‘What a mess up!’: New employee accidentally prints 3,600 shipping labels instead of 1 on his third day there, sparks others to share their embarrassing new job stories

Author image for Elna McHilderson
Elna McHilderson • Managing Editor
Sep 17, 2024 9:00 AM EDT

There is always an awkward starting period for any job you start. It's like moving into a new school. Everybody there already knows each other and has formed their friend groups and you have to figure out where you fit in. Sure, on paper, you know exactly the job position you're in and we're all adults—but for some reason, you're still the new kid who doesn't know where to sit for lunch. Eventually, you figure things out and everything is ok (or it's not, but then since you're an adult, you can just quit). But what happens during that starting period? Sometimes some hilarious mistakes go down. What if nobody showed you how to work the copier and you don't even know who to ask, so you try to figure it out for yourself and then BAM, you've accidentally printed over a thousand pages of just the letter K or something… You're not alone, though. See some of the hilarious mishaps others have had when they first started a job below! 

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  • 01
    "It restarted and printed another 1,800 with no way to cancel it..."
    via Pickpic
  • 02
    3 days into my job I accidentally printed 3,600 shipping labels instead of 1. After the task ran once, it restarted and printed another 1,800 with no way to cancel.
    via JonLongsonLongJonson
  • 03
    Carton ID 17726997 Contents of Carton Part NBR $200602801160 Description IF036139 Carton #: 1799 of 1799
    via JonLongsonLongJonson
  • 04
    dramatic... I once worked a summer job at a small nursing home. One of my tasks was ordering groceries online (we cooked the meals ourselves). I thought that you ordered by the piece, like '10 onions', '20 apples', and so on. But the system was designed for large orders, so it set everything to kg (~2.2 pounds). The next day, we got a delivery of so much food...
    via dramatic_opinion_763
  • 05
    Squirrel_Q_Esquire. Much smaller mess up here for me and it was personal, but during law school, I was doing. online grocery from Kroger and I needed 3 potatoes. So I searched potatoes, found the picture of the kind I like, and hit 3. I should note that the price was listed as per pound or ounce (so it can fluctuate) rather than a set number. Anyway, overall it was a large order thanks to also stocking up on some household products, so my total was over $200. Well it turns out that instead of 3
    via Squirrel_Q_Esquire
  • 06
    bestem The person before me at my last store, once tried to order 10 reams of 11x17 glossy paper. They had a large print job that was going to use 2 cases of the stuff, despite the fact that other than that job, we barely ever used the paper (usually we used a heavier gloss paper, or just not glossy). When I got to that store and walked into their storage area and saw 8 cases of the stuff stacked up on the side, because they had nowhere else to put it, I just laughed. It was obvious what happene
    via bestem
  • 07
    Watchlar984 I worked at a gas station where we had to place an order weekly by calling in numbers, no product names, and once someone ordered 20 cans of Mint Bandit chew instead of 20 cartons of Marlboro Light box because they wrote the wrong down. We had to borrow Marlboro Lights from other stores and the mint Bandit we had forever as one guy bought one tin per week.
    via Watchlar984
  • 08
    AlexFromTheC Worked in a nursing home for the last 6 years, ordering supplies was one of my main tasks. People would always mess up from time to time and not notice some things would need to be ordered by case and others by individual item/box. Gloves would need to be ordered by case and if you didn't make sure to change it to that you may order 15 individual boxes of gloves rather than 15 cases of 10 boxes each, then you'd be SOL.
    via AlexFromTheC
  • 09
    mbbysky I worked in restaurants for about a decade. The coding of "Item X" is entirely asinine for anyone not in the know. Incredibly, this experience paid off in my current engineering degree, as a coding class project had us create a modular, idiot-proof order form for a local nursing home with VBA. Mine won the extra credit (based on the nursing home kitchen manager's review) because I was the only one who understood Sysco's insane invoice coding schemes. The kids who never worked in restaura
    via mbbysky
  • 10
    Chance Answer7984 Yup... I've done much worse with dumb mistakes. We accidentally spent several times that when a supplier changed our normal listing for rubber bands from a small pack to 5lbs without anyone noticing. I went through an exercise a while back where we had a dozen people involved in trying to figure out how many labels we needed for a last time buy for a specific product. Maybe 30 man-hours and easily a couple thousand dollars in labor. To decide whether we needed $10 worth of labe
