I was in the hospital having surgery, so I wasn’t really with it at all. I have my work bookcase arranged so I could find all of my reference books in order. I could reach out without thinking to grab the book I needed without even getting up from my desk.
My wife decided to get everything ready so I could catch up my work as soon as I got home. So she “organized” my desk area. This only added a week to my work scheduled. I got everything back in order on my desk. I sat down and started to work, I went to work, reached for a reference book. I couldn’t find the book where it was supposed to be.
My wife had put all of my library in alphabetic order.
I got the work done, on time with a lot of work until 2:00 am.
Yes we are STILL married for 36 years!
What’s Your Biggest Work From Home Fail? (Contest!)
Thanks @AnkerOfficial for awesome contest.
My work from home fail came when I was sick and my boss told me to stay home. That day I ended up having to do a video call with my sons teachers because he had missed a week due to a family death. During the conference call I got up to get something to drink, and me being sick I was in pajamas…only I didn’t have my drawstring tightened so when I got up and walked away my pajama pants fell down. I quickly grabbed and pulled them up to only hear one of my sons teachers say nice boxers. I turned beet red and ran out of the room. That was fail 1, fail 2 came towards the end of our conference call when I started coughing a lot and ended up throwing up all over my laptop and camera. My sons teachers quickly exited the meeting and I was left cleaning up this mess.
I ended up getting an email from the schools principal informing me he heard what happened and that he would excuse my sons missed work for the week. He also informed me to next time I’m sick, do NOT have a video call and to make sure all clothes are in order. Now whenever my sons teachers email me they call me Mr. Pajama-fail or Sir barfs a lot. Of course they asked me first and since it’s what happened I agreed because I saw the humor in it.
My biggest WFH fails are always because of my laptop. The laptop is almost always on the dock so I’ll jump into a meeting and my mic is covered up so I’ll talk to a bit before realizing that no one can hear me.
I think my biggest work from home fail was when I started groaning and complaining I was tired as I was moved from a breakout room into the main zoom room. I thought that I would be automatically muted, but apparently not and my coworkers got a lovely variety of grunts, groans, and woes of my back problems.
I will never live that down…
Unfortunately I did not have the option to work from home during the pandemic (I work in healthcare). However I had a pretty sad fail during one of my interviews just a few months back which was on Zoom.
The interview was for one of my top choice positions, so I was quite anxious for it. I started my first two interviews well, and got along well with both of the faculty. There was a lunch break in between, and a lunch lecture during the meeting to get an ideal of the learning environment at the program. I took the opportunity to relax and catch my breath with my webcam off. I was mentally preparing for my next interview, which was with the program director. I figured that the interview would not start until after conclusion of the lecture, right? Wrong. I got a message that I missed stating that my interview was beginning, and ended up being 20 minutes late to my 30-35 minute interview. The interviewer rushed through just a few of their planned questions, and I’m sure that I was unable to make the needed impression for the competitive spot offered.
This was a huge fail for me since I knew I definitely hurt my chances for my ideal position. I did not end up getting the position there, but thankfully did manage to find an alternative position instead.
Fairly simple - failed to mute the mic while dealing with a kid’s emergency on a company meeting.
Embarrassing, but fortunately at this point similar things have happened to almost everyone, so no one is hitting too hard on it.
And shared on social media.
I had a HUGE conference I was hosting. I thought I had everything under control and all contingencies planned for…
…until my neighbor changed the day of their landscaper mowing, cleaning, and leaf-blowing their yard…only a few yards from where my WFH office is…I just raised my voice volume and tried to drown-out the landscapers who were hard at work…and they finished just as my conference was ending… :o
Using a webcam from 2007 and not being able to take an exam becausr the resolution was so bad😮
So, my mom works for a small company and wanted me to get her ready to work from home. I get her a new laptop, surge protector, monitor, mouse, microphone, webcam, you know, the whole thing. A day later I get a call from her frantic because her system was broken. I guess she was playing with the dog, through the toy forward, hit the surge protector and it dragged half of the station off the desk and onto the floor. That… was not fun to fix.
But, rejoice, when I replaced the stuff and got it working, she got on a voice call with her boss and goes “I am so terribly sorry about being late. My son had better things to do and it took him this long to get here.”
Some charming stories, good luck every one.
My work from home fail happened when everyone at our house was in a Zoom meeting. It taxed our internet service enough that when I was talking at my meeting, someone joked that I sounded like I was drunk because the audio kept slowing down and pausing (it was only 2 o’clock in the afternoon). I promptly switched from using internet audio to calling-in to the meeting.
Definitely interested to see the specs of the webcam since Anker versions of products are much more reliable
Thanks @AnkerOfficial for a really great contest!
My most embarrassing moment was at the beginning of the pandemic, I assisted in teaching a class, and I was new to Zoom. My responsibility for the class was that I would monitor the chat and would have to interrupt the class for questions/clarifications, so I was meant to be a silent observer.
I had a new usb mic which I thought I had tested thoroughly. Turns out there was a separate volume button for my ‘mic volume’ that I would hear in my headphones. I therefore thought my usb mic wasn’t working.
