Everyone makes mistakes, but when we say that phrase we're usually talking about something small like accidentally dropping something, or bumping into a stranger. Not every mistake is so benign, though. Every now and then we make one of those mistakes in life that leaves us making that face and wishing we could find the UNDO button. Sometimes, the universe throws us a freebie and we manage to narrowly avoid catastrophe. One Reddit user asked:

What's the biggest fuck up you ever made that was fixed before anyone knew about it?

Obviously we were clicking that immediately. A parade of terrible failure turned into glorious victory? Pssssh click it like you mean it, yo. We grabbed a few of our favorites to share with you, so kick back and enjoy these emotional roller coasters.

Instead of charging a customer's credit card for $150. I charged $15000 and it went through. I ran up to a private office and immediately called the issuing bank. Told them what happened and they made it as if nothing happened.

Was taking care of my neighbors bird, and he flew out the house as i opened the door and went over and behind it. I shat bricks cause she really loves the bird and had it for a while, heard him chirping on the trees behind the house and kept calling him "Mango! Mango! Mango!" He came to the windowsill and i lured him in with food. Best believe i didn't let him out of his cage after that

Started an apprenticeship in IT and was woefully underqualified. I was given the responsibility of maintaining the intranet site for our whole department, obviously given a role that's internal so I couldn't f*ck up customer facing things. They underestimated my power. On one cheery Friday evening when half my department had gone home early I was experimenting on the site, creating and deleting test pages in a hidden area. I got two different delete buttons (on the same page) mixed up and accidentally deleted the whole site... there is no undo. I didn't have access to the change log. What I DID have was another tab open with the same site on it in edit mode that I forgot I had. I hit 'save changes' on that page and voila, everything is back! After changing my pants I went home and spent the whole weekend terrified that my boss would find out. They never did.

Fast forward two years, I've been training hard and now I design systems for our staff. Never f---- up that bad again. Yet.

When I was in high school, my parents had a VW Golf and a station wagon. I had keys to both cars, although I normally drove the Golf because it was a GTI and a hoot to drive. Our local mall had the movie theater, arcade, and food court all near one particular entrance, which was normally my preferred place to park.

One Saturday I didn't have much going on so I got up, drove the station wagon to the mall, played some games, tooled around for a bit, hung out with friends, then got in my car and went home. When I got home both my parents were gone, which was weird, but I thought, "It's cool. I can watch what I want to on tv". So I grabbed a bag of chips and started watching some movie on HBO.

About an hour or so into the movie I realized.... "hey wait a minute, I didn't drive the Golf to the mall. But I drove the Golf home..... oh crap!" I realized my parents had driven to the mall in the Golf and used the exact same parking area I used. When I got out of the mall I must have seen the Golf, just got in it, and absent minded driven home. My parents were still at the mall, had been for over an hour (which was a record for my dad), and I was certain my father was in the midst of calling the cops to report a stolen car.

I jumped into the Golf, drove as quickly as I could back to the mall (had my mother seen the way I drove, she would have killed me). By some miracle the EXACT spot my parents had parked in was available, so I parked the car. I then walked the couple rows over and got into the station wagon and drove home.

My parents came home like 30 mins later. I asked them how the mall was and my father started bitching about how my mother made him shop for a new bedroom set or whatever. But other than that, it was fine.

I didn't tell them that story until I was into my late 20's.

New baby arrived and pretty sleep deprived, my wife heads out for some shopping. She was not a happy camper

I'm getting ready for work, all organised, open the door and F----- F--- I remember the baby is home with me, just before I'm about to close the door.

Slink back in and sit on the couch til she gets home.

Baby would have been fine sleeping in the cot for 20 min but I think the marriage would have been over.

Okay not mine but a mate. Basically when he was a kid him and his brother were fooling around and throwing things at each other in the yard. A wayward throw sent the projectile right onto the windscreen of his dad's car, cracking it.

They decided not to face the music and just went inside without saying anything. The next morning the dad before leaving for wok comes in and says "You wouldn't believe it. I was hosing the ice off the windscreen and it bloody cracked it"

I used to work at a call center for a popular gift company. This one couple calls up and says "we need to cancel our order!" I look it up, and tell them UPS already has the order to deliver it. They tell me "You dont understand. We are sending this to our son and his wife. We accidentally put his ex wife's name on the card. It will ruin Christmas if they receive this gift!!!" I was finally able to call UPS and get them to not deliver the package. Not my screw up, but dang.