    via Chance_Answer7984
  • 11
    OR20 A colleague of mine wanted to print a pallet label. You had to out in the job number and the correct number of labels would be printed according to the job. He hit enter too quickly, so that no number was entered. Turns out, that now the system will print out every pallet label of every job ever existed. The IT had to kick the job, the problem was, that the software prints out one by one, so each label is a separate operarion, starting once the action before has finished. Removing that was
    via OR20
  • 12
    KiwiNo2638 Everyone makes mistakes. I once caused a database crash for blue chip company which caused their clients massive headaches for weeks, in my first month. I was there for another 15 years. nabrok I bet you never made that mistake again. If you fire people for making mistakes, you just have a bunch of people that never learned from them.
    via KiwiNo2638
  • 13
    whereugoincityboy I once under bid a job by over 100k. Also I once accidentally ordered 20 racks instead of 20 boxes of product. Each rack had probably 50 boxes on it. We had a big sale after that. I'm still alive 20 years later and I didn't have to change my identity.
    via whereugoincityboy
  • 14
    OrangeObjective3789 I once made a miscalculation in an excel spreadsheet that made it look like one of our shareholder's were billions of dollars richer than they were. That same sheet was sent to him, and no one cared. - 2 years later I still work at the same investment bank. Mistakes happen.
    via OrangeObjective3789
  • 15
    KneadAnd Preserve I work night shift at a nursing home. Once at work at around 3 am, I accidentally walked past a fire extinguisher on the wall and somehow grazed it with my jacket, the hook broke and and it fell down and started spraying and waving everywhere and I couldn't get ahold of it or make it stop. The powder COMPLETELY coated the entire hall, the walls, ceiling, all the resident's wheelchairs, medicine carts, computers, the floors. And it's a huge hall, it has 30 rooms. The entire staf
    via KneadAndPreserve
  • 16
    and they came to see and looked through the windows of the automatic closing fire doors and all they were able to see was the clouds of extinguisher spray and it looked EXACTLY like smoke. So they for a minute were panicking thinking the building was legitimately burning down. One of them was actually in tears. They also made the whole staff have mandatory fire extinguisher training, and of course everyone knew the reason. The whole thing was extremely embarrassing, but I still work there and it
    via KneadAndPreserve
  • 17
    BrotherTyron Worked in an upscale supermarket, drove the electronic pallet loader into the fine wines wine fridge on my 2nd week. Destroyed a solid 1800$ worth of wine. Ran to the boss on the verge of tears, he replayed the security footage and laughed his off. "We got insurance man don't worry about it, just help me clean it up" God that job was dope
    via BrotherTyron
  • 18
    Tiedyeinstein I worked in a grocery store and took down the entire produce department roof with the electric high stacker. It was a warehouse with high ceilings and the produce area had a drop ceiling held with wires, clipped it trying to lift a pallet to the top of the high shelves and completely knock the roof down. Called the boss ready to get fired and he laughed saying "I thought it would have been me to finally take that thing out"
    via Tiedyeinstein
  • 19
    Careless_Sky_9834 First day of my first job of my life at a bank. I set off the silent panic button. The bank was surrounded and locked down. (No one had shown me where the panic button was so I had been fooling with it none the wiser!)
    via Careless_Sky_9834
  • 20
    _g_e_o_r_g_e_ A kid working on his first day at the pub I worked at was told not to touch the big tray of beautiful bone china belonging to the owner's wife. To prove his worth, he did, and fell down the stairs with it. He was sacked on the spot as a lesson, and then unsacked the next day. For the next couple of summers, he proved time and time again he hasn't. learnt his lesson. I understand he's now a very rich businessesman. Moral one: everyone makes mistakes, make sure you learn from them Mo
    via __g_e_o_r_g_e__
  • 21
    thewizpower At the paper mill where I work, one of my responsibilities was to routinely inspect the ropes in the basement, ensuring their splices were solid and their overall condition was strong. On one particular day, while making my rounds, I mistakenly shut down the wrong rope run. This small error had significant consequences: the ropes melted off the machine, the paper broke, and we were forced to halt production for four hours to rethread the ropes. The downtime cost the company nearly $1
    via thewizpower

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