These 15 terrible mistakes will make you feel better about whatever smaller mistakes you've made on the job.
Silent But Deadly
“Worked as a student in a bank-agency.
I wasn’t 18 yet, so I wasn’t allowed to be at the front desk (some insurance-issues), basically I was doing paperwork in the back. Once, a customer wanted to enter, but one can’t just walk into a bank, you have to ring a bell, and have an employee open the door for you by pressing a button under the front desk.
Long story short, he rang, all employees were busy, so I went to press the button. I check under the desk, s—, 3 buttons. The man was looking at me, looking pretty pissed by the waiting-time, so I just press a random button. Turns out it was the motherf’ing alarm button.”
Insulting Superman
“Back in high school, I had a job as a web designer at a small web shop servicing non-profit organizations. My bosses didn’t let on that I was as young as I was, and they handled all the face-to-face client meetings.
My job basically entailed designing and preparing the website for our clients. One of our big clients was Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation. I sliced up the site and put in filler text, knowing full well that only people coming from our internal IP would be able to see the development.
I should mention that my company was small, close-knit and had a great (albeit vulgar) sense of humor. Rather than going the standar lorem ipsum route, I instead filled in something along the lines of “Herp derp I’m Christopher Reeve, I drive myself with a straw. Weaknesses include kryptonite and falling of horses.” It got worse, but I’ll let your imaginations fill in the blanks. There were about four paragraphs of filler text.
I came in to work after school one day and all three of my company’s owners/my bosses were waiting for me. I thought they were pulling some prank, but they asked me to come into their office. At this point I knew something was definitely up.
My boss: “Chris and Dana saw the site.”
Me: “What? Who?”
Him: “CRPF. Chris and Dana Reeve. The director wanted to show them the progress. Apparently he didn’t check before he showed it to him in person.”
At this point I think my stomach hit the floor and kept going straight on to the Earth’s core. My boss told me he’d let me know what the next steps were, but just to know that I was in deep, deep shit.
Anyway, I didn’t get fired (despite how adamant Dana Reeve was about the fact) and I had to write an apology to the Reeves. I found out later that Chris actually had a pretty solid sense of humor and thought it was funny. RIP, Mr. and Mrs. Reeve.”
Eat Your Heart Out, Howard Stern
“I used to work in radio, and I got my start in a small market in Florida. I worked hard and was very ambitious, and within about five years I had worked my way up to program director of the hard rock station in our building. I was 23 at the time, and most of the guys at the station were in their late 20’s and 30’s. I was a bit arrogant, and not great with people, and they respected me about as much as a baby respects a diaper.
I had a vacation package to Vegas that I had sitting around, and I figured I might be able to win over my afternoon drive DJ a little bit (he was the hardest for me to win over, being a guy that had been in radio since I had been literally been sucking at the teat.) by giving him the trip to give away on his Friday show.
So I tell Bob, and he gets pretty excited. I told him he could give the trip away however he liked, but it had to be given away that afternoon so we could lock in the winner’s names for he plane tickets. He says cool, and comes up with the simple idea, “What would you do for a trip to Vegas?”
I should have known how much trouble that would cause.
The first thing Bob decided he needed was his regular panel of white trash for judges. You know the type. 30 something dudes that love Pantera, hate dentists, and think “travelin’ is for idiots.”
Now our station had literally once been a closet, and once converted, was only about 12 x 12. It was a tight fit for Bob and his sidekick Jimmy as it was. And then the receptionist comes in, and she has three more guys with her. Cletus – his real name, no further description necessary, Gator – not his real name, but also no further description necessary, and some guy I had never met but looked far too normal to be hanging around with those degenerates. He was a decent looking guy wearing decent looking clothes and we’ll call him Harry, cause I remember him doing a pretty decent Harry Carey impression, which was really only an impression of Will Ferrell doing Harry Carey (that was the flavor of the moment), but whatever.
So that makes six in this tiny room, and the last guy in is carrying a case of beer. At this point, I should have put my foot down. But I was a young kid, and I was already on Bob’s bad side, and I felt I had to take the risk.
