The Day My Mistake Became a Public Spectacle at Work

A Personal Story

The office was small — just four desks, each occupied, the sound of keyboards and phones filling the space. I shared it with three colleagues, one woman and two men, each focused on their own tasks. On that week, one of my responsibilities was to make changes in our systems and move them into production so the whole team could keep working smoothly.

It wasn’t glamorous work, but it mattered. The systems had to run without interruption. I was already tense, trying to ensure every step was done correctly. Still, in the rush of many tasks, I made an error. A program crashed in production because of one of my changes.

My heart raced. My palms felt damp against the keyboard. I was scanning lines of code and logs, trying to figure out what had broken and what impact it would have. The stress was already suffocating — when the door opened.

My manager walked in. Her presence was sharp before she even spoke. She didn’t ask what had happened. She didn’t pause to let me explain. Instead, her voice cut through the room:

“Fix it. Now. How could you let this happen?”

The words came like blows. Her volume rose higher, echoing in the small office. She didn’t lower her tone for the sake of my colleagues, who sat uncomfortably close, pretending to keep working. One picked up the phone, another typed with exaggerated focus, while everyone silently witnessed what was unfolding.

I felt exposed, as if the mistake wasn’t just mine but now a spectacle. My cheeks flushed with heat, my stomach tightened painfully, and I fought the urge to disappear under the desk.

When she finally left, the silence she left behind was heavy. My colleagues didn’t meet my eyes. I couldn’t bring myself to look at them anyway. I gathered my things quietly, head bowed, feeling small, inadequate, humiliated.

I went home that night with a stomach ache that turned into two full days of sick leave. It wasn’t just the mistake that had broken me — it was the way it was handled.

And when I returned, I found out those two days had been marked in my performance review. The absence, directly linked to the stress of the situation, became a justification to lower my score.

The Hidden Cost of Public Shame

Everyone makes mistakes. In fact, mistakes are one of the ways systems improve, because they reveal where processes or checks are fragile. But in that moment, my error wasn’t treated as a step toward growth. It was treated as proof that I wasn’t good enough.

Correction is natural. Feedback is necessary. But public shaming is neither correction nor feedback. It is punishment, delivered not just to the person but in front of an audience, stripping away dignity while doing little to actually solve the problem.

I left the office with pain in my stomach because the body doesn’t lie. Stress doesn’t stay trapped in the mind — it spills into the body, into physical symptoms that demand attention. That pain was telling me that something wasn’t right, that I wasn’t safe, even if no physical danger existed.

What made it worse was the ripple effect. It wasn’t just the humiliation in that moment; it was the erosion of trust afterward. I no longer felt secure around my colleagues. I no longer felt confident in my own skills. And when the performance review came, it confirmed what I feared: not only was I humiliated, but the incident would leave a permanent mark on how I was judged.

What I Learned

Looking back, I can see that as painful as it was, the experience left lessons I carry with me still.

I learned that mistakes are inevitable. No matter how careful, how skilled, how prepared someone is, errors will occur. The real measure of leadership is not whether mistakes happen, but how they are handled when they do.

I learned that shame is not feedback. Constructive criticism has the power to teach, to correct, to build confidence for the future. But shame corrodes. It silences people. It creates fear where trust should be.

I learned that health cannot be secondary. When my body gave me signals — the stomach pain, the exhaustion, the inability to focus — it was reminding me that no job is worth sacrificing well-being for. Silence in the face of that pain doesn’t protect you; it only prolongs the damage.

Most of all, I realized that resilience doesn’t always roar. Sometimes resilience is quiet. Sometimes it is the act of stepping away, taking sick leave, giving yourself permission to rest, even when the workplace doesn’t.

Final Reflection

That day remains etched in my memory not because of the mistake itself, but because of the way it was handled. I wish more managers understood that when someone is already struggling, raising your voice doesn’t help them recover. It only deepens the wound.

Workplaces are built not just on systems and deadlines, but on people. And people need dignity to thrive.

Have you ever been corrected in a way that felt less like guidance and more like humiliation? How did you carry it afterward?

Written by Menta — still learning how mistakes can break us, but also how they can rebuild us.