If you’ve ever encountered jaw-dropping moments of professional incompetence, prepare to be both amused and amazed as we recount some of the dumbest mistakes ever witnessed on the job. From the colleague who accidentally sent a sensitive email to the entire company to the employee who mistook the emergency exit for the bathroom door, we’ve got stories that will make you wonder how some individuals manage to navigate the professional world. Expect tales of misplaced files, baffling decisions, and moments that defy all logic.
A friend of mine started a new job in a bank on the same day as some other guy. A week into their job, one of their clients brought in a cheque for 1 billion Pounds. The same day, the cheque went missing. Turns out this other guy just took the cheque home to show his parents. He’d never seen so much money and thought it was an ok thing to do to take it off the premises without permission. The entire branch was searching the office for this cheque while he had it at home. He didn’t last another week.
Took the wrong coffin to a funeral. Someone else had to drive to the cemetery with the correct deceased on board, and thankfully they made it before the viewing.
Putting all the patient’s false teeth in a bowl together to soak in a dementia ward. Took us weeks to try and match the patient to the teeth, no, they weren’t marked up with the patient’s names. Doubt the right teeth ended up with the right patient, it was guesswork.
Removing the plastic wrapping from a pallet of 5-gallon cans of (highly flammable) acetone. He didn’t have a box cutter so he proceeded to melt it with a lighter.
One volunteer had no computer experience. We showed her step-by-step how to do her job. She didn’t know what a mouse was, how to click on something, etc. We got her up and running. She was pleased with herself, at having gotten the hang of using a PC.
Fast forward two hours. Come back to the office and she’s in tears “I swear I didn’t do anything! There were just fish everywhere all of a sudden!!” Look at the computer. Aquarium screen saver.
After her little breakdown, she had to take the rest of the afternoon off.
We work in IT and there was a guy who drove a forklift through a wall in the warehouse. It wasn’t Michael Scott. Or Dwight. It really happened, it was a guy named Tom who was tasked with going to the storage area in the warehouse to get some laptops. When asked why he used the forklift (which he had never driven before or was even authorized to touch) he said “I thought it would help”.
I worked for this abhorrent woman who used to go into direct reports documents, delete lines and columns from spreadsheets, slides from presentations, rewrite copy, etc. She did this to a few of mine so I learned to always keep a backup copy away from her view. One day, we were virtually reviewing a highly detailed spreadsheet that took quite a bit of time to create. In front of our whole team, she began to harshly criticize and start deleting information and moving things around. By the end of her Tasmanian Devil tirade on the spreadsheet, she barked about how none of the data added up and openly questioned why someone would present this. I explained that the data had been tallied correctly at the start of the meeting but due to columns and lines being deleted, it no longer did. She defensively questioned ‘Well, WHO did this?’ And I said “We can easily check if we look at the document history, see here.. (with a few clicks shows a history of list of changes all with HER name on each in the last 20 minutes). I clicked on the document as it stood when it was initially presented to its original state and correct tally. I was one of the very few who stood up to her. Team – 1, abhorrent boss – zero.
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.
Taught preschool for 8 years before the pandemic. It’s the protocol to count the children before moving from one room to another to make sure no one gets left behind. Had a coworker 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” 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.
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.
Poured the sink cleaning solution into the ice cream machine instead of the cream mixture and I had to stop them, they then said “I’m sure it’ll be fine, it was only a little.”
No that would poison people. I had to clean out the whole machine from top to bottom and refill it. I ended up throwing away nearly a whole bucket full of contaminated ice cream mixture.
I would also like to add that the containers didn’t look anything alike, the sink stuff came in big plastic jugs with screw tops and the ice cream comes in cardboard cartons (like orange juice) that you have to cut open. so I don’t know how she could have possibly mixed the two up.