The last thing Bob did before he started the contest was get a guest judge, who “won” the right to come in by answering a stupid trivia question on the air. So then this guy comes in, and his name is Chuck, and he’s already drunk. And that made 7. The most unmagnificent 7 imaginable.
Everyone starts drinking, and Bob decides to fire up the contest. He starts lining up contestants to come in. 20 minutes later, we get our first potential winner.
Imagine, if you will, a woman in her mid-40’s. She’s tall, meth-addict-thin, wearing a tight black dress, and has only one tooth. Her hair is stringy, and there are bald patches on her head where she may have been balding but more than likely had ripped the hair out in fits of paranoia and rage. That was contestant 1. Her boyfriend also tagged along, and I don’t remember too much what he looked like, but he was that weird passive type that followed behind and didn’t make much eye contact with other men.
That made 9 in the tiny room.
Part of me knew I had to be in there to monitor things, but part of me wanted to run out and wash my entire body in the sink across the hall. Pearl Jam ended and Bob cracked open the mic. “Well here we are. It’s Bob, and we’ve got our first contestant trying to win the trip to Vegas, and she’s a hottie.”
Ewww.
She said her name, which I don’t remember, and Bob popped her the question. “Alright! What would you do for a trip to Vegas.” The woman, who we’ll call Betty, smiled, and her boyfriend opened up her purse and pulled out a package of foot long hotdogs. He ripped them open, Betty smiled again with that big, open, one-toothed hole of hers, and propped one leg, then the other, onto the console.
With a meth-fueled lightning quick movement, Betty removed her panties and a new smell filled the room. It smelled like rotting meat and a burning tire. And before any of us knew what was happening, Betty shoved a hot dog up her you-know-what. And then another. And another. And again and again and again, until the whole package was up inside her. If there’s one thing I’ll never forget, it was the proud smile on her boyfriend’s face. I could read the look on his face, and it said “life will never get any better than this.”
While all this was going on, the white trash dudes in the room could barely contain themselves. They were laughing, dry heaving, and going apes— as each hotdog had been shoved in. Bob did his best to narrate the proceedings without violating FCC rules, and it was just a total nightmare. Betty finished her work, removed the hotdogs, put them back in the package, and I had the two escorted out.
“Thanks. We’ll let you know.”
Ewwww.
I walked back in and the guys were all still going crazy. I pulled Bob outside. “Bob, we can’t have that happen again. That was awful. F’ing awful.” “Yeah, I agree. We need to clean it up.” Well, that was easier than I had thought. At least Bob was on my side.
I went back in to the drunken white trash sardine tin that was the studio right then, and Bob put the word out on the air that the next contestant would be in shortly.
This time, it was just a solo girl, and this time she was light years classier than the previous contestant. And by that I mean instead of having only one tooth, she was only missing one tooth. She also had a bag of marshmallows, and immediately everyone in the room eyeballed it. Before going back on air, Bob quickly asked what she was going to do with the marshmallows, and Tracy said, “Aww don’t worry sugar, I heard that last woman, this ain’t gonna be nothin like that!” Whew. That was a relief.
Bob cracked the mic again, talked up the contest, and introduced Tracy. “Alright Tracy, the last girl we had in here was, uh, interesting. I’m hoping we get a different kind of interesting with you. Are you ready?” “I sure am, sugar!” “Great. Tracy, what would you do for a trip to Vegas!?”
Tracy opened the bag of marshmallows, took a few out and…started juggling. I let out a sigh of relief. Thank God. And then she flopped down in the chair, propped her legs up, and started shoving the marshmallows into her you-know-what. “WHAT?! NOOOOO.” The dudes all exploded in laughter, and Tracy went to town, trying to shove an entire bag’s worth of jet-puffed marshmallows into her snatch. I stood, paralyzed with fear. Bob could hardly keep from cracking up while he relayed the event on the air as best he could.
All of a sudden, Tracy popped a marshmallow out of her crotch like it was some sort of ping pong p—y show in Bangkok. Everyone was silent as the mallow rolled across the floor of the studio. And then, for reasons I will never understand, the normal looking Harry Carey dude flew off his chair, pounced on the marshmallow, and he ate it.
He f’ing ate it.
