone gave me a low batt beep at this point and my mentor and another co-worker went to verify status and readings at the equipment.

I was at my Van looking for my cell charger when the first switch blew and the fireworks started. High Voltage arching and sparking is a scary thing and I thought about my co-workers near the area and all the porcelain flying there so ran to the vault and grab the switch control handle and opened it back leaving in the dark all the costumers from the first transformer.

Under normal conditions the semaphores at the top of the switch should be clear and the change close-open-close can be clearly seen. When we closed the switch for the last time I saw the changes of the status on two of the phases but was not so sure on one of them. I went under the switch and did not see yellow so I thought it was OK. Big mistake. The semaphore on that phase was so glazed and detetiorated that covered the yellow completely. I did not see it and after they took the switch down I realized that you could be 6 inches from the semaphore and would not be able to see the yellow behind. That bad it was. I looked to it from the ground 65 ft under it. Ampmeters readings were not good since the station was pretty unbalanced at that point so we did not have too much to work with. I thought about reading the current directly from the CTs using a clamp meter but did not do it. My bad because that would avoid the incident.

We lost one transformer and several thousands costumers for 1 minute 20 seconds, my boss later said that opening the failing switch saved the whole station but that was little consolation, and had to reconfigure the distribution grid for a couple of days. Ouch. Between the costumers and the new switch, etc, the company spent about 300k and revised the procedure for these tests.

Talk about expensive fireworks... :bio:


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## Ferg_AR (Aug 27, 2007)

Yeah, so after reading all of these stories, mine is feeling pretty insignificant. lol

My little screw up accumulated into nothing. No harm done luckily.

Can't wait til I make a real mistake so I can add to this thread though.... not!


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## Art (Aug 28, 2007)

mine was a pretty simple one, ie, bone headed...first job out of the Army

project engineer for an electrical contractor...

doing a take-off for a large hospital in AK...

they showed a typical room detail with a smoke detector...first dwgs I had ever seen...

I counted one smoke detector...unfortunately there were 200 or so rooms!

my boss, a great guy, said call the general up and tell him what happened, have the $ discrepency prepared...I was 'nervous' to say the least...

I called, he requested a meeting...

I showed up shaking...

my boss was already there...they acted serious for a minute, then showed mercy and started laughing, my crying may have helped...lol

the general said he would cover the cost...but no margin...gawd was I releived...

I've learned...

we will make mistakes...90% is an A, but you still made mistakes

learn what mistakes you can make...miss a device count, no bigee, miss a concealed wiring run, oh crap!

money mistakes are tolerable...safety ones are NOT

own up to them as soon as you find them, let everybody know, and have some solution options ready...

do not be afraid to ask for help, this can AVOID mistakes...


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## Dleg (Aug 28, 2007)

I made a safety mistake once, and got away with it. I used to fire off high explosive "jet perforation" charges inside oil wells as part of my my oil field work. As a rule, we were required to shut down all of our electrical equipment (duh) and shunt the down-hole cable reel to a safety resistor before arming the electrical blasting cap. The theory was (based on a fatal accident or two) that 25,000+ feet of cable wrapped around a drum was a good enough antenna to generate the current required to set off the blasting cap, should someone fire up a radio transmitter nearby. Obviously, all radios on or near the rig were also turned off while we armed the "gun" - which in this case was a 40+ foot long metal strip with four RDX-powered shaped charges per foot, all connected by 40 ft. of primacord. A pretty decent bomb.

So there I was, on my third straight day of running these charges down-hole on a billion-dollar oil platform off the coast of CA. I had slept maybe 2 hours the whole job, and was a walking zombie, powered only by caffeine. My crew assembled the next gun, hung it in the pressure-lock system, and called me up to arm and attach the blasting cap, which I did. The gun was then sealed into the pressure-lock system, the wellhead was opened, and the gun was run down-hole. Procedures required that I not switch everything back on until the gun was below the sea floor, which in this case was 1,200 feet down. So I took my time shuffling back to the instrument cab.

And what did I find when I went to de-shunt the cable and switch the firing circtuiry back on? I had never even turned it off! That woke me up real quick. Not only could I have blown myself into little strips of meat, but I probably would also have taken the whole platform with me, considering the other nearby wellheads and gas lines.


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## JPGOLF (Jan 31, 2008)

I was the project engineer on a new municipal bldg.

I was busy running other jobs at the time and had another engineer do the HVAC sizing for the units. I reviewed his work and saw his outlet temperature based on the heat output of the unit was too low, so i told him it had to be at least 95-100 degs. He changed it, BUT LEFT THE SAME UNIT WITH THE SAME HEATING OUTPUT, not a larger one! I missed it completely.

Project went to construction and on the first winter, 2nd floor was C-O-L-D!!!! and the unit was running constantly trying to achieve temperature. I found out about it and had to go to the boss and explain the whole thing, on top of having to let the architect on the job (who previously BTW complimented my job as project engineer) know that we screwed up!

I felt horrible! of course. My company had to pay for replacement unit, however, I asked a mech. contractor friend of mine to change it and send us an invoice. He did not charge us! (HALLELUJA!!) So I did a few jobs for him (reviewing dwgs.) as payback.

In my defense, even though I know it is my fault, the other engineer has a LOT more experience than me and should have known better, but what are you going to do?

ALWAYS CHECK EVERYTHING! TWICE!!

JPR


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## ODB_PE (Jan 31, 2008)

I designed a support bracket off of some field dimensions and somehow I designed the mirror image of what was required. I had no idea until the excellent steel fabricator luckily went out to field verify as he was supposed to. He saved my ass. It would have been a huge embarrassment.


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## Capt Worley PE (Jan 31, 2008)

I once worked for an industrial fan company. They had two 10" versions of their product that they took to shows for demonstration, since the smallest fan they made was 14" and blew too much air to use at trade shows. Well, one day they decided it would be cool to have remote controls to start these things with. Since I was the engineer. albeit mechanical, I got to make them.

I was going to buy a couple of garage door openers and use the remotes and electronics off of them, because I knew they could handle the amp load. I was told that was too expensive, go buy a couple of RC ceiling fans and use those. I protested that they were marginal at best, and probably would blow after a few start cycles, if indeed they didn't blow the first time. "You dang engineers want to gold plate everything. Just do it the way we said."

Oh, yeah. this was the day before the salesmen were suposed to go to the show.

So anyway, I buy a fan, strip the stuff I need, and jury rig the remote start system. test it three times, it works. mad rush, go get another one, wire it up to the other ten inch fan, try it once, then it gets shipped. I implored the guys not to use it excessively because of how on the edge the thing was.

They come back all mad. The remote starters blew at startup.

Dang.

It was hinted by someone there that the fans were actually started numerous times in the hotel rooms and before the show opened, but couldn't confirm it.

I was also told the phrase, "See? CW doesn't know what he's talking about," was used.


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## ODB_PE (Jan 31, 2008)

^^^

why didn't you just buy them a couple of clappers?


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