I was making pizza. Guy broke the pizza board(the thing with the handle you make the pizza on and then slide the pizza into the oven) I found the other one and he lost that. So I told him to make pizzas on one of the plastic cutting boards. He put the pizza into the oven on the board and just left it. The board melted. No more pizza that day.
The office we worked in was shut down due to covid and the company went 100% remote. A new senior engineer was hired to work directly with our product team and also manage a team of developers. During our company-wide weekly zoom meeting after he was done presenting for the company, he turned his camera off but forgot to put himself on mute. 100+ people heard this man playing Fortnite and talking down about the company to someone else in the background among other things. He only lasted a month.
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 pissed 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 bareback 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 worked as a line cook when I was 19 and the general manager set up a fundraiser without scheduling any extra workers for either the front or the back of the house.
We did literally 7x the normal amount of business that night. Checks were taking about an hour to get to the table after being ordered. We wasted so much food because we couldn’t keep up or keep track of what we were prepping. The whole restaurant was in shambles.
How does a manager know it’s going to be that busy yet fail to prepare in such a spectacular fashion?
Nearly leaving a child behind on a field trip. We took a large group of 4 and 5-year-old children to visit a farm/petting zoo/pumpkin patch. We had three vehicles. I was in charge of my own group, but I noticed one of the other teachers was being very lax in her supervision for most of the trip.
When it was time to leave, I loaded my children on the bus (with some other adults) and did a head count/attendance check. Before getting on my bus, I noticed that the other teacher had climbed onto her bus and sat down BEFORE the children boarded. She walked on first and had the kids follow her. I almost let it go, but gut instinct told me she wasn’t counting her students. Once they were all boarded, I walked back and climbed on her bus. She seemed irritated when she realized I was checking on her… I was not a supervisor or anything, just a fellow teacher, so she didn’t answer to me in any way. She said something like, “We’re all good, let’s go!” I knew how many were in each group, so without answering her, I did a quick count. Sure enough, we were missing one. I ended up leaving the bus and going to find the kid myself… he was still on the playground with children from another school.
When we got back to the bus, the other teacher blamed the kid! She said he “wandered off.” Really, she is the one who gathered the group and left the play area, meaning she is the one who “wandered off.” She was pissed when I went to the administration about the incident.
I work maintenance at a grocery store for context. My boss at the time was very inept when it came to technology. He hated technology with a passion. I understand everyone should know how to use a mop if you are in this line of work but when you have machines that make it easier, I see no issues in using one.
So anyways, my boss couldn’t figure out how to use one of our machines (the task) and hated it with a passion even though it’s one of the easiest things to use. He couldn’t figure out why water wasn’t coming out to clean up a sticky floor. All he has to do was press the little button that has a water spout on it which means water will come out if pushed. Instead of asking me or trying to use his brain, he proceeded to kick the sh*t out of it and destroyed the water tank and then couldn’t understand why water was leaking from it after and then proceeded to call it a “piece of sh*t” and said, “This would’ve been better if we just used a f*ckin mop!!”
I have so many stories about him but that’s one of my favorites.
I worked in a veterinary hospital for a good number of years. One day, unknown to me, some little girl had found a dead/dying seagull with her family and brought it in to see if we could help it, but it has passed by the time they arrived.
Our veterinary technician took said bird for disposal but was too busy to deal with it then (like… Put it in the freezer. One minute tops with labeling!), so instead he just packed to box with the dead bird into our storage area with dozens of similar boxes and just leaves it there.
Days go by ( while he is still working, I should add) and I come back on shift and something is seriously rank in the office. Customers are complaining! No one knows what would cause it, but I eventually find the box buried beneath other supplies. I walk up to my head receptionist and say “So… Seagull?” and watch the absolute fury grow in her eyes. The tech did not last long after that.
I worked on a golf course during the summer. Area with lots of poison ivy. Two of my coworkers were instructed to weedy a river edge area. If we encounter poison ivy, we either stop what we are doing or go get full suit protection with respirators. These dumba**es were weed-whacking in the thickest poison ivy I had ever seen. No protective suit or glasses or respirator. I roll up and notice what the heck they’re doing and point out all the poison ivy everywhere- they were aerosolizing the oil. They both ended up in the hospital on steroids to prevent their death because of the oils they inhaled.
