More Homer Simpson Like Employee Behavior

And you thought you had a bad day last week:

A worker accidentally tripping a shut-off switch at a major Ontario plastics plant will cost Nova Chemicals $11 million in lost profit, the company said Wednesday, because it won't be able to fulfill some contracts because of the blunder.

A contractor's employee installing a structural steel platform at an ethylene plant in Corunna, Ontario, mistakenly activated a process shutdown switch on Monday afternoon, stopping production and forcing two weeks of repairs at the facility.

"The switch is a safety thing so if anyone sees something going wrong they have the opportunity to shut down the plant," said Nova spokesman Greg Wilkinson. "But that's not what happened here. It was not a safety issue. It was simply inadvertent."

To me, "inadvertence" and "$11 million dollars" just don't seem to fit together.

PS