Hey now quit beating yourself up. If you don’t make any mistakes how will you learn. To share a couple of my mistakes with you.
20 years old, straight out of college, working for a corporation that didn’t want to spend money on a scheduling system for employees. This meant everyday starting at 10 am I needed to create the next day’s schedule using index cards (all employees name and hire date listed) and a time card rack. After schedule was created, we made copies that were then posted up and we kept the time rack in our office for employees calling in. For the most part real easy but the biggest issue is that due to the union everyone had to be scheduled per seniority. If they were not scheduled but had seniority they got paid. The same if an employee called to find out schedule and were told a wrong time to start they were paid for hours that they should have worked. So this particular incident happened when it was our busiest season. I had two ladies call in to check schedule and they both had the same first name. One started at 7 and the other at 7:45. Accept I made the mistake and didn’t ask them their employee number and told them both a different time to come in. I made note of my conversations with them and that I had tried contacting them throughout the evening to apologize and let them know correct time to come in. Since I had owned up to my mistake and tried to remedy it the employees went to the union but were turned down for filing a complaint as they didn’t have current contact information on file with us. Plus they had been there over 10 years and were on the schedule everyday at the same time for those 10 years that they knew better. I still felt really bad about it but had to suck it up and move on.
Working as a billing clerk I was in charge of sending out monthly invoices to customers. When I first started it was complete chaos. Nobody knew who had been billed or when. The managers didn’t know what was billed and who paid unless they fingered through the huge accordion file box hoping that it had been filed there. So after doing a reconciliation on all of the customers accounts, I created an excel worksheet showing who, what, and when the customer had been billed and paid. My routine was to go one by one and check off billing, update payments, and mail out invoices. Somehow the system we were using to bill had a glitch while I was creating and printing invoices that it was making duplicates. I hadn’t caught the mistake in time to fix before all 180 invoices went out. I updated my worksheet, email the worksheet over to managers , and files the paper invoices in the accordion. I went on with my tasks and a week later after returning from lunch, my micromanager calls me into her office because there is a serious problem. She wants to know why this happened and what am I going to do to fix it, how could I make such a mistake in the first place, and how could she trust me to handle billing anymore. So I calmly told her I would check this out and fix it and apologized for making this mistake. Head hanging low, tail between legs, walking back to my desk I immediately went back through all of the invoices for that month and tried to figure out what happened. It was some glitch that I could not recreate. So finding the duplicates, which only ended up being a handful. I immediately typed up a letter to our customers and let them know there was a glitch and that the invoice was correct that they had received but the invoice number was wrong and if they wanted to have a corrected invoice sent to them to please let us know. After the reprimand from manager I was sure there were now going to be a stream of phone calls from irate customers coming in . Let’s just say none of the handful of duplicate invoices called in not requested a corrected invoice. Found out later the only reason the manager found out was because a customer had paid and listed invoice number on check and it wasn’t I the accordion. I still made the mistake, owned it, learned from it, and moved on.
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