Advice please - should I offer?

[Scoosh]

Another thing to tell yourself is that you have learned a lot from this experience. You certainly won't make that mistake again - and will ensure that no one else around you does it either.

As has been stated earlier - your attitude is highly commendable and it shows you are a conscientious employee. Give the man a pay rise

 

[Chris James]

A bloke I used to work with connnected the electrodes the wrong way round while electroplating a Concorde drive shaft, thereby dissolving holes in it.

Rather expensive, so the engineers poke yoked (foolproofed) the connectors so they would only work one way round. A couple of years later the same operator once again dissolved another Concorde drive shaft. He had removed the connectors and reinstalled them himself.

He only finally got the bullet for smoking spliffs on company property.

So don't worry about a mere £500 of damages!

 

[Rhythm Thief]

I once damaged a tractor unit quite badly at work. Being young and naive, I offered to pay for the bits to fix it, and duly handed over about £300 in cash. Shortly after that I realised the boss hadn't been paying me properly for the work I was doing, and when I left he refused to pay me for three or four nights out I'd done because I "hadn't gone far enough from the yard". I've never offered to pay for any damage since (and to be fair, my employers since then wouldn't accept it if I did).

 

[jonesy]

I work in consultancy, and I can think of plenty of examples where f* ups on projects have cost far far more than £500 to fix in additional time that has to be spent. And while people will often do evening or weekend work that isn't charged to a project, it wouldn't occur to anyone to offer to pay for cost over-runs out of their own pocket...

 

[Piemaster]

The boss phoned yesterday about a couple of pipes that had been fabricated circa £1k each. Both had been made the same, unfortunately due to slight differences in the two machines they were intended for they only fitted one of the machines. He was especially annoyed as at the time the order was placed he had been assured by a colleague that they were both identical. I took the opportunity to blame the other guy. Mainly as it was his fault, but it won't go any further than that.

 

[Piemaster]

Forgot the flow chart to help you Longers:

 

[dellzeqq]

I shouldn't worry about it!

Where I used to work, a couple of engineers on the optics machine-shop floor once dropped and shattered a lens while installing it in a military imaging system.

The lens in question was worth £250,000.

I shoot ye not.

you cannot leave it at that! We want pictures, a full description of the wave of terror that spread through the building, and a 'where are they now' roundup!

 

[ColinJ]

I heard about an engineer who designed the control system for a motorised hoist system used for transporting huge rolls of carpet about a factory. He'd made a mistake in the software - instead of gently decelerating to a stop at the end of the track, the unit accelerated to maximum speed and knocked out the wall of the factory - oops!

 

[Chris James]

While on the subject of engineering cock ups, I worked for a summer at British Steel, Scunthorpe. During a plant tour of the rolling mill we were shown an oven that appeared unused.

When we asked what it was for we were told that it was for keeping billets warm if they had to suspend rolling. We pointed out that it looked unused and the guide said that it have never been used as the designers had forgotten that the billets increase in length with rolling so they were too long to fit in it!

 

[Foghat]

Imagine being the welder who did for the SS Normandie....

Or the air crew which accidentally lost 4 H-bombs in the Mediterrananean!