Have you ever had “just one job” and messed it up?
As the NSW Liberal party deals with the fallout of a “mind-boggling” administrative error that saw it fail to submit the paperwork to run candidates in eight local councils, we asked Guardian staff to share their own worst clerical mishaps.
Share your own blunder of shame in the comments below.
‘I was wearing my trousers inside out’
I had applied for a cadetship for a major news organisation, but did a lot of misreading. First, I misread the time and date for the exam and woke up about 20 minutes before it was due to start. I raced there and somehow found I was wearing my trousers inside out.
Anyway, somehow I did well enough to get through to interview stage – but I did not realise that I had ticked a box that said I would like to take the cadetship in a different city, so was rather caught off-guard when asked why I wanted to move to that city (which I’d never visited in my life).
I did not get the cadetship.
– Celina Ribeiro
‘I triple-checked I had my passport’
That would be the time in my early 20s when I decided to skip the travel agent when I booked myself a flight from Sydney to New York. After saving up for months, I didn’t want to waste any money paying for travel agent fees and booking online seemed so quick and easy.
I was so excited when I turned up at Sydney international airport and I did everything right: turned up hours early, printed copies of my ticket in hand, triple-checked I had my passport and made sure I had taken care of any visa requirements.
I got to the airport and couldn’t find a check-in area for Air Canada anywhere, at first putting it down to getting to the airport too early. It took far too long for the reality to sink in that I had, in fact, booked my departing flight from Sydney, Nova Scotia, Canada.
– Melissa Davey
‘We weren’t allowed cordial at home’
My one job was to pour the cordial on the jugs for all the dinner tables at grade 6 school camp. However, because we weren’t allowed cordial at home, I’d never seen it made. So I just poured a bunch of jugs of straight cordial syrup for a class of preteens.
– Michael Kalenderian
‘For some reason our tickets had printed in German’
Mine was during my first Euro trip as a very worldly and mature (read: extremely naive and cash-strapped) 19-year-old. I had been in charge of booking the train from Paris to London for me and my friend and for some reason our tickets had printed in German. No matter, I intrepidly figured, this is Europe! And the numbers of the departure time were still readable for this monolinguist.
Lugging our bags to the Gare de Nord at 10pm – a late departure, but it was the cheapest ticket – we stood on a ghostly train-free platform wondering what had happened. Peering at the ticket again, I saw the numbers right there – 22:00 – but what was that word before it? Ankunft, I pronounced slowly. My friend responded: “arrival”.
That’s when I noticed another four-digit numeral. The time 19:45 - 7.45pm – preceded by the word Abfahrt. Sounded like something that happens after too many downward dogs, I joked. “Departure,” my friend corrected me, the realisation sinking in for both of us.
The last train from Paris for the night had just arrived across the English channel at London’s St Pancras. A brain abfahrt indeed.
– Emma Elsworthy
Share your story in the comments below.
