Everybody makes mistakes from time to time, it happens all the time. Some mistakes however have drastically larger consequences than other ones, and can make lives worse for potentially hundreds if not thousands of individuals. These stories are about the most wildly out of control mistakes that had drastic consequences for all involved. Content has been edited for clarity.
Dog Gone Shocking
“This reminds me of my friend’s favorite story about his brother that he tells constantly. My friend’s brother is a vet (not an old soldier, but, like, a horse doctor) and he was brought a small dog that was overheating and he doused it with ethanol to cool it down but the dog got worse and the situation warranted the use of a defibrillator. Sure enough, the dog caught fire and it died. He went back in the lobby and told the owners he couldn’t save the dog, but he would gladly dispose of the body if they wanted. Luckily for him, they didn’t ask to see the body.”
Market Crash
“When I was about 18, I was working at a grocery store. One night, near closing, I started going to all the registers and collecting the hand baskets that accumulate around them throughout the day. I ended up with a ton of baskets and, rather than cutting the load in half and taking two trips, I set out with a huge pile of baskets that completely obscured my view. If you have any brains (I didn’t), you can see where this is going. I plowed into this little old lady and sent her stumbling backwards into a display of apple pies. Everything. Stops. My manager runs over to see me surrounded by baskets and a lady on the floor covered in pie. My manager helps the lady up and sends a bag boy to go grab some paper towels while I panic and begin picking up the baskets while trying not to cry. The bag boy returns and tosses the towels to my manager but completely misses and smacks the lady across the head with the roll. Thankfully she was okay and very nice about the whole thing, I think we gave her a gift card to the store and whatever she was there to get that night for free.”
A Real 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. Since most text formats require a bit of dummy text for their website, I 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 trouble.
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.”
Tapes Were A Real Flight Risk
“I used to work for a TV company that makes a lot of high profile shows, including one of the most popular shows on British TV, which is also broadcast around the world.
Our client had gone out on location and shot all their footage for an episode of this show and brought it back to my work… Only for me to then lose their tapes. The show goes out on a Wednesday night, and it got to the Sunday beforehand and we still couldn’t locate five of their tapes of footage, because I had put them somewhere, and not in the location I logged them into on our system.
Everybody chipped in to help look for these tapes, staying behind and pulling 16 hour shifts to search for them, but when push came to shove, we couldn’t find them and my company had to pay for the client to re-shoot their footage. Not the end of the world, right? Wrong. It turns out the the footage on the tapes I had misplaced had been shot from a HELICOPTER. So my company had to fork out £18,000 for the camera rentals, the crew and the hire for a freaking chopper! And then real kicker is that as soon as they had shot it again, the original tapes turned up.”
Slip Up
“Working at McDonalds three years ago, little kid spills Coke on the floor. I happily wander over to clean it up (never was bitter about my job, it’s my job! It pays and I chose it!) with a mop. Mop that stuff up lightning fast with a smile and everybody is happy. Go behind the counter and retrieve the slippery when wet sign to place over the newly cleaned area, and when I get there, distracted by something, I slip! My foot slips out like a javeline and kicks a baby’s high chair, the baby’s head whiplashes against his table so hard both of his shoes fall right off. I just stared in horror at the family. I place the sign down like an idiot and run back behind the kitchen for my dear life. Then I proceeded to crack up in the most maniacal nervous laughter accented with breaths of horror. What had I done?!”
Hit Me With Your Best Shot
“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 floor 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.”
Mechanical Failure
“I used to be a mechanic. One time I was doing a tune up on a Dodge Neon with a manual transmission. A safety procedure dictated that whenever you started a vehicle, you were supposed to actually get into the vehicle and start it while sitting behind the steering wheel. Now, there are supposed to be Neutral Safety Switches on vehicles so that the engine will not start if the car is in gear. For a few years, Dodge did not install these on their manual transmission Neons.
It was winter in Wisconsin, I had the car in a bay with the garage door shut sitting on a lift but the lift was lowered all the way down on the floor. I was confident that the gear was in Neutral, forgot that the Neons didn’t have the Neutral Safety Switches and was in a hurry as the car was supposed to have been finished and the customer was waiting in the front office to pick it up. I should mention that the Neon had been ‘tricked out,’ meaning it had a cheesy custom paint job, expensive after-market rims, a very large, expensive sound system, etc.