OMG, OMFG. Bob, on the mic, was screaming. “OH JESUS, HE ATE IT. HE ATE THE DAMN MARSHMALLOW.” I almost puked. The whole place was ready to erupt with that weird sort of frenzied testosterone excitement that doesn’t quite know how to release itself because the circumstances are just too bizarre.
I had Tracy quickly escorted out. “Was that a good show, baby? Did I win?” “That’s enough from you,” I said without looking at her as she walked out the door. Bob went to commercial, and I told him that was it, the contest was over. He agreed. He told me he was going to let the judges decide who won. I said fine. He came back from commercial and cracked the mic and went down the line. One vote for Hot dog girl. One vote for Tracy. Another for Hot dog girl. Another for Tracy (Bob’s sidekick was casting a vote too, which made it two all). The final vote came down to Chuck, the “guest judge,” who by this point was so drunk that his eyes were shut and he was hanging on the microphone for support.
“Chuck, it’s down to you,” said Bob. Chuck breathed real heavily and pulled himself up. “I…I don’t, uh…” “C’mon Chuck, it’s on you. Spit it out! Stay with us bud!” “I, ummm, I don’t really give a damn as long as they keep stickin s— up their p—ies.” My jaw dropped. We were a small locally owned station and we didn’t have a delay. The entire listening audience had just heard that. My f’ing life is over. There goes my job.
Bob stared blankly. “Give it to marshmallow girl,” I said. Bob went to a song, and I grew some balls out of necessity and kicked everyone out that wasn’t supposed to be there. I thought about how my last act as a manager at that radio station was going to be awarding a trip to a girl that shoved marshmallows in her hoo ha. And then the news broke. Bob’s sidekick came up to me in the hall. He had overheard Cletus the judge and Tracy talking afterwards. They were together. He rigged the contest. I couldn’t even give away the trip. I couldn’t even do that.
I spent the entire weekend terrified that I was going to come in to a firing on Monday, and put together my air-check and resume’. And then the craziest thing happened. Nothing. Nothing happened at all. It was never brought up, upper management never talked to me about it, and no complaints ever came in. I don’t know how, but I remained at the station for another three months before leaving for a bigger gig on the other side of the country. But dammit, I was more scared during that time than I had ever been or have been since in a work situation.”
Is It Robbery If You Give Them The Keys?
“I used to work at a car rental place. My job was to clean the cars, get them ready for customers and do the inspection of the car before people took off with them. One day I was in the lot parking a truck that I had just cleaned and got out to head back into the office. It wasn’t uncommon for people to come up to me with their rental papers and ask for the keys to their car so as I was walking back, a couple of older sort of grimy looking guys walked up to me. The one guy said “hey, we’re all done inside and the lady said that truck is ours.” I’m not even going to make excuses for why I did it but without even asking a question I said “ok great, here ya go!” and handed him the keys. I thought it was weird at the time because when I handed the guy the keys, his friend said “fuck!” under his breath and looked pissed. Anyways, I walk back into the office without a care in the world and I see my boss. She asks if I saw those two guys out in the lot and I said “The guys who rented the truck? yep.” Then she looks at me with her jaw on the floor and says “NNNNnnnoooooooooooo.” She turns around immediately and calls the cops to tell them we just had a truck stolen from our lot.
Weeks go by and eventually the truck turns up out in the middle of nowhere. The cops find needles and booze all over the inside and they returned it back to us. I had to go to the police station to pick the guy I gave the keys to out of a photo lineup.”
Time To Find A New Gig
“I was working on one of those TV shows where you do stupid things in public and film peoples reactions. In the skit we were doing, a man would be jogging with a stroller containing a life-like baby doll, and I was going to hit him with a car. The jogger was wearing bright green (they dress funny on these shows so that you don’t mix up the cast with pedestrians).
So I’m cruising up to the stop sign in a beat up old ford, my adrenalin is really pumping (this was my first time actually being involved in a skit). I see the bright green jump suit, and I gun it.
I hit the wrong guy. It was just some dude jogging with his kid. I realized what happened when the guy I hit didn’t jump onto the hood the way you’re supposed to in these stunts. I honestly don’t remember anything about the incident after that, I was in shock. The dad had a few broken bones, the baby was fine.
