It could be customers or clients. Maybe it's a co-worker or even a boss, but we'll bet everyone has heard some pretty stupid things at work. Has it ever been so bad that ya wondered, "How did she even managed to dress herself that day?"
We found 25 hilarious stories about the absolutely dumbest things people have heard their co-workers or clients have said to them at work and frankly, it is pretty amazing that some of these people can tie their shoes, much less hold down a job for more than a few hours. Content has been edited for clarity.
Nancy, Freaking Nancy
“My co-worker Nancy. Freaking Nancy.
Here are a few gems from her:
‘I like to think of myself as a “dream player.” A DPer if you will.’
This woman took a yoga class at lunchtime, fell asleep in the yoga class, and came back an hour late to work.
As an almost 60-year-old woman, she routinely forgets she’s afraid of heights and will seek out activities that place her at a great height, such as zip lining or rock climbing. At which point in time, she will remember her fear and have to be assisted back to the ground.
She wants to buy a scooter instead of having to drive a car despite having crashed every. Single. Scooter. She’s ever driven.
She didn’t realize we had dental insurance for SIX YEARS and had been paying out of pocket the entire time.
Our new supervisor is African American and Nancy wanted to welcome him to our department by making a sign of some sort. She believed us to be the ‘cool kids’ of our agency because our department was tucked away in the back of the facility. So she thought it would be appropriate to make a sign that said ‘Welcome to the back of the bus.’ To an African American man.”
“Horror House Screaming”
“One of my first jobs was at a fast food restaurant. Parents were always making their kids get applications so they could work a summer job. One kid in particular sticks out. She came from a very wealthy family and technically didn’t need the job, but her parents wanted her to have a first-hand account of what it was like to work a customer service job. She was about as ditzy as could be, though.
One night, she stayed late to close the dining room, part of which required her to clean the restrooms. When I told her this, she started gagging, saying, ‘I can’t do it! It is too gross’
I told her it really wasn’t that bad and that she needed to get the cleaning caddy from the mop room, spray down the sink, refill the paper goods, use the toilet brush to clean the toilet, and then mop. She put on her brave face and proceeded.
Shortly after, I hear this full on horror house screaming coming from the bathroom. She comes running out, gagging and crying. I asked what happened, and she starts bawling about getting toilet water in her mouth. I asked her how, and she said she was scrubbing the toilet with the ‘rubber brush thing’ and it splashed back in her face. I go into the bathroom to see what is up, and it turns out she was using the plunger to clean the toilet.
I also taught this girl that when someone gives her a $20 bill or higher, that she needs to use the counterfeit marker. If it stays yellow, the bill is good. If it turns dark brown, then the bill is bad and she needed to let me know.
After her shift, I pull her register to count it and every single $20 was marked with a dark black mark. I stopped counting and asked her why the bills were marked with a black mark, and she replied ‘I couldn’t find the special marker you gave me, so I just used a sharpie.'”
The Dumbest Question Ever
“In first aid training during Marine Corp basic, the instructor made the point at the outset that there are no stupid questions, so don’t be afraid to ask. We were seated at tables and he was lecturing from a raised platform – roughly the height of our tables.
When we reached the part about tourniquets, he went on at length about how a tourniquet is your last resort to stop the bleeding and that the person is probably going to lose all or part of the affected limb. He stressed that you need to position the tourniquet between the heart and the wound — but as close to wound as possible to minimize the damage.
Private Smith raised his bony white hand from the back of the room and we all knew it was going to be good. ‘How do you apply a tourniquet for a head wound?’
‘Son, obviously you’re not going to tie anything around a man’s neck, so you just keep packing the wound with clean dressings and apply pressure,’ the instructor replied.
‘But what if he’s bleeding real bad?’ Private Smith asked, ‘Then would you use a tourniquet?’
The instructor leaped from his stage and stomped across the tabletops until he reached Private Smith. He grabbed him by the throat and started choking. ‘A TOURNIQUET AROUND YOUR NECK WILL KILL YOU!’ He dropped Private Smith back into his chair and then stuck out his hand, ‘Son, I want to shake your hand. In all my years of teaching these classes, that is the first truly stupid question I have ever heard.’
