About the Author:

Melissa Lawhorn is a senior at Indiana University and holder of multiple internships. With multiple internships under her belt, Melissa provides her perspectives and advice for fellow college students to get the most out of their internship experiences. Follow her weekly column in The Internship Chronicles.

As people, we all make mistakes. As interns, we’d really rather not.

Recently, I’ve made a few mistakes as intern at Deer Park Manor. I told you all about how I was in charge while my internship coordinator Sue was gone on a European vacation for two weeks. It was definitely a lot of pressure, and a ton of responsibility. Part of that responsibility included taking deposits and any other payments that may have come in while Sue was away.

This task, which sounds simple, could be easy or hard. Basically, if someone gave me a check, I wrote out a receipt and that was it! WOOHOO! Easy as pie. Unfortunately, taking a payment via credit card wasn’t as simple. See, in order to take a credit card you had to use the credit card machine. Sue showed me how to work it and I assumed all would be fine. Unfortunately, that just wasn’t the case.

My first mistake in this situation was completely forgetting to return a client call. That sounds bad enough in itself, but actually it was made even worse because the couple wanted to put their deposit down — and I didn’t call them back. Thankfully, they were still interested a week later and gave me another call. Because of my error, I offered to take the payment via phone and go in IMMEDIATELY to process it. When I took the credit card payment via phone, I took down the card number and other pertinent information, and went on over to the Manor to use the machine.

I entered the information and double-checked it, confirming that I was charging the correct card and I wasn’t going to charge some random person’s credit card; then the receipt started printing. Honestly I was feeling pretty good… I managed to successfully book this client and take their payment, even after my mistake of not calling them back.

Then I tore of the receipt and saw it said REFUND… in the deposit amount of $500.

…………*crickets* Yep, you read that right. I actually PAID THEM $500. Apparently, on the credit card machine, hitting charge issues a refund, while PAYMENT is taking a payment. I have to be honest, I just assumed charge = charging the client. Oops… a $500 oops.

Thankfully, one of the office employees let me know it wasn’t a big deal, and we would just charge them $1,000 to cover my accidental refund. Awkwardly enough, I then had to call the client (you know, the one I forgotten about to begin with) and tell them that I had also made a mistake with the credit card machine, and they would see receipts for each of my transactions. It was extremely embarrassing, and what’s worse, I’m sure it made the Manor look HORRIBLE to this now-booked client.

Have you ever made an expensive mistake? What did you do to correct it?