I once was configuring the network firewall of the university I worked on and accidentally and without realizing toggled a switch that effectively cut all internet access of the university. I realized it only when someone in the room asked another person about the Internet being weird, then it hit me. My heart started racing as I went back and correct the configuration setting.

I cut the University from the world for about 5 minutes, It probably affected about 150k people, at the very least. "Internet glitch" was the official diagnose.

Not myself but my Dad. Had the story confirmed to me by him and a number of his friends who were there too so definitely was true.

He was on rugby tour with his team and in classic rugby tour fashion, were being idiots in their hotel, drinking too much, being rowdy, that sort of stuff.

At one point it ended up my dad chasing one of his teammates down the hallway. The teammate he was chasing was in the room right on the end of the hallway, they got up to full sprint, the teammate got into his room before my dad could catch him and slammed the door behind himself.

My dad was 6ft 5in (195cm) and weighed around 17 stone (238lb) in his playing days, so he was a big guy. He didn't have time to stop when his friend shut the door and ended up going straight through it. He took it straight off the hinges and cracked the wood in a number of places.

They were due to leave the next day from the hotel and due to a number of other breakages and the team generally just being awful, the manager had said that if anything more was broken, they were to be thrown out and there was going to be full room inspections before they left either way.

My dad was a bit of a handy man so carried a small set of screwdrivers with him wherever he went and luckily he had them on this day. His team mates and him managed to screw the door/hinges back onto the frame. The issue after this were the cracks in the door.

The door was a dark brown colour with the internal wood just being some light brown cheap chip board like material. Due to this the cracks were very noticeable.

One of his teammates came up with a plan. In each of their rooms they had the standard complimentary tea/coffee/biscuits as well as a small tub of Nutella (no idea if Nutella is a thing outside of Europe but for anyone who doesn't know, it is a nutty chocolate spread, dark brown coloured, rumour also has it that it is actually nectar from the Gods) to go with the biscuits. Nutella, conveniently, was almost a perfect colour match to the broken door.

A number of their rooms donated their Nutella to the cause and they smeared the cracks with it to make them blend in.

Along came the room inspection upon check out and the manager checked each room one by one with them watching. Apparently they had left the door open for him in hope that he would not use it at all. He didn't look at it at all on the way in and just shut it behind him on his way out, the door with makeshift chocolate flavoured cement held together and he didn't notice a thing. They had got away with it.

As far as any of the guys involved know, the owner never got in contact with the club regarding the door over the following few weeks so while he inevitability found out about it eventually, the running theory goes that due to him missing it in the inspection, they couldn't be blamed however many days/weeks later it was noticed.

I technically invaded Iran.

I was serving in the Navy during the War on Terror, on my second deployment, and was in Navigation. Our Captain was a little... eccentric? And he liked f---- with people. So one night he came on the bridge in his robe and fuzzy slippers and asked me to plot out 12 nautical miles from Iran. Which marks the shift from territorial to international waters.

My "mission" for the rest of the night was to ride that line. Either to let them see us on radar just outside of their waters, or just to give me something to do for shits and giggles. So for the next few hours I was advising course corrections and doing everything I could to keep us close to but not inside that line.

Except for the little slip up of forgetting to account for drift once. Whoops. So for about... 10 minutes or so the US Navy had technically invaded Iran's territorial waters. They apparently didn't notice, and I corrected it quickly.

In truth it's probably not nearly as big of a deal as it sounds, but at the time 21 year old me was fucking sweating bullets, thinking I'd just declared war on a foreign country or something.

One day after a night of heavy drinking, I woke up to find I had shat myself whilst I was asleep. I was absolutely horrified as you can imagine. I quickly showered and stripped the bed, taking extreme care to remove any trace. I was just finished when my boyfriend came home. He didn't suspect a thing.

When I was 15, I tried to bake a carrot cake, and I think I misread how much carrots to put and ended up with maybe 10x the amount of carrots you're supposed to make. Whatever I did, it became the mushiest "cake" ever.

Guests were already coming, and in a stroke of genius, I told my mom's friends, "Since two of you are bringing your babies along, I made it extra soft for them. I also reduced the sugar and increased the carrots to make it healthier!"