As he walked back to the front of the room the instructor called out, ‘A word of advice for the rest of you — if you are ever shot and this dummy is your only hope, do yourself a favor and put a bullet in his head, because I still don’t think he believes me.'”
Not The “Photoshoot” They Were Expecting
“I work in OBGYN. A pregnant patient and her mom come in for 4D ultrasound.
Halfway through the scan, her mom pulls out two cute little dresses and starts asking which one the tech likes better. The tech says both are pretty. The patient, who is on the table being scanned, asks, ‘So when are we going to try them on?’ My tech just looks at her and says, ‘Excuse me?’ The patient says she went and bought the premie dresses for her baby since she was having ultrasound pictures done and wanted to know when they were going to be able to try them on the baby for pics.
I kid you not, she actually thought she could somehow magically pull the baby out and put clothes on her then put her back for the ultrasound pics. My tech just looks at her dumbfounded and says, ‘No.’
So the patient gets ticked and wants her money back since she ‘paid for 4D pictures.’
Yeah, people like this reproduce. It’s sad and funny.
Finally, on the way out, her mom says, ‘I guess we’ll return the dresses; she’ll be too big for them by the time she is born.”
That’s Quite The Career Path
“A private once told me that if he got out of the military, he wouldn’t go to college because his dad would hire him on as a janitor at the hospital he worked at, and as long as he worked hard, he would get promoted to be a doctor one day.”
Maybe She Thought He Was A Merman
“I worked in a hair salon with a girl who was the classic bleach blonde ‘dumb blonde.’
We live in a small town near a big lake called Wallsley Lake. There is also a nearby community called Wallsley also. So the blonde is cutting a guy’s hair and she asks where he lives. He says, ‘Oh, I live in Wallsley.’
The girl stops and gets wide-eyed. ‘You mean, like, the lake?’
The guy is kind of country and he just says ‘Yeah, Wallsley.’
Now the girl is super wide-eyed, ‘Do you live on a boat?’
The guy is like ‘No, I live in a house…’ Like, what’s wrong with this girl
She literally says, ‘You live in a house in the lake? Like under the water?’
The guy wasn’t even laughing he just rolled his eyes, ‘I live in the TOWN of Wallsley. The community. It’s a little place. There is a post office and a few houses.’
The blonde says, ‘UNDER THE WATER? THERE IS A WHOLE TOWN IN THE LAKE WHERE PEOPLE LIVE UNDER WATER?'”
Confused And Dispirited
“I used to work in a company that dealt with vouchers. The nature of them is unimportant, what is important is that they were physical vouchers that needed to redeemed by post. The recipient received a voucher with a stub. The voucher would be posted to the company with account details, and we would reimburse them. In the event of the vouchers going missing in the post the stubs could be mailed or faxed as a back up. I took a call from a very upset voucher recipient who had sent £600 worth of vouchers that we hadn’t received. Reassurance was given, as were instructions given to mail or fax the stubs.
Upset turned to anger – recipient needs money right now and doesn’t have a fax machine. The recipient begrudgingly agrees to go to their sister’s to use the fax machine there, on the provision that I hang around for them to arrive and call her back immediately. I agree and skip my lunch break to do so. Thirty-five minutes pass, and I receive a fax of a blank page with one stub for £50 in the top left corner. This is not great.
I call the recipient straight away on their mobile and let them know. Anger intensifies. Accusations of dishonesty fly and recipient’s volume increases. I politely ask them to fax the stubs while I am on the phone. Recipient counts out vouchers on the call and faxes again. Same result. I’m mystified, recipient is furious, and accusations redouble. I am tired and hungry, confused and dispirited with my head in my hands, staring at this fax wondering what on Earth is happening.
It’s at this point that I notice a small black diagonal line in the top left of the single stub at the top left of the blank page. I interrupt her tirade of angry accusations and ask, ‘Have you stapled all of your stubs on top of each other on a sheet of paper?’
