I found this recent news item over on Computer World pretty amusing.

Excel error leaves Barclays with more Lehman assets than it bargained for

October 14, 2008 (Computerworld) A reformatting error in an Excel spreadsheet has cropped up in the largest bankruptcy case in U.S. history, prompting a legal motion by Barclays Capital Inc. to amend its deal to buy some of the assets of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.

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one of its first-year law associates had unknowingly added the contracts when reformatting a spreadsheet in Excel.

Going on to read the rest of the article, it seems the real error here was that someone was in a hurry and didn’t pay enough attention to what he was doing. He was trying to export contents of Excel to a PDF.

However, contracts that had been marked as “hidden” in the spreadsheet when it was received by the law firm were added to the purchase offer during the reformatting process, according to the motion. Those contracts weren’t supposed to be part of the deal; they also were marked with an “N” for “No” in the original version of the spreadsheet, Cleary Gottlieb said in the motion.

That doesn’t seem like a “reformatting” error to me. That seems like an ID1OT error. We all do dumb things when we’re rushing to complete a task. That’s why I try very hard NOT to be in a hurry. It just leads to screw-ups. In this poor guy’s case, though, his mistake was very costly to both him and his company.

I have made some mistakes when rushing that have taught me the extreme value of simply taking that extra time to proof-read, and to breathe. I’ve used the wrong set of primary keys to update a database. I’ve forgotten a very crucial piece of a where clause. These mistakes have taught me to step back, take a little extra time, and don’t stress, or I might be spending a lot MORE time cleaning up my mess.

What’s the biggest mistake you’ve made when you’re trying to rush to complete a task? What did it teach you? Did you take responsibility, or try to blame the tools you used? How did it work out for you?