When I worked construction, there was a guy who showed up with nothing in his tool belt except a small bag of peanuts in one pocket. He didn’t stay around too long.
My manager at my previous job mixed up the class dates for employees of a very large client, and it affected their billing. Of course, none of us including our manager knew she did it at the time.
I had to find out due to the barrage of emails and angry phone calls I got from said client. After assuring them I’d look into it, I had look through a long email chain just to find out it was our manager who made the mistake.
I told her, and her reply was for me to fix it.
It frustrated me to no end because she always lectured me on making little mistakes and I had to fix them myself. This mistake, however, was huge as it took months to figure out what went wrong, and I already had to deal with the brunt of the client’s anger and frustration.
There was no accountability on my manager’s end. Not even a thank you or any kind of appreciation for me for sorting it out.
A well-liked director of our art department was leaving for another company. He crafted a beautiful and inspiring message which announced his departure, how much he’d enjoyed working with us and how he was now on to a new adventure. He sent the message to the entire company.
One of his junior employees, accidentally replied-all that her life was devastated, she was heartbroken and she was going to be despondent over losing the best lover she’d ever had. He was married, not to her, and had 3 children.
The bon-voyage celebration was quietly cancelled. He left, silently, 10 minutes after the reply had been sent.
Without understanding the mail system she tried to do a recall-all and sent a “Please don’t read the message this is attached to. It was a private message between colleagues”.
A friend of mine is an intern medical resident. There was a patient in her hospital whom a whole team of doctors had just convinced the family to remove from life support after weeks. My friend went into the room after reading the wrong patient’s chart and told the family she expected the patient to make a full recovery… it was everything that the family had been praying to hear for months only to find out it wasn’t true…
I worked in a busy pizzeria when I was young. The pizza maker was talking to his girlfriend who was standing in front of him on the other side of the counter.
He throws up the pizza dough in the air to spin it and it comes down and lands on top of his girlfriend’s head and continues to spin.
The packed dining room erupted in laughter and she ran out crying with flour all over her face and jet-black hair.
I was a 911 operator. I quit when I realized the job wasn’t for me because it’s not a job you can half-*ss.
Anyway, we had a new guy who didn’t take the job seriously at all.
One time somebody called and said they were paranoid that people were listening to their phone calls and their thoughts. This guy was calling from a neighboring city, so the new guy had to transfer him to an operator in the neighboring city. Once the call is connected, you have to hang up, since it’s no longer your call. But the new guy thought “This call’s too interesting” and decided to mute himself and listen on the line. The operator is assuring the caller that nobody’s listening to his calls and thoughts, and at this point, the new guy goes, “Ah this is boring,” and hangs up, which makes a loud audible click. Now the caller is going into a paranoid meltdown because somebody actually was listening to his calls.
Didn’t personally see it, but my MIL’s doctor (family doctor/general practitioner) forgot to fax her lung scan report. The next time she was there (about 6 months after the scan) she asked: “BTW, what did that report say?” “What report???” “From my scan?!” Searches in a huge stack of unsorted papers on an untidy desk “Oh.” Well, she had lung cancer and nearly died because her treatment started 6 months late.
“Jolene” would steal products from the store in the middle of her shift when it was relatively busy. This was a fast food establishment so she’d take gallons of tea, lots of sandwiches, go in the fridge and take the wraps, etc.
The manager would quietly walk around and count up every item she took, deduct it from her paycheck, and then over time, the operators cut her hours until she was no longer on the schedule.
Jolene never understood why she had no hours and would come in off-shift to let them know she was available. It was… so dumb, no one even bothered correcting her.
I once knew of a therapist who was seeing the two biological children of the bio parent I was seeing.