‘Yes!’ Came the triumphant reply.
‘Ah,’ I say, ‘Fax machines essentially take a photocopy or the page and send it over.’
‘Don’t patronize me, I know how a fax machine works!’ was the angry reply.
After a few moments of stunned silence, I eventually talked them into laying all the stubs out on the page and faxing them again so we could process the reimbursement. 12 years later and I still have no idea what was going through their mind.”
He Got Egg On His Face From His Own Stupidity
“I once had a guy on a construction job freak out because I didn’t keep canned tuna in the fridge. I tried explaining the whole point of canned food but he urged me not to eat it and when I went ahead anyway, he told me, ‘It’s your funeral.’ It only occurred to me later that any time he bought anything in a can, he must have to get it from a non-refrigerated part of the supermarket.
He was in his late forties.
I also currently work with someone who had never seen or heard of a boiled egg and flipped out when he saw one. Despite robust ‘egging’ from the rest of the crew, he defends himself to this day as with breathless amazement he regales us of how astonished he was when someone, ‘just started peeling an egg like a freaking orange.'”
When Hardware Meets Software
“The manager of the department that sold Mp3 players came up to me and asked, ‘Can you listen to FM radio on the iTouch?’
I said, ‘The iPod Touch doesn’t have an FM antenna but you can download apps that will let you listen to just about any station in the world you just have to be on WiFi.’
Her quick-witted response, that she thought put me in my place, ‘Can’t you just download an antenna?’
I was dumbfounded, ‘No, you can’t download hardware but…’
‘That’s wrong! You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she yelled and put up her hands, huffed away and told the customers they can download an antenna. I know this because they later came back to return the iPod after NOT being able to download an antenna.”
Two Mystery Letters
“I had a colleague at work who was absolutely convinced that there were only 24 letters in the English alphabet. I asked them to recite the alphabet and count the letters as they went.
He got to the middle: ‘L M N O P,’ but because of how they had been taught to sing the song, they counted ‘elem’ and ‘enno’ – as one letter each.
I was dumbstruck. His brain had never, in 25-ish years, despite being able to read and seeing the letters on a daily basis, made the connection that not only had they never seen these mystical ‘elem’ or ‘enno’ letters printed anywhere, but that L, M, N, and O weren’t in his old nursery rhyme.
It was this day that I lost faith in the long-term success of any democracy.”
Who Thought It’d Be Smart To Put Him Behind The Wheel?
“I clean cars for a car rental place and we have a garage with three bays. We had temp workers all summer and one of them would go through the car wash and then go straight through the bay and then back in.
Well, one day he decided to go out of the bay and sit outside the garage. Figuring he was done, I pulled my car in and went to work. One of my coworkers stopped me to show me a video and as we were standing there, the temp backed up into my car.
He then got out and proceeded to yell at me because he wasn’t actually done. After he came back through, he explained he was ‘catching the radio waves outside and then bringing them back in.'”
She Needs To Go Back To Junior High
“A lady at work (21) couldn’t get her head around Stephen Hawkings having children. We were having lunch at work and he’d just died, the TV was talking about him leaving behind his family including his children, she was beside herself with confusion. ‘How did he have children?’ she exclaimed!
We expected the next sentence to be around him being immobile in later life but the next words she uttered were:
‘How did he give birth in that wheelchair?!’
Silence reigned around the table until one of the other ladies said, ‘Say that again so I can experience it one more time.'”
How Can Someone Go Through Life Without Knowing THAT?!
“I was at a training course for work the other week and there is this dude from another department, Burt, who kept trying to make friends with my co-worker and me. He was pretty young, a bit weird, but my co-worker and I kept up light conversations with him between training.
At one point, the instructor passed out a form that we all had to sign. My co-worker and I both signed it, and I pass it over to Burt. He asked ‘What’s a signature? Is that your name or what?’
My co-worker and I look at each other in amazement. Burt was dead serious.”
The Little Blinking Light Can Be Confusing
“I used to work as third-party tech support.
