The ultimate bad day at the office!

Think you've had a tough time of it? A hilarious new book that reveals some of history's biggest blunders might just make you feel a little bit better about your own

- By Paul Coulter

We all make mistakes but rarely do they change the course of human history. Getting on the wrong train, messing up that work assignment or accidentally copying the whole company in on an email describing your boss as an idiot can be hard to recover from.

It's embarrassing. Hard to forgive. And sometimes you just want to forget about it all. On a day like that, you just need a sympathetic and understanding ear.

What no one needs (but you're getting anyway) is a historian to tell you that someone else in history had it worse! A lot, lot worse.

From ancient empires, to Napoleonic armies and broken NASA spacecraft, as a species we have a proud track record of stuffing things up, messing things up and generally making a bad thing worse. In fact, the bigger the ego, importance or entourage, the bigger consequences. So whenever you exclaim: “This must be the worst day ever”, “Why did I say that?” or “That bus driver clearly aimed at that puddle,” here are a few times in history when things went from bad to worse. It may not make your day better but sometimes it’s nice to know that even the biggest names in history stuffed up too.

NAPOLEON

Got a maniacal ego-obsessed boss? Spend your days being undermined and underappreciated? Napoleon was so fanatically obsessed with the idea that he could punish his old pal Alexander I of Russia for breaking his trade embargo against Britain, that he invaded Russia.

His generals repeatedly warned him it was a mistake, they even referred him to books about Russian winters so cold that birds froze in midair.

But Napoleon refused to listen. He ignored all the warnings, ranted repeatedly that he would have a short battle against the Russians and be back in Paris for the autumn. His “short war” ended up with him marching his poor army all the way to Moscow, and he still didn’t get so much as a text back from Alexander.