As the title says I messed up today at work. I work in pharma. I was working on a machine and let go of a button I shouldn’t have, it caused about $50k worth of product to be dumped instantly. To add insult to injury the production downtime is gonna cost about $75k minimum.
Stuff like this happens quite a bit on our factory floor. Just 2 weeks ago the whole process was down for a 36 hour period due to someone’s error which probably cost close to $600k if I had to guess, a combination of product loss and downtime cost. It’s a relatively new process here ( a few years old ) , but I am solely responsible for this one error. I felt quite terrible when it happened but people told me it’s okay and not to worry. This company turns over billions each year after all. It’s just the fact I caused it makes me feel quite bad. All it’s going to take is a 30 second conversation to get everything explained with management but still it’s a little deflating.
Anyone have any advice? Things haven’t been exactly plain sailing outside work so this is the cherry on cake. Thank you.
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Its process that should be blamed for failures, not people. Admit, be sorry, say you’ll do better next time and offer support in improving processes to avoid this in the future. That’s all you can do really.
It’s referred to as a cost of doing business. No one person is absolutely perfect. Your best lesson will be how to prevent this in the future. Don’t be hard on yourself as shit happens sometimes.
>Men of Reddit , I messed up at work today. How to get past it ?
you already did.
it’s in the past. just look forward and everything will be fine.
My mom used to work in processing medical debt payments. She would tell me all the time about checks that were worth 250,000 getting lost or shredded by mistake. Most companies have human error for stuff like this built into their budget so when a big error happens it’s not crippling to a business. I would suspect your situation is pretty similar. If you made a habit of stuff like this happening that changes things.
Acknowledge it, own it, learn from it, and don’t let it paralyze you. It’s a matter of if, not when, you make a mistake.
Time erodes all regrets.
$125k in pharma ain’t anything. I use to work in pharma and we would replace small pieces of analytical equipment and bill the pharma labs $60k. If a syringe costs $5 on the streets pharma pays $50 for them. If you buy software for $400 pharma pays $4k for it. Just add a zero to it and that’s the pharma price. $125k loss is absolutely nothing to them, won’t even affect the books or their annual profit or anything. Who gives a crap. It’s just a job. No one will remember and no one will care and the way pharma works you’ll probably be at a different company in 2-3 years.
It happens. Don’t beat yourself up about it. Admit fault to your management, explain what happened (maybe offer a process improvement if you think of one and your management is open to ideas), say you’ll do better, and move on.
If anything you now have a great answer for the question “tell me about a time you made a mistake and how did you resolve it / learn from it?” for any future interviews (not saying you’re going to get fired lol)
Seriously, don’t sweat it. You’ll be fine.
They’ll engineer a process to prevent operator error next time. Just do what you can. If they decide to terminate you, that’s fine, lesson learned; what you did was unintentional.
Take responsibility and share the process you are committed to following (or offer new process/solution that everyone should follow moving forward) to avoid this happening again in the future. Mistakes happen – like why that medication is legally allow to $$$ cost that much in the first place 🙂 – Outside of this, there nothing else you can do.
I wouldn’t worry mate. People make mistakes and the important thing is that nobody died.
I work in mining and we have a system that if you fuck up and cause a significant production loss, you have to buy the crew a carton of beer. You drink the beer with the crew then move on. It seems to work well, we all make mistakes as long as you learn from them.
Big pharma makes money through extorting diabetics and the elderly. Don’t feel bad for them, they have billions. Fuck their money. 100k is a drop in the bucket for them, and likely insured anyways. G9 about your life and just be better going forward.
I’ve worked in IT for 20+ years and mistakes, even costly ones, come with the territory. It’s the nature of the beast. The important thing is to admit to it right away, get help from your teamco-workers, and recover from it best you can.
To make you feel better, here are my top three fuck ups.
– Fat fingered a forwarding rule and sent a public facing toll-free number to a porn number. That was fun. 6 hours before it was caught.
– Shut down a production cluster of virtual machines when I thought I was in the test environment. It went down dirty and was a pain to get back up and running. 6 hours of business lost.
– Did a batch update of about 10,000 users email addresses and erased what is known as “Proxy Addresses”, a collection of important addresses both public and private. This was a costly lesson in how arrays function. It broke mail flow for 24 hours. I had tested on a dummy account.
All of them were costly to the businesses, but I owned them, got help, and fixed them. That’s all that anyone can really ask for. And because of that, I was never fired. I learned a lot from it as well, and as a result, I can usually spot when my less experienced juniors are about to repeat the same mistakes.
Humans make mistakes. I get it though. I work for a company that saw millions and millions in profits last year. I made an error that could have cost us $3,000 last week. It bothered me for about a week. I’ve made errors that HAVE cost us about as much as you cost your company but I’ve also saved our company $75,000 on a single case.
In the grand scheme of things you are making your company very VERY profitable I’d imagine. You also discovered a flaw in the system potentially that could be fixed in the future with a fail safe.