My parents' friends kept going on about what a thoughtful, sweet kid I am, baking a cake specially with babies in mind.

The weird thing was, the babies were hooked on the cake. One of the moms kept calling my mom for the next few months asking if I have time to bake that cake again. I did try to replicate it but I just couldn't so I kept pretending I was too busy.

I met her kid again when she was 11 and apparently, one of her earliest memories was eating that cake. Her mom told me I was the one who baked it for her so she was really excited to meet me, because in her memories, it's some mindblowingly awesome cake that no cake has ever compared to. I had to burst her bubble and tell her what really happened.

Dropped a hookah coal on the living room carpet and burned a dime-sized hole in it. I didn't know anyone who could fix it, so I took scissors and trimmed some carpeting out of a little spot in a corner of the room and superglued it into the melted spot. It's still perfectly camouflaged and mom is still completely unaware a good 7 years later.

My Dad blew up a lava lamp when I was about 12yrs old.

My Mom was working late ad he was cleaning some stuff out of the basement when he found an old lava lamp. Decided to try to get it working again. He set it up and had it on for a while but it wasn't doing anything. It had been laying on its side so all the wax was stuck on one side. He got impatient. We had a gas stove so he puts it on the burner on low. That got the wax down to the bottom, he puts it back on its base. It's still "not working" fast enough for him, so what does he do? He shakes it. The top blows off and the entire contents spray across the living room. All over my Mom's brand new La-Z-Boy love seat. It was her first piece of furniture that was white, and she absolutely loved it.

I had been taking a nap, and woke up to absolute chaos: sisters freaking out, Dad freaking out. We spent 2hrs using kerosene and rags to clean red wax and oil off the love seat, lamp shades, wall, and carpet. Somehow we got it all up, except for some red stains on the lamp shade, so we turned it toward the wall. My Mom walked in about 15mins after we got everything put back together. Didn't notice a thing, except maybe that we were all acting a bit strange.

We didn't tell her til years later, after we were all adults. I have never seen my Dad in such a state of panic, before or since.

Yes, we still tease him about it, 30yrs later.

I was working for a large news organisation. We all MSN messenger on our computers (this was early 2000s). Meant to message colleague re useless boss being an utter tool. Sent it to boss. He was with someone and talking to them rather than looking at his computer so I break the land-speed record and basically shove him out of the way to delete the message, mumbling some excuse...

I had my first job as a wardrobe stylist assistant. We were shooting Renee Zellweger for the cover of a magazine. I can't remember which one. The stylist asked me to fill up the steamer and turn it on. The steamer was one of those big ones where you can't see how much water is in it. I filled it to the top. Apparently there is a stick with a line to tell you how much but I didn't know it and had way overfilled it. After about 1/2 hour, boiling hot water starts spewing out of the steamer! Luckily, it spilled in the only area where there wasn't either Renee getting her make up done, or the very expensive clothes she was going to wear. I unplugged it and cleaned it up. Crisis averted.

My brother got my mom a small western statue that had a cowgirl riding a horse for Christmas the year before he passed away. While moving the statue one day I dropped it and the woman's head broke off. I found the only glue I had which was Elmer's school glue and glued it back on. Amazingly, it stayed. She never knew what happened and I never plan on telling her. It was probably the best thing he had gotten her for Christmas in a long time and it would break her heart since it was the last thing he got her.

As kids my best friend and I were golfing in his front yard. He hit a chip shot right into his picture window shattering the outer pane. With some quick thinking we grabbed one of those copper BBs from my BB gun and placed it between the panes of glass and left for the rest of the day.

When we came back later his mom explained to us how someone BB-shot their window and that she called the cops and insurance. It got fixed and nobody ever suspected our golf ball.

Years later he told her it was us and she didn't talk to him all day.

About 6 months ago when I bought an engagement ring I was so excited that I sent a picture to my girlfriend by mistake, having meant to send it to my sister. My plan was to propose as a complete surprise so this would have fucked everything up. Well my girlfriend came home cursing her phone because the battery had drained too soon that day. I casually said "oh, so that's why you haven't answered my texts, let me plug that in for you". Plugged the phone in, turned it on and deleted the picture while she was taking a shower. The surprise was perfect!

H/T: Reddit