People can be very dumb at times and it makes you wonder where their common sense went.
BLT’s Are Tough
“I was at a Subway and the person in front of me asked for a BLT. The employee just stared blankly until the customer said, ‘bacon, lettuce and tomato’. The girl then grabbed some bacon and put it on the bread, but then just stared blankly again until the customer said, ‘Lettuce’. After putting lettuce on the bread, the customer got a blank stare until saying, ‘Tomato’. To this day, it’s the dumbest employee I’ve ever seen.” Source
That’s One Stupid Way To Almost Die
“Had one of my chefs chopping and blanching chips/fries, a job usually left for whatever commis was on shift but we were short that day so I got him on it. He had a large baby killer (a large plastic container, they come in many sizes & have a small sticker of a baby falling into them on the side) full of water and after he had chopped would dump the fries in there to soak the starch out. Usually you would drain them and then fry. Well he just walks straight over to the fryer and dumps the whole thing in, water included. I’m in shock at this point but run over and drag him away and then lunge for the emergency electricity cut off switch, hit that then move away. The oil fizzes for a few seconds and then just erupts and fills the kitchen will gallons and gallons of oil. One of the stupidest things I’ve ever seen happen in a kitchen.” Source
An Internet Tax?
“The Hungarian government trying to tax the internet. It was going to be a fixed rate per gigabyte. It was bafflingly stupid really.” Source
Fatal Incompetence
“There was a woman who survived a car crash, but was left for days in the car with her dead family because the police didn’t come to check it out. She died in the hospital.” Source
The Legend Of Slingshot Tim
“Probably Slingshot Tim, a guy I used to work with, who managed to slingshot himself into an office table during a meeting. Tim was the definition of an unnecessary hire. His dad was one of our most important suppliers at the time, so the boss was forced to hire him for a job he basically couldn’t do, but also couldn’t ever really be fired for. It was the moron’s sweet spot. During one meeting with Tim, I saw him lean really far back in his chair during a meeting. Far enough back that the chair started to creak loudly. So far so standard, but Tim had done this maneuver without turning the little knob thing under the chair to give himself a little slack, so he had to push really hard against the base of the table to stay in his ‘casual’ position. It looked like a surprising amount of effort; Tim was visibly sweating to stay ‘cool’. Eventually, Tim couldn’t take it anymore, and ended up slipping about two thirds of the way into the meeting. Thanks to physics the lack of tension shot his chair forward, throwing him into the conference table. He took the entire desk to the chest, shaking the projector enough to unplug it from the wall and spilling more than a few cups of coffee. It was the most hilariously loud and stupid thing I’ve ever seen in a meeting. Even people walking by the conference room completely stopped to witness this grown man turn himself into a human catapult. He picked himself up off the floor in a daze, then started hurriedly packing up his stuff amidst uproarious laughter and ran out of the room. I’m not sure if Tim still works there, but I’m definitely sure the legend of Slingshot Tim endures to this day.” Source
Just A Little Off
“I was doing contract work in Miami for a drug company making a product containing nitroglycerin. They had a chemist, Ph.D, who I thought did some odd things, but one fine day we had a meeting across town with him in it. It was a planned meeting. The subject material was known to all days before it.
During this meeting, the good doctor gets up to make some point. This prompted him to start drawing a stick figure of nitroglycerin on the whiteboard.
He drew three carbons. So far, so good… And then another, and finally a fifth. I looked at my boss (i’m a R&D engineer, physicist by degree) and he saw it too. Nitroglycerin doesn’t have 5 carbon atoms in it. It has 3. While this might be a little nit picky, this guy was the chemist for this plant, with Ph.D, and nitroglycerin delivery was the entire point of the product. I checked everything I saw from him after that lest it become my mistake.” Source
Nooo…He Didn’t
“We have a coolant circuit that uses distilled water. Occasionally the tank is a little low and needs to be topped off. We tell a guy to refill it. Later we come back and we see empty oil jugs next to the tank. Noooo he didn’t…there’s no way… Sure enough there is now a sh_t ton of oil in our water system. Fan-f*_king-tastic were my exact words I think.” Source
How Does This Even Happen?
