We all make mistakes at work, whether it’s a simple typo or a major blunder. But some mistakes are so dumb they make you wonder how the person even got hired in the first place. In this collection of stories, people share the dumbest mistake they’ve seen a co-worker make on the job.
These tales of workplace incompetence are sure to make you cringe. So sit back, and enjoy these stories of workplace fails. Maybe they’ll even make you feel a little bit better about that one time you spilled coffee on your keyboard.
All content has been edited for clarity.
That Went Downhill Fast
“The plant manager let the safety guy go because they didn’t believe safety was a full-time job and wanted to cut back on company spending and decided the supervisors could do all the safety audits, training, and keep the building up to code.
Not even a week later 2 guys got their arms cut off working on a machine that they weren’t trained/certified on and the back building caught fire due to pallets and cardboard boxes being stacked in the wrong area near the furnace.”
Luckiest Man Ever
“During my first internship at a chemical plant, I was given the task of reading through safety violation reports and sorting them. This turned out to be WAY more interesting than I initially expected as the reports were riddled with accounts of sheer stupidity in the workplace. Here are a few of the most memorable incidents:
A woman accidentally glued her own eye shut after trying to reattach a fake nail with industrial strength heavy duty super glue and then subsequently rubbing her eye.
Someone somehow accidentally mixed an acidic compound from an unmarked bottle into their beverage and drank it.
A man working atop some scaffolding forgot to attach his safety harness and fell from ~20 feet onto his back. The report stated that he stood up, somehow okay after falling from that high, and came back to work the next day good as new.”
Poor Dallas
“Working with a tree-cutting service in Tampa, I was asked by the boss to ascend a nearby tree and cut some limbs. After seeing how close they were to power lines, I refused. He got really p*ssed off and yelled at me to clean up the area.
Then he sent up Dallas.
Dallas put on his climbing spikes, roped up the tree, and started cutting. I was worried and kept watching him as I picked up limbs.
Sure enough, he leaned back and before I could yell, put his sweaty back right against the power lines. A bright blue flash arced across his back and his body jerked away and slammed against the tree trunk. He bounced off and back into the wires. And again. Finally, his spikes got dislodged and he fell out of the tree, falling until his safety line snapped taut, leaving him dangling upside down like a broken-back doll.
I thought he was dead, but a moment later he started moaning, then screaming. ‘I’m on fire!’ he yelled. We lowered him to the ground to the sound of sirens approaching; a neighbor had seen what happened and called EMT.
A nasty black mark curved across his back and the current had surged down his legs and through his boot heels, seeking out ground. Both his heels were blown out.
I quit at the end of the day.”
Just A Small Mistake
“One time a member of my dev team was given a task to cancel a few credit cards (less than 10) directly in the database.
They canceled 17 million, the mistake was only caught when the company helpline started to receive millions of calls the next day from all over the country with people asking why their cards were not working.”
At Least He Wasn’t Dead
Saw a guy get zapped pretty badly when he stuck a tool in the wrong place on a big dryer at a hotel where I worked. We had asked him if he should cut the power first, and he said, ‘Nah, don’t need to.’ For a moment after, we thought he was dead.
Not The Sharpest Tool In The Shed
“A girl on the till had a guy come up and buy a $2 pack of gum with a $100 note saying sorry he didn’t have anything smaller. She gave him his $98 change and he left.
He came back in a few minutes later and said, ‘Hey I found a $2 coin in my car can I have my $100 back?’ So she did it. It was a small shop so it was a tough scam to fall for.
She also managed to lock herself out of her own car while it was running but parked in a way that no one could get in or out of the car park.”
You Played Yourself
“The company director sent his travel plans for a ‘work convention’ to the communal printer in the staff room. Bet him and the other director would have had a lovely time. A 5-star hotel, and a presidential suite in Barcelona for a week sounded nice. His wife thought so too and was furious she wasn’t going also surprised that he and a lady director were sharing a room for a week and that when she looked into it there was no convention. Things went south pretty fast and now the company is no more.”
This Is What Happens When You Don’t Pay Teachers
“I taught preschool for 8 years. It’s protocol to count the children before moving from one room to another to make sure no one gets left behind. Had a co-worker on her phone, didn’t count kids, and had left behind a child in the toy closet. The kid was 2 years old and trapped, screaming and crying in a dark toy closet for 20 minutes before a teacher passing by the empty classroom heard her. My coworker didn’t even get a slap on the wrist and management never told parents.
