Hurricane Hatter - Me at my most destructive

Can you top this?

At work tonight, I knocked over an entire 10 sample set of cyanide distillation glassware. I am royally fucked tomorrow when I have to face my supervisor. I mean we're talking 10 distillation flasks, 10 distillation heads, and 10 absorbtion impingers well worth............

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~ $6,000. My fucking car isn't even worth $6,000. Here it is a couple hours later and I can still see all the glass tumbling down towards the concrete floor, almost as if in slow motion. Six fucking grand gone in the blink of an eye, just like that.

 

You should file a lawsuit against your employer for making you work under unsafe conditions.

 

I burned $450 of chickens once by leaving them in the oven overnight.

 

Yes, because $450 of chickens is anything as important as $6000 worth of highly specialised and complicated glassware. Idiot.

Man, Hatter, wtf happened?

 

There may have been times in my aviation career when I may have been responsible for thousands of dollars worth of damage to army aircraft. Maybe not. Just remember: Deny, deny, deny, counter-accuse.

 

I had an awesome post in this thread right after Japes' first post, and now I come back to see it never got posted.

Just thought I'd share. I don't remember the specifics, but the general gist was "you're a moron."

 

When I worked in landscaping a mistake I made lead to one of my co-workers crashing into a cable TV satellite and shutting down 17 HDTV channels for thousands of homes. I was working on the main RCN property.
The vehicle used was an Exmark lawnmower, 60 inch cut, and cost 10k new.
Now, I wasn't the one who crashed into the satellite, and so I didn't get blamed for it by the cable company, but the working crew never forgot what I did.

 

Sorry, I forgot there was the strong possibility that common conversation conventions such as relating to a similar story in your own life would be immediately ostracized by angry forumites who will immediately respond to THIS post by threatening to reach through their internet and cause physical harm to me.

PS: Yes, Dark Elf, because almost destroying something with a crane compares to actually destroying a large stack of expensive glass jars. Idiot.

 

Alright, Grakelin, how big is the oven that 450 dollars worth of poultry can be destroyed within?
Also, I'm not really sure if my story will top Grimm's, simply because he had a reason to use the word cyanide in it. There were a LOT of pissed people with blank channels, though.

 

I don't think I've ever done something that cost a company money... I once caused my scoutmaster to fishtail into a wall of ice (at only about 5-10 mph), and tear up his bumper... but that was only like $1k worth of damage...

 

It was at a grocery store, the oven where people go to get their 'Ready-Made' chickens and the like.

 

Well, I can safely say that the only thing I ever destroyed during work was a human's soul.

That poor woman... I had to explain to her why, despite the fact that her ex-husband was a bastard to her, he had won custody and there was no legal basis for her to appeal the verdict *again*. I could actually hear her spirit shattering down the phone. I tell ya... never working for a legal firm again.

(It's one thing to destroy someone's soul when you're doing it because they're an asshole. It's another thing to do it to someone who didn't really deserve it. I actually felt guilty about that one.)

 

Meh, they probably have some kind of insurance for it. My dad is an exec in a photo company, and they handle, sell, and fix $50,000+ (that's the cheapest) machines. There are times where snapping a tiny glass tube a millimeter thick could cause thousands of dollars worth of damage. Since no technician or employee would be willing to take that kind of fiscal responsibility, they have a financial plan from a third party to cover the damage. It's like medical insurance. You get enough companies from different industries to pool in on monthly payments and premiums, a "pot" of money is established, one of them sustains damages, and well, you get the idea. I'm sure your company has the same kind of plan.

 

Well my supervisor wasn't too happy about, but luckily he took it out on everyone else before I got to work the next day (he works morning shift, I work evening shift). By the time I got to work he was just like "yeah we're screwed for a little bit, but I know shit happens." Today he was even back to cracking jokes with me, so I think things are back to normal.

I put the racks on a large cart to wheel it from the hoods to the sinks to clean my glassware. In front of the sinks are these 2-inch thick rubber mats. I've trucked carts back and forth over those mats at least a couple thousand times, but this one time a wheel on the cart got caught in the groove between two mats and the whole cart lurched forward spilling precious glassware everywhere. It was a fucking nightmare.

The cyanide wasn't much of a threat because I countered it with 1:1 HCl as soon as it happened and then cleaned up the acid with a special industrial powder acid neutralizer. All that's left to tell anything happened is a big orange stain on the floor in front of the incubation ovens.

The one guy here, I think trying to make me feel better, told about the time last year he flooded the entire distillation room because he had the water pressure to the distillation block turned up to high. All the rubber tubes connecting the cold fingers popped and they had an inch of water covering the entire room's floor. It then dripped down to the floor below, which caused a huge raucus. I wonder how much monetary damage that caused?

 

One of my fellow crewchiefs called an engine clear when it still had the plug in the intake. The pilots started it up, and by the time they aborted start, the engine was toast.
Price tag: about $750,000.

Another of my fellow crewthiefs rammed a forklift into the stabilator.
Price tag: about $50,000.

One of our pilots tried to park a Blackhawk in a Kiowa Warrior pad. Shaved off 3 of the 4 blade tip-caps on the concrete T-barriers.
Price tag: about $100,000

During a phase inspection, a civilian contractor left a shop towel stuffed inside the #1 input module. On run-up, it got cycled through the main transmission, the #2 input mod and both accessory modules (collectively known as the 5-pack).
Price tag: about $1.5 million.

When flying over Baghdad, our automatic countermeasure system thought it detected a missile lock. When it dispensed flares, I watched as one of them bounced off an Iraqi's balcony and into his house.
Price tag: Priceless.

 

Nicely done Japes! That gave me a good laugh.

 

I once (one of life's "Oh Shit!" moments) lost the bolt assembly to an M16A1. Not sure how much that cost. Since you can't technically swap bolt on those thing, they probably had to have another one made.

Do you have a recording of the sound? you could market that. Or at least post it here. I've heard that sound, but like one's voice, it sounds different when you hear it outside your body.