Have you ever made a huge mistake at work and wished there was an undo function for real life? The government did a little while go, and it turns out, for them, there is one.

About half a century ago some nerds in America were playing around with early computers and invented the ability to undo an operation. A few years later some more nerds gave that function a keyboard shortcut: control + Z. It caught on. The rest is history.

Control + Z (or command + Apple + starfish symbol + buy undo credit from iTunes... or whatever the Mac equivalent is) is a ubiquitous and vital reliever of anxiety in the digital age. "I wish there was a control + Z shortcut for real life" has gone from being a chortle-worthy observation to now being an old chestnut with mould inside it.

Less common is desperately pleading that control + Z actually be applied in a real work situation. But that's exactly what members of the federal government did a few weeks ago after "accidentally" voting the wrong way on a motion in the Senate.

The Senators initially voted to acknowledge "the deplorable rise of anti-white racism and attacks on Western civilisation" and that "it is OK to be white". When they found out that "it’s OK to be white" isn’t a mildly provocative jab at the PC brigade but a neo-Nazi trolling slogan, they asked for what has to be Australia’s largest ever workplace undo.