One day a client called in saying she couldn’t remote into her computer. I was guessing that it was off or asleep, so I called her office and asked the woman who sat next to her to ‘Go into Dawn’s office and tell me if the blue lights on her monitors are blinking or if they’re on (meaning solid).’
She goes to Dawn’s office and responds by telling me, ‘They’re on. Well, no now they’ve gone off. Well, now they’re back on. They just went off again. I’m not sure what’s happening. Let me get someone else.’
She apparently didn’t understand what a blinking light was!”
Which Desktop?
“Working help desk for a small pharmaceutical company, I get a call that a sale rep’s computer isn’t working.
Me: ‘Okay, let’s get started, what’s on your desktop right now?’
Sales Rep: ‘Well, my laptop, stapler, coffee, some pens, my phone…’
He went on for a good 10 minutes.
Yeah, I could have stopped him, but it was too amazing to stop.”
Going Back To Basics
“I have two favorites:
One coworker said, ‘Huh, it must be 32 degrees outside.’
I checked my phone and said, ‘No man, it’s 17.’ He said no, it has to be 32. I asked him why is that? He said because it only snows when it’s exactly 32 degrees…he’s in his late 50s.
Another coworker: ‘I had to go to my kid’s teacher conference yesterday. She said my daughter doesn’t know all 26 letters of the alphabet. How can she know all 26 letters of the alphabet when there are only 24?!’ I said, no man there are 26. And he says, ‘Oh, well I don’t count the capitals.'”
Numbers Aren’t Really Her Thing
“A former obnoxious coworker, who loved to point out other people’s errors and pass blame, was taking inventory with another colleague. He was reading off the numbers and she was transcribing them onto the inventory paper. He told her the one count was eleven hundred. She asked him, ‘How do you write that?’ So he told her, ‘One one zero zero.’
This happened 5 or 6 more times with any number larger than three digits. She legitimately did not know how to write numbers. She was in her 30’s. With children. That she wanted to homeschool.”
Never Got Through To Him
“In first-aid training during Marine Corp basic, the instructor made the point at the outset that there are no stupid questions, so don’t be afraid to ask. We were seated at tables and he was lecturing from a raised platform – roughly the height of our tables.
When we reached the part about tourniquets, he went on at length about how a tourniquet is your last resort to stop the bleeding and that the person is probably going to lose all or part of the affected limb. He stressed that you need to position the tourniquet between the heart and the wound – but as close to wound as possible to minimize the damage.
Private Smith raised his bony white hand from the back of the room and we all knew it was going to be good. ‘How do you apply a tourniquet for a head wound?’
‘Son, obviously you’re not going to tie anything around a man’s neck, so you just keep packing the wound with clean dressings and apply pressure,’ the instructor replied.
‘But what if he’s bleeding real bad?’ Private Smith asked, ‘Then would you use a tourniquet?’
The instructor leaped from his stage and stomped across the tabletops until he reached Private Smith. He grabbed him by the throat and started choking. ‘A TOURNIQUET AROUND YOUR NECK WILL KILL YOU!!’
He dropped Private Smith back into his chair and then stuck out his hand, ‘Son, I want to shake your hand. In all my years of teaching these classes that is the first truly stupid question I have ever heard.’
As he walked back to the front of the room the instructor called out, ‘A word of advice for the rest of you – if you are ever shot and this idiot is your only hope, do yourself a favor and put a bullet in his head, because I still don’t think he believes me.’
What Kind Of Modern Technology Is This?
“I work for a bank. A lady asked if she could make a payment on her loan over the phone with CASH. I asked her how that could be possible and she said, ‘I don’t know, take the serial numbers or something?’ I made her read all the serial numbers to me then told her my boss said we can’t do it.”
She Gets A Zero For That Logic
“There was this girl working in accountant office of our company. When she was issuing invoices to our customers, she didn’t put ‘0’ in bank account numbers.
When this came out she was asked why she missed every ‘0,’ she answered, that: ‘0’ is nothing so what’s the point to write it?
By the way, she graduated college with perfect grades.”
Hello Nurse, Goodbye Nurse!