I reached in through the door window to start the motor to ensure that my tune up was successful. The motor fired right up and revved up to around 4,000 RPM as I had some tools lying on the engine, a normal thing when working on engines. But a wrench had somehow managed to find its way under the throttle cable, pulling the throttle open, which was equal to having the accelerator pedal depressed about halfway down to the floorboard.
The car was in reverse, not neutral, and once the engine started and instantly wound up to around 4K RPM, the Neon FLEW backwards off of the lowered lift, through the garage door, and across the parking lot, with me hanging out of the driver’s side window. The Neon bounced off a brand new Cadillac and smashed into a pair of gas pumps. I had managed to hang on for the entire ride; I was trying to get the key shut off or pull the gearshift into neutral, anything to stop the car but it was unable to do so while making a short but very quick trip from my bay to the gas pumps. My co-worker estimated my speed at around 35MPH.
The pumps caught on fire, as did the Neon and the Oldsmobile that was sitting on the other side of the pumps getting gas. I ran over to the gas emergency shut-off switch but the Neon and the Olds ended up burning up. The owner of the Neon was shooting the breeze with my boss and they both witnessed the whole thing. Well, they just saw a Dodge fly through the garage door, bounce off of a brand new Caddy and into the gas island, which was quickly engulfed in flames.
Amazingly, no one was hurt except me; I had a broken arm and needed a few stitches from all of the glass from the garage door, but was okay. I wasn’t fired, I was a good mechanic and had a very cool boss. Insurance paid for everything except the bill from the fire department.
To this day, whenever I start a car, I get in and start it with my foot on the brake.”
Pain In The Glass
“I accidentally knocked over two aisles filled with fancy glasses. Lucky for me, everyone was too busy freaking the heck out (there was apparently a customer nearby who also got a few cuts on his legs) that they didn’t notice me slowly slipping away and reappearing a few seconds later to ask what happened. No one ever suspected it was me, but I still felt horrible because it was over a few thousand dollars worth of stuff that I broke, which may not sound like much, but when you’re fifteen years old working on $11/hr, five hours a week.”
Off The Rails Failure
“I worked payroll for a contractor for a railroad company and I was in charge of making sure all of the companies got paid. I did pretty well and liked the job, but one of the companies who had the biggest contract with us (millions) had an invoice that was just 1 page while all the other contracts were pages upon pages of figures.
I ended up misplacing the invoice for a month, so they didn’t get paid. This caused our company to lose this contract and pretty much go out of business.
I was really young and looking back on it there were so many things that I should have done differently but just didn’t realize. Plus it was, in my opinion, way too much work for one person, which I had said a few times before. Either way I felt really bad…still do. I ended up quitting a little while later. The owner didn’t tell anyone why we lost the contract, but me and him both knew.”
The Mom Almost Killed Me
“I’m Firefighter-Paramedic/Nurse, and I’m going to list a few. I have been doing this for 12 years (Fire/Medic 10 Nurse 3).
One time we accidentally set fire to a fire engine. Way too long of a story to go into detail, but as the officer in charge when this happened, it’s my fault even though I wasn’t the operator of the 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. 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. I chalked it up to not getting in early enough. Usually I would get into work an hour before the shift, but I got in right at shift change got a hurried report, and ended up missing out on that information.
Another time I 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.
I also 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).”
Not Cool Dude
“I was officiating a soccer game of 15 year old boys. The teams respective colors were RED and WHITE. There was one African American boy on the Red team. As the game progressed, it got more dangerous and out of hand. At half-time, I informed both benches that I would be calling the game tight, and that the next flagrant foul would not go unpunished.
30 seconds into the 2nd half, the African American boy had a hard foul. I blew my whistle very aggressively and yelled, ‘TAKE A REST, BLACK!’
After realizing what I had said, I immediately tried to correct myself. I stumbled over every word. The damage was already done. One player on the other team said to me, ‘Not cool, dude.'”
Fire Up The Generator
“I worked in a warehouse once unloading trucks of mostly food and sometimes cigs. I was unloading a few packages of cigs and accidentally hit the gas instead of the break. I reamed the boxes. I thought I was fired for sure as reaming a boxes of cigs costs quite a bit ($50 a carton/30 cartons a box). Turned out I missed the marlboros and hit some mini stogies that were packed on top. Those things are like $5 a carton. Boss was happy he didn’t have to fire me for it so it worked out. Another time I ran the thing into a shelf, which knocked it over and then knocked over the one next to it like dominos.
I didn’t have a drivers license at the time so I’m not really sure why they kept having me drive that forklift. Now I’m behind a computer screen away from heavy machinery. I’m sure everyone is safer for it.”
