How often do you make mistakes at work?

Mistakes at my job are usually in the paper work,and when found I try and correct them.

More often than I would like.

Being somewhat of a perfectionist, I try my best to get things right the first time round (by asking questions, questions and more questions). Spotting my mistakes (or worse, having someone spot my mistakes) mortifies me. That said, I fix my mistakes and remember not to make the same ones the next time.

Not often. My work is very self-directed so I’m usually the person who picks up any errors or oversights.

I might forget to mark a paper if a student submits late and doesn’t alert me it’s waiting. I might miss an email or two and not respond. I remember someone reminding me ‘nobody is dying’ when I was stressing about my workload a few years ago, and it’s something I remind myself of at times. If there is an error, usually it can be rectified without any serious consequences. There’s nothing that’s going to result in a serious outcome. It might inconvenience someone, but that’s all.

Before I was forced on medical hiatus, mistakes were rare. At best, a mistake would scrap a part, resulting in thousands of dollars in losses (wasted man-hours and machine time) as well as shipping an order short; we had only enough material to do the orders with zero “spares”. At worst, a mistake could either do many thousands of dollars in damage to the machine (spindles were $62k, C-axis servos were $198k… you get the idea) along with 2–6 weeks of downtime and/or send things flying is dangerous and possibly lethal ways.

Standard practice was to double-check your loads, then have someone else double-check your double-check. First parts and setups were a bit fussier. Oh, and not on.y did you have to not break the machine or hurt/kill anyone, you had to have the part within tolerance. Fortunately, most of what I worked on had pretty loose tolerances; I could be +/- 0.010” before it was scrap, resulting in pages of paperwork.

I make mistakes from time to time and it bothers me more than it should. Recently, I was sending discovery responses to opposing counsel in one of the lawsuits my attorney is handling and it included a CD with thousands of documents in it. As usual, these were sent out right before the deadline, so there was no wiggle room. I realized after the mail was taken that I hadn’t even put the CD in the envelope. I freaked out a bit and my attorney had left for the day, but was able to package up the CD and post it to go out priority mail so it would reach opposing counsel before the actual responses could. It worked out, but I worried all weekend that I’d get reprimanded for it. I got to work the next Monday and had an email from my attorney saying it wasn’t a problem at all and it could have waited until Monday.

I feel really inadequate when I make a mistake at work. It embarasses me, even though I realize everyone makes mistakes. I’m pretty easily embarassed and definitely easily stressed out.

I was wrapped pretty tight in my job, and I would get mad if I made more than 1 mistake a month, and even that one would upset me quite a bit.
I am much calmer now. I really don’t know how the stress didn’t get to me before.