“I work in a college with a good Nursing program. Heard a girl tell her classmate, ‘I don’t know why they make us memorize all this stuff about different prescriptions. I mean, it’s not like we are going to kill anyone if we give them the wrong medication.’
And her friend agreed.”
That’s One Solution For Illegal Immigration
“I worked with a guy who was a very nice, but very dimwitted conservative.
One day he says, ‘I figured out how to solve this Mexican immigration problem! We should build a river between the United States and Mexico.’
To which another co-worker pointed out, ‘Well, that’s a good idea, but there already is a river between the United States and Mexico.’
Guy says, ‘Really? Well, it can’t be very big.’
‘Actually, that’s literally the name of it. The Rio Grande – it means the big river.'”
He Was Always Messing Up, But Never THIS Bad
“While I was working at a coffee shop, I had a coworker who I liked a lot but he wasn’t the brightest. He frequently got orders wrong and was very slow to ring people up.
One day, I get a customer that approaches me and complains about how he asked for no cheese on his breakfast sandwich. I knew that this coworker of mine had prepared the sandwich and I just wondered how he messed this up.
I offered to try and take the cheese off of his sandwich. The customer said that wasn’t the problem. There was nothing on his sandwich at all.
My coworker thought the customer wanted him to take everything off the sandwich. That’s exactly what he did and he handed the customer essentially two slices of bread and we charged him $5 for it.
Still makes me laugh.”
Not Thinking It Through
“I had a coworker pass a stack of documents to another coworker, asking for her to help fax them to another branch. The top of the pile had a post-it note saying ‘fax me.’
Later that day, the branch calls back and asks us to re-fax the rest of the documents. We asked if something went wrong and they explained they had been faxed only the post-it note, NOT the documents the note was on.
We wondered how she even managed to dress herself that day.”
Safety First, Birds Always Say
“My fiance worked with a guy at one point who legitimately believed that the only reason birds don’t get electrocuted when they’re sitting on power lines because they’re wearing ‘special bird shoes.’ Like, somehow in a bird’s life, they get all get fitted for tiny rubber shoes.
Mind you, this was a grown man who was at least 40.”
Math Can Be Hard
“A coworker I worked with years ago, who was in her mid forties, was trying to explain that 9 out of 10 had to be 99% because 9 is 1 less than 10 and 99 is 1 less than 100 and since 99 out of 100 is 99% therefore 9 out of 10 is 99%.
No matter how we explained it to her, she was convinced she was correct and what we were saying made no sense because ’99 is 1 less than 100 and 9 is 1 less than 10.'”
It’s All Fun And Games Until Someone’s Too Stupid To Play
“At my old job, sometimes it would be so slow and we would play stupid games to pass time. One was ‘the animal game.’ It’s a stupid simple game where one person just thinks of an animal and gives us the first letter it starts with like, ‘starts with D’ and we’d all guess animals that start with D until someone guesses the correct one. Like I said, simple and stupid.
So this woman (grown woman, mind you) says she’s thinking of an animal that starts with C. We guess and guess and no one gets it right. We ask for another clue. She says C-H. Ok, chimpanzee? ‘NO.’ Cheetah? ‘Nopeeee.’ Literally, people who didn’t even work in our department even were trying to guess. No one could get it.
Finally, we give up. What’s the animal?
CHaranchula! (Tarantula).”
Trapped Inside
“We had recently hired a new girl at the sandwich shop I worked at. She was 16, it was her first job, and she was very obviously a little bit coddled in her upbringing. I still remember the first time she was sent to the cooler by herself. It was a door that sealed shut, kind of set into the wall. There wasn’t really a latch, and you just pushed and pulled to open and close it. Anyway, she had been in there for way too long, and finally I hear a knocking on the cooler door. When I opened it, she exasperatedly stumbled out and said ‘there’s no way to open it from the inside!’
All you have to do is push. Her twin brother did the exact same thing during his shift.
After months of this, another girl we worked with got frustrated and shouted ‘Karmen, you are incompetent!’
And practically in tears and without missing a beat, she replies ‘I am not incompetent–what does that mean?!’