This therapist got overly involved and emotional and had the two girls, who were both under 10, write private letters to the judge stating they wanted to go back with their abusive mother, who was still defending her decision to beat the girls with cords.
She didn’t give copies of the letters to the state’s attorney or the mother’s attorney, this is called ex parte communication. She got reamed in court and her license was reported.
I worked for an online shop in customer service. This one girl was always so nervous. A customer placed an expensive order and she accidentally cancelled it when changing the shipping address. Ok, fine place a new order but the girl went on to accidentally cancel two more orders! The very patient customer had like three 5k charges on her card. The last order didn’t go through because her bank stopped it for fraud.
I work in finance and a colleague accidentally liquidates a >$100m model portfolio. Hundreds of accounts. Massive tax consequences.
He looked like death when he realized it. Just catatonic shock staring at his screen. We took him to the bar downstairs while the rest of the team fixed it. Luckily our E&O insurance covered it and we were able to undo everything but he needed a few personal days to get his nerve back haha.
I worked at a tech repair shop, or not sure how to call it,- but we basically repaired laptops, pcs, printers, and the like (no TVs, not that it matters). This was run by three older dudes and one of their nephews worked there too. The dudes were pretty chill most of the time, and one of them was really cool like, ALL the time.
The nephew was a moron, though. He had seniority over me, but they trusted me way more than they did him. Despite being there for more than a few years, and despite him being a close relative.
So one day, the chill dude has to take a printer to a company that was like 2 hours of driving away and since it was the nephew’s task to test the printer properly, he asked him like 10 times if he had tested it. The nephew said he did, just 5 mins ago, and that it worked…
Of course, he did not test it and it did not work when he hooked it up at the company. Needless to say, the chill dude went ballistic on him. Shortly after that, he got fired because of many similar mistakes he made.
All he had to do was test a f*cking printer. It was 5 minutes of work.
I read something about a trainee paramedic. They arrived at a stabbing. The knife was still in the person. The trainee pulled the knife out. If you know anything about being impaled or stabbed, it’s that you DO NOT PULL IT OUT. It can cause more bleeding.
Needless to say, the paramedic freaked out and said they shouldn’t have done that. So what does the trainee do? THEY PUT THE KNIFE BACK IN THE STAB WOUND!!!
The person died and the trainee was kicked off their training course and charged with manslaughter.
My friend, Katy f*cked up everything. Everything. She couldn’t count change without giving a 50 instead of a 5, she couldn’t wash dishes without breaking a few, and she couldn’t order milk without accidentally ordering 200 gallons more than we needed (we needed 4). She flooded the kitchen four times. She set it on fire twice. She could not be trusted to close – not close by herself, she couldn’t be trusted to CLOSE. At all.
Minor things, too, like if you were doing a giant pile of dishes, she’d wait until you were DONE and SUPER HAPPY ABOUT BEING DONE to say oh, there are these dishes too, and just…dump them down. She would spend so much time wiping down the clean tables that she wouldn’t get to the ones that were actually messy. If you bummed her a cigarette, she would take it as open permission to steal as many cigarettes as she wanted from that day forward, and go into your stuff and leave your stuff a mess in the process. And then, when you went to have a cigarette because Katy almost poisoned someone by somehow mixing up the detergent and the caramel for the seventh time that day, you’d be out of cigarettes.
I genuinely don’t think she was lazy, or f*cking up so we’d do her work for her, she just…couldn’t not f*ck up. Just…every possible way a person could f*ck up, she’d zoom in on it and then do it three times, each time saying that she didn’t know about it, though. Simply one of the most hopeless individuals I have ever had the honor to meet in this lifetime.