Needless to say there was a huge settlement payed out. I’m currently pursuing an unrelated career.”
Hard J
“I was a stage manager at a 3000 seat hall in downstate NY and was doing a performance of Julio Iglesias. Due to a snowstorm that day, I predicted a cancellation, so myself and about 5 other stagehands hit the hotel lobby bar for about 3 hours prior to doors. The radio DJs who were supposed to introduce him did not arrive on-time. Even with the snow, the house was sold-out and packed… I walked out on stage and stumbled over a cable, and almost fell from the deck – recovering, I walked up to the mic (with spotlights on me all the way) and proceeded to blank on his name, and managed “JEWEL-E-O EN-GRACIAS'” and ambled off the stage. Narrowly escaped unemployment.”
Kids, man!
“I used to work at Chuck E. Cheese and was taking a pizza from the kitchen to the customer. At the time, it was extremely busy and there were little devils running everywhere; and this lady was at the far end so I had to zigzag through the games to get to her. So after successfully maneuvering through a bunch of games and small children with two pizzas on my hands, I came within 10 feet of her table and thought I was home free. Well turns out there was a 2 year old kid crawling right in front of me. I tripped on the kid, the pizzas went flying and hit another kid, and both of the kids were crying because I stepped on one and nailed the other with pizza. And before you think this can’t get any worse, I then had to deal with the parents…that part alone still makes me shudder to this day. After about 45 minutes of yelling at me, they pressure my manager to fire me. My managers a cool guy so he said no, but he pulled me aside and told me he would have to pretend to go bat-shit crazy on me to make the parents happy. He did and it was the finest acting I have ever seen a non-actor pull off. It even scared me for a minute. I continued working in that hell hole for another year before I left for college.”
Hospital Prank Goes Wrong
“I was working as a janitor in a hospital (if anyone’s wondering, no it isn’t quite like Scrubs portrays it) and I was always looking for ways to make my day more enjoyable. This often led me to play pranks on my fellow coworkers. Occasionally the pharmacy would get shipments on dry ice and I would get to play around with it once they received the medicine. I thought it would be a fun idea to put it in the mop bucket of my friend who was working on a patient floor. I would call her about five minutes later and it would be the perfect prank. Well, I did call her five minutes later and she answered in a panic. She told me she was having a chemical reaction in her mop water and she alerted the head nurse and the on-call hospital manager so they could start preparing to evacuate the floor. I quickly explained the whole situation and the next day I had a talk with my boss. It turns out that even though most of the staff involved thought it was severely inappropriate, they also found it really funny (once all the panic was over with) and my boss even complimented me on my creativity, even though I probably should’ve just been fired.”
Oh The Irony
“Firefighter-Paramedic/Nurse here I am going to list a few. Throwaway account for obvious reasons. I have been doing this for 12 years (Fire/Medic 10 Nurse 3). In no particular order:
Dropped A Newborn Baby. What it sounds like really, as soon as the sucker popped out she was quite slippery fell out of my hands right onto an ambulance floor as I was handing her to my partner. In the end it was okay, but the mother almost literally murdered me (understandably of course).
Kicked a Cardiac Monitor/Defibrillator into a pool during a Cardiac Arrest. The patient was pulled from a pool, and as equipment was getting shuffled around the monitor got moved I inadvertently kicked it, and it ended up at the bottom of a pool. They cost about 20K each. Luckily there was another one there.
Destroyed a Garage Door by driving a ladder truck thru it while it was closing. I was backing up my spotter wasn’t paying attention someone closed the garage door, and it was destroyed.
Set fire to a Fire Engine. I was the acting officer that day, meaning the regular Captain on our engine was out “sick”. Our engine got placed in a back alley adjacent to a structure which was on fire, the Operator/Driver had just been cleared (my mistake was not realizing this, because this wasn’t my regular station, and while I had worked with the crew before didn’t know it was literally this kids first day cleared to drive/pump), and his placement put the engine very close to said burning structure, albeit far from the fire if that makes sense. The cab windows were down, one thing led to another and half of the interior of the cab was on fire. Luckily we took care of it fairly quickly.”