This same coworker forced her class of 2-year-olds to ‘get dressed themselves’ for outside play in the winter so one time a little girl ended up playing outside in the Minnesota snow without boots on for ten minutes before my coworker noticed.”
I Can Imagine He Had A Tough Time Getting A Recommendation
“I worked for a start-up cider manufacturer in my second year of college. Normally after a day of production, we have to sanitize all the metal components in a hot caustic wash. There are hundreds of pieces, so it takes a while. Anyways, our managers left us an hour before our shift ended to clean up. I had to go do some e-commerce end-of-day stuff before leaving so my coworker wrapped up the cleanup. On Monday we returned to the warehouse burned down. Apparently, he left the caustic heater on all weekend and it caused a chemical fire. Everything was destroyed and it ended up bankrupting the company. He dropped out of his co-op degree after, he wouldn’t be able to get recommended for another placement.”
Not Even Remotely Worth It
“Before retiring, I was a branch manager for my state’s DMV. Suddenly, one of the other managers is off sick for a few days. Then it became a week. Two weeks. Then, the auditors completed their investigation, and she was gone. Turns out she was accepting bribes from aspiring truck drivers so they would pass the written test. She was taking in an additional $100 – $250 a week. The dumb part? The pay was decent, and the benefits were fantastic. So she gave up decent pay, fantastic benefits, and a really nice retirement for extra spending money.
Then there was the assistant manager who would pocket anywhere from $750 to $1500 a week. So a better payoff. But she was removing it from the day’s cash receipts. She had only ever worked for the DMV, working her way up from clerk. She had no idea that there are accounting systems within accounting systems. The bank would send over deposit discrepancy reports which she would blithely pitch, not realizing that the same exact report was also sent to our central office. The wheels of state government turn slowly, so she was able to do this for over a year, but once those wheels start, they do not stop. She ended up going to prison and was ordered to pay over $30K in restitution. The full manager also got fired because the investigation revealed that he was rarely in the office, and left everything up to the assistant manager.”
That’s One Way Of Advising People
“An IT worker once sent an advisory to the entire company about an email several people had received with a malware link. She did so by forwarding the actual email with the link.”
How Did She Not Notice
“Printed 500 copies of her gas bill on the company printer. The printer only has enough tray capacity for 250 copies so she had to have reloaded the paper at least once.”
And That’s Why You Don’t Drink On The Job
“I was working in a tool and dye shop in my early 20s and I was watching an old guy (who was perpetually dr*nk) pound an injector pin into a plastic injection mold with a big piece of steel round stock. Well as he was pounding the pin in, he missed the pin and hit his thumb. It looked like his thumb exploded. He was in such pain he p*ssed himself. They ended up amputating down to the first knuckle. Then to make matters worse, he got fired for being dr*nk on the job.”
That Place Certainly Sounds Like A Circus
“I worked at a jail as a corrections tech. One day an inmate had an allergic reaction. This CO, let’s call him Farva, came into the tank with the nurse. This is an open tank. There are 15-20 other inmates in there. The nurse decided to administer an EpiPen. Farva took the EpiPen from the nurse and tried to administer it to the inmate.
Just to clarify, a fully trained and educated nurse has a medical instrument taken by the biggest f*cking idiot ever. He holds the auto-injector upside down with his thumb on the needle and plunges it into the inmate’s thigh releasing the needle into his thumb.
The CO is on the ground. The nurse has no extra EpiPens. The inmate is about to f*cking die. The other COs are on their way but I have no idea how to relay what just happened. Luckily the nurse was able to go back to the nurses’ station and grab another Epipen before the inmate died.
The kicker? Farva only got a warning. He almost killed an inmate. That whole jail was a f*cking circus.”
It’s A Great Nickname At Least
“There was the time we were doing an asbestos removal job in the pump house under one of those 250,000-gallon water tanks you see elevated 50ft In the air. William broke a pipe fitting before the shut-off valve, so no way to shut it off. Asbestos waste washed out the containment, through the second, and out the door. It was everywhere.
And that’s how William earned the name ‘Quarter Mill Bill.'”
That’s A Great Way To Go To Prison
“In the Army, I was assigned to a Field Artillery unit. During a training exercise, a gunner in our unit didn’t align his tick marks up with the collimator correctly and his tank ended up shooting a dummy round into a formation of soldiers killing 4 or 5. (If it were a live round, the whole unit would have been decimated.)
Dude got 15 years (or more) in Leavenworth.”
Juice Is Expensive Though
“A guy I worked with got fired from his 120k-a-year job because he was stealing juice from the stockroom.”