The mic was on a stand and I hit the mic stand and the mic accidentally multiple times. The lecturer notified the class 2 times for everyone to “make sure their mics were on mute” (I didn’t see that he and I were the only ones off mute,…I now know how to do this).
This went on for a while. I could see the lecturer getting frustrated. Half way through the lecture I reached to drink some water and subsequently knocked the usb mic and stand over and it hit the side of the desk, my chair and finally the wood floor. The whole time I was saying “oh crap, oh crap, oh crap”…as my significant other was in the same room and knowing how expensive the mic was she screamed out “oh my god did it break?!”.
The lecturer yanked off his headphones with a painful grimace and yelled, “everyone, PLEASE mute your mics!!“. The students obviously knew it was me as we the lecturer and I were the only ones with unmuted mics,…again, I now know how to look for this.
In addition, because of this, much of that lecture wasn’t usable. Instead of using that recorded lecture for this year, that specific lecture is the only one that he must re-record,…because of me.
At least I know how to use my usb mic now!
I had to poop during a meeting. Except I forgot to mute myself…
I am lactose intolerant and ate cereal unknowing that I I never disconnected from zoom. And walked away with an accident stain camera side in front of the head of HR [quote=“AnkerOfficial, post:1, topic:89638”]
AnkerWork
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Me and one of my coworkers are always going to meeting with our supervisors. Even before the lockdown, we were always in meeting.
Backstory: So in this one meeting my coworker was tired. We had the lights off and was watching a slideshow and here she was about to doze off right next to our main boss. Luckily we got a break and me and her was kidding around about her about to fall asleep. So I joke and told her if she did fall asleep to tell them she was up late going to Krogers. We had a good laugh.
So anytime we are getting tired in a meeting Kroger is our secret key word for we are tired.
Fast forward to now…
We are in a marathon of like 5 meetings in this one day vs our normal 2 or 3 a day. We get on the meeting and I am tired. I am getting to that point of I am about to doze and if I did fall asleep, I would have started to snore loudly.
When to my luck I hear an skype message ding. I see a message from her that called my name and then “Kroger Kroger!!!”
I realized it and put myself on mute. It make it all more funny in that I was in a meeting a few day before that where there was an actual guy that was our meeting snoring through it as he forgot to put himself on mute.
PS Nice thread as I love to hear how we all have had work issues from home.
The electrical circuits in the rental home we’re in are so screwed up, the space I’m using as my WFH office is on the same breaker as the kitchen. Not usually a problem, except there’s a faulty GFCI (ground fault circuit interrupter) outlet that trips if you bump it the wrong way.
One little bump, the power flickers, and the network goes down. This happened several times - including during a troubleshooting call with a Fortune 100 company - before I realized what was wrong, and bought a UPS to keep power stable for my office. Then I started the still ongoing conversation with the landlord about fixing this, among many other things.
The simplest part of my work from home fails is my coworker. At 3 years old you would expect a little etiquette when it comes to sharing of your computers 
. As soon as I break out one of my laptops for emailing and other work activities, he strongly believes that it is in fact his device and any cartoon that he cannot get on cable should be streaming nonstop on the device. Last week, I had to wait until he passed out from over exhaustion at 10pm with a hand stuffed into a goldfish package watching Paw Patrol on tv and Thomas the train on the laptop. My wife and I were perplexed with how upset he got every time we attempted to “liberate” one of our devices from him.
That fail leads me to the bigger one, which has earned me the label hoarder at work. I have 3 laptops (1 Linux, 1 domained to the company server, and 1 non domain for software admin access) and a mountain of cables based on the job need. My company has Dell branded docks with hardwired cables (though I have them slowly converting to Anker since 2 of our IT guys love the brand) so we are unable to bring our docks home since the are easy to break. For the ability to use a second monitor I have one Video cable for 2 Laptops and a second USB-c model for the 3rd. 2 AC supplies are needed because the XPS 15 needs over 65W minimum to charge at all and I only have 1 of the higher powered adapters. IT looked at me funny when I had them order a USB-A hub and a USB-C hub. Kept trying to tell them that I need way to many cables simply because my laptops all only have either 1 or only USB-C ports, so I need at least 1 port to charge (why is it so hard to convince IT that you just need more ports??? A newer Dell XPS 13 with all usbc, an older XPS 15 and an old Latitude with only 1 usbc just makes life hard when most of my adapters and chargers are usbc lol). To really sum it up, the biggest fail of work from home is needing almost a dozen different cables to operate 3 laptops efficiently since they all do not have the needed ports. It has been a crazy year, hope everyone else is finding ways to be efficient as well. Good Luck all!
Reminds me of when I worked on a customer site and I needed one of their PCs to access their network but I needed my own to access non-official apps.
So what I did was have a small travel personal laptop and an A/B VGA switch so I could use a large monitor switching between devices.
Modern equivalent would be a PC stick or Raspberry Pi and a monitor with multiple HDMI inputs.