Well There’s Your Problem
“Right out of tech school, I got a job as a mechanic in a small chain shop. Often times, experienced techs would diagnose a problem them pass it along to me to do the hard labor. I think that is pretty typical.
So, I get this car that needs an air conditioning evaporator replaced. For those that don’t know, this is often found way up inside the dashboard and can be a considerable amount of work to extract. This particular one was a beast and fought me every step of the way: hidden screws, unseen clips, tight spaces.
I get it all back together and recharge the AC system. The car goes out working perfectly.
As it turned out, the driver was taking a trip across country and I missed a crucial part of any evaporator install: checking the drip valve. All of the accumulated water that would normally drip outside onto the ground was instead pouring inside her car.
So, she gets back from her trip and the car was soaked. Over an inch of water under the carpet and seats. We had to strip it down to the metal and air dry everything for two days.”
Bottoms Up!
“I work in a theme park, and on this particular day, I was manning the control booth. I was sitting in the chair, which was a rolling office type chair, when I decided I wanted to stand. I hopped down and somehow managed to propel the chair into the wall with my ass. The chair slammed directly into a fire alarm, and the lever ended up getting depressed AND pulled down. By a chair. I stared at it in horror for a moment, but nothing happened- until suddenly: “BEEEEW. BEEEEEW. BEEEEW.”
Yup, I set off a fire alarm. With my a–. So when you have a fire alarm at a ride, you have to cycle all of the guests clear of the attraction, kick all of the guests out of the queue, and then evacuate all of the employees while you wait for the fire department to come and give you the ok to resume normal operation. Once we had gotten the venue fully evacuated, I was freaking out. I figured I was in huge trouble, what with inconveniencing several hundred guests and wasting the fire departments time and all.
I came clean to my supervisor immediately- I mean, I was the only person in the control booth, it would be obvious that I had done something, so better let her know of my clumsiness before she thought I had had a more sinister agenda. To my great surprise, she started laughing hysterically and told me not to worry about it.
The ride ended up being close for like an hour and a half, and during that time, I had at least 7 or 8 managers and supervisors from around the park come and make fun of me.
I think the best part of the whole situation, though, was that after the incident, my supervisor and I decided there should be a cover over that fire alarm, so we gave a call to the safety department. We never did get a cover, because apparently a room full of engineers and the man in charge of safety resort-wide spent hours trying to fling a chair at that godd—ed fire alarm, and not ONE of them could recreate what I somehow managed to do in one try. With my a–.
I still get shit for that one, and it happened nearly 2 years ago!”
Burning Up
“Found a lighter in my pocket while standing in my boss’ office at the deli I worked at.
I was bored.
I had to run past the entire deli counter screaming to get to the sink when I lit my shirt on fire.
There were at least 15 customers in line.”
Hope That’s Insured
“I used to work manufacturing large televisions. The company had just received a shipment of 50 104″ screens from a vendor. A brand new employee was charged with transporting and stacking them. Just as he stacking the 50th screen it slips out of his hands. It falls and shatters all 50 screens. In his first 4 hours of work he manages to destroy more than $2 million in material and set back production by weeks.”
Yikes
“I work at a pet store. I accidentally threw a snake away. I was cleaning the bedding and didn’t see him buried in his. I dumped it. 2-3 days later my department manager brought it back to me after finding it in the receiving garbage. Somehow I didn’t get in trouble. Snake was fine.”
Rain, Sleet, Snow, Lost In The Back Of My Car
“I worked in a mailroom right out of college for a fairly large company.
We often times had Overnight, Next Day AM packages that HAD to be there or apparently the world would explode. I was responsible for getting these to the drop boxes before pick up time, which means I had to take them with me when I left work and drop them off.
Well one Friday, had one of these urgent letters. Left work and completely forgot about it. It sat in my car all weekend. Got to work the next monday, the CFO and several upper management were literally freaking out cause the letter didnt arrive (got yelled at, etc). It apparently was a half a million dollar check that this company was waiting for or they were going to take some kind of legal action or something.
It turned out fine, but I wanted to die at the time. Been there.”