“A group of students at my workplace who did not realize, until they were taking a formal English exam, that their teacher had been teaching them the wrong book for six months.” Source
That’s Embarrassing
“We (in Australia) recently had a national census – Government spent millions setting a up a website encouraging people to use it. Only it couldn’t handle more than a million queries an hour and so crashed just after dinner time – roughly 7pm (when not surprisingly more than a million people just happened to log in) on Census night. They’re now running ads to assure people they are competent enough to store all the private data gathered.” Source
The Kramer Approach
“We have this chemical we have to inject in our process to make sure solids don’t come out of the liquid. We have been warning this particular customer for months that the level of this chemical was low and dropping, and they better add some stat. Instead they decide to use the Kramer approach and push it to the last drop. Now they have solids in all their tanks and pumps, causing them to have to shut down and clean out every piece of equipment manually, and losing production for about a week – that’s a couple of million bucks down the drain, good jobs guys!” Source
Poor Kid
“I was at a restaurant. The young waiter was clearing dishes. He dropped all the dishes right by the table. Like he didn’t even make it a few feet. Starts stacking them up again, is super embarrassed. And then he drops them again. His superior comes over and sends him back into the kitchen and clears all the dishes.” Source
I’m Trapped!
“When my wife was in medical school, I was walking her to class when we passed another car in the parking lot and saw one of her classmates frantically beckoning to us from inside her car. We went over and she shouted something to us from behind the closed Window. When we got closer I heard her saying that she couldn’t get out. I pointed to the button on the door and told her she had to unlock it. She unlocked the door, got out and thanked us profusely, explaining that she had locked herself in her car and had been stuck there for the past half hour! How she didn’t know to unlock the door is beyond me, but what still blows my mind is that this woman is out there somewhere treating patients.” Source
“Don’t Say This Part”
“I was assistant to a VP at a bank. One of my duties was to make him look good each Monday morning for the meeting. I would print out his homework from the past week and keep it all tidy so he could just rattle it off. One Monday, he literally said, ‘Don’t say this part’ from my notes… wow, dude, I coudn’t have made it too much easier.” Source
Please Read…Eh Who Cares
“I was getting my drivers license renewed in Chicago. I needed to get a vision check. I put my eyes up to the machine. The clerk said ‘please read the (couldn’t hear what number she said) line’. I asked ‘could you repeat that?’ Her response: stamped my paperwork and said ‘go pay the clerk.'” Source
Sounds Like Your Love Life Is Incompetent, Buddy
“I hired an escort so I’d have a date for my cousin’s wedding. She claimed she was well-read and promised ‘sophisticated conversation’ in her ad. In reality . . . First, we bumped into the maid of honor’s family. They had just seen Jurassic World and their son was reeling off dinosaur facts as little boys are suppose to do. Apparently the kid was not making enough eye contact for my date’s satisfaction so she asked: ‘Oh, is your son autistic?’ ‘No . . . ‘ ‘Did you get him vaccinated?’ ‘Yes . . . ‘ ‘You know, thimerosal really taxes a kid’s system. You should get him checked out for the autism.’ I quickly changed the topic and asked the maid of honor if she was ready for her LSAT yet. My date chimed in: ‘What are you, thirty? Why didn’t you take it in high school? Did you get knocked up or something?’ I joked, ‘Well, law school isn’t like the NHL. You can’t skip college and head directly to the pros.’ Ends up my escort thought the ‘L’ meant it was the ‘late SAT’, like a drop out getting their GED. We had to explain to her it meant the Law School Admission Test. During the reception, she enjoyed the open bar a little too much and started running her mouth when the best man’s toast went long. ‘Toasts! They always give out toasts! I can’t believe it. Greatest Fascist Dictator: Adolf Hitler. At least he made the trains run on time. ‘My dad had enough of her shenanigans by that point. ‘That was Mussolini.’ ‘What?’ ‘Mussolini made the trains run on time!’ ‘I don’t have time to fight with you people. I’ve got another date in an hour!’ She stormed out of the reception and I had to laugh off the ‘another date’ line as us trying out an open relationship.” Source
A $3 Million Downsize
“We were running out of stock space at work. So the company spent $3 million to renovate the stockroom and by the end we lost stock space.” Source
How Was She Not Fired?
“Some lady I used to work with totaled a company vehicle, in the parking lot. I wasn’t in that day but I saw photos of the aftermath. She was trying to back the news van out of the garage. Realized she forgot something and got out, leaving the van in gear. Thing rolls down hill and get’s wedged, perpendicular, between two parked cars. Both the cop and two truck driver both said ‘how the h*ll did that happen’. All three vehicles were writeoffs. This was the second time she had damaged a company vehicle. Earlier that year, she was backing out the mobile production van. It’s one of those high top cargo vans with an AC unit on the roof. She didn’t roll the garage door up high enough. Off comes the AC. The door was also badly damaged. Bottom panel had to be replaced, which isn’t cheap on those industrial doors. I thought for sure she’d get fired after the parking lot incident. The company is self insured, so that must have cost a pretty penny. But no, she was still there up until recently and left on her own accord. She wasn’t allowed to drive the vans anymore though.” Source