Dropped The Ball On That One
“While riding as a volunteer EMT, my partner & I were sent to the home of a pregnant woman in our sister squad’s district while they were busy trying to get a crew together, or out on another call or whatever… She was in labor (though contractions were still far enough apart that she wasn’t going to pop on our stretcher) so rather than make her walk, we took her out in a stair chair.
My partner had the bottom pegs and I had the top; he gets to the bottom of the stairs and trips on a garden hose, losing his grip on the chair.
So I’m halfway down the stairs, with this pregnant lady in a stair chair suspended in midair, and it was like a Wile E. Coyote cartoon where gravity hadn’t kicked in yet but I knew it was about to and all I could do was hold up a little sign that said ‘help’.
She starts to fall, and takes me with her. I tried as hard as I could to yank the chair backwards so that it’d land on a step or at least on me, but her momentum was too much, and we tumbled to the driveway. I like to think that my effort to save her was what kept her from face planting, but we still dropped her.”
Needless To Say I Was Fired
“I left a huge legal folder for a multi-billion (with a B) lawsuit on the subway. Some homeless guy finds it, calls the opposing attorney and ransoms the bloody thing. Luckily there was nothing in the file that was secret or not well within the public record. Needless to say I was fired by my law firm.”
Word Choices To Die For
“Accidentally uploaded the email templates to the wrong website. The email template I uploaded was from an organic farm company with a message like ‘If we don’t get back to you soon, we’re probably knee-deep in mud’.
The company I uploaded it to? Yup, Funeral Directors.”
Millions Of Dollars Nearly Went Down The Drain
“Due to a misunderstanding with my boss, I wired $7,000,000 of a client’s cash to a hedge fund instead of $3,500,000. More importantly, this particular fund ‘locked’ their assets on that date. They would not return the cash, and all investment were locked up (cannot be redeemed) for a year.
So, effectively, my client had doubled his investment in this fund, and now had $3,500,000 less cash than he should have had. That $3,500,000 was to be used to purchase a home and make other investments.
I’m not sure I’ve ever felt more nauseated at work. Second worst day of my professional life.
Thankfully, after many, many phone calls and arguing, some of my managers were able to get the funds returned, but it was a big deal. To his credit, the boss that I had the misunderstanding with about the amount of the wire never yelled at me. He said that he knew I had already beaten myself up enough, and that was that. Never mentioned it again.”
Wrong Song, Wrong Time
“Whilst working in a district theatre, I wrote down the wrong number for CD’s in the 10-disc exchanger. So instead of playing Amazing Grace at the commencements to remember the classmate that killed himself, I played a song by Ke$ha from a dance troupe rehearsal that was going on the same week.
Also while running a regional championship swim meet with 13 teams in attendance, I forgot to re-set the timing system before the next start, so a whole event’s worth of swimmers didn’t get legal times. Several of them were trying to reach state-level cuts too. Whops.
I also once made 400 copies of a 10-page school board agenda when I meant to make 4. It was about the importance of effectively allocating resources to stave off massive budget cuts.”
Like Something Out Of A Looney Tunes Cartoon
“A psychiatric patient escaped the unit on my watch. It was my first job out of graduate school and I hadn’t even made my three month probation period yet. A gentleman with bipolar disorder who referred to himself as ‘Spiderman’ actually fashioned an dummy of himself out of linens and put it in the bed. When I did room checks, I thought he was there. To be fair, it wasn’t all me–the air conditioning guy had been in the room earlier that shift and had forgotten to secure one set of locking screens. Spiderman jumped out the second floor window, landing in bushes and breaking his ankle. It was caught on outdoor security cameras but no one noticed until the next day when I got a call from the nursing supervisor asking me how this happened. Spiderman disappeared, only to return 2 weeks later for re-admission, with a cast on his leg, manic as can be.”
Smooth Move
“I was waiting tables at a restaurant back in college. I was picking up some sauces and I slipped and an almost full cup of orange dip went flying and hit an old lady customer on the back. her black shirt was DRENCHED in orange-ketchup-mayonnaise-God knows what. She was sitting at a table with at least 10 other people. Big family dinner. NOT ONE of them noticed.
In fact…my eyes darted around the room and nobody was looking at me. No one had noticed. At this point, I analyzed the situation:
I could tell her now and she’ll get mad and yell and I might get in trouble,
OR
She could find out later on her own and get mad and yell, but I won’t get in trouble.
Easiest decision I ever made in my life.”