They did have enough to fire her, but every time they did, her mother would come in? And yell at the manager? And then he’d say well, you know what, never mind, just keep a closer eye on her. And you WOULD! You WOULD keep a closer eye on her! You’d follow her around the place keeping an eye on her! And then you’d have to, you know, do your actual job, and you’d take your eye off of her for fifteen seconds and boom, she’d take the fresh, newly-baked cookies off the tray that was designated for the fresh, newly-baked cookies and throw them in the trash because she decided that tray was for stale cookies, in spite of the fact that there was no such thing as a stale cookie rack.
She was pretty nice, though, in spite of all of that. I hope wherever she ended up, she doesn’t burn it down.
About five years ago everyone in my office received an email from the facility/security team in the middle of the day notifying us that there was an active shooter in the parking lot. The email also included the “Run Hide Fight” strategy and told us to avoid the main entrance of the building.
Immediately the building, which likely held 500-1000 employees that day, went into a frenzy. My manager left the meeting we were in to hide in a bathroom stall. Some employees turned over tables to barricade the conference rooms they were in. Others hid in closets. Some sprinted down back stairways. Some walked calmly toward the front entrance to evaluate the situation themselves.
After what must have been the longest 3 minutes of our lives we all received a follow-up email to inform us that the prior email was sent in error. The facility/security team was testing some of their emergency protocols. A member of the team inadvertently sent the test email to all employees based out of that office.
After all of that madness, we were expected to go back to work. I must have still been shaking in meetings several hours later.
I found out my coworker just never ever emptied vacuum bags for some reason. We were at a training and it was like he was just realizing that you needed to do that. He seemed to think vacuums stopped working after a month and didn’t use them if he could avoid them, and tried to bar me from getting one. At the training. Needless to say, he got an earful and I found out that I had been allotted a vacuum cleaner he had stashed away for three years for the aforementioned reason.
It explained a lot. One of the offices had gotten a new vacuum and I would regularly empty the cannister and wash the filters, before getting transferred for a year, and returning to a busted vacuum with no suction. The filter was literally a rock from zero maintenance. I fully cleaned that thing and it was just not salvageable.
HR sent out annual emails about insurance and such to our entire company, as they do.
One of the top CEOs hit reply all and told HR she was secretly going through a messy divorce, to keep it quiet since they were both high-profile people. Said she was probably losing custody of her kids, moving to an apartment. She basically asked how making adjustments to her benefits after the divorce and after losing her kids worked.
The HR person hit reply all to her email as well letting her know that everyone was now aware of her business.
I work in fast food, I have for about eight months. There was this new hire that arrived over the summer, pretty quiet at first. After a few days, he meets one of our managers, who happens to be openly gay. A few people that work here are and everyone’s chill about it. The new hire walks up to him and goes “Wow, I didn’t know they hired your kind here.”
I work at a place designing packaging for home products (washing up liquid etc.)
A coworker was working on some packaging for washing machine capsules and forgot to add print to the bottom of the clear bag they come in (they’re required by law to be fully printed so the capsules cannot be seen when the pack is closed)
The packaging was printed, went to shops and bought. Kids saw the capsules, ate them and around 100 ended up in comas, one child unfortunately died.
On top of that it cost the company over 500,000 Pounds to remove the remaining packs from the shelves and re-print them correctly.
Feel pretty bad for them as it was such a small mistake that came with huge consequences.
My dad is an electrician. He told me this story that occurred when I was a little kid:
He was working on some machine and asked his boss if the power was turned off. The boss said yes, it was completely off. Dad began to work on it, and he was shocked with ~500 volts iirc. I don’t know much about electricity, but I recall him saying it was enough to kill him.
After that, he sat down and some coworkers were all around him making sure he was okay. His boss then came over and asked what was going on, and my dad proceeded to punch him directly in the face and explain that the machine wasn’t off at all, and his boss replied “Oh my god, do you want to hit me again?”
Thankfully my dad walked away without any serious injuries and only punched his boss once.
In the restaurant, I was in the back tending my sauces while my line cook was running the show. He poked his head around the corner and said, “Meatball, come here for a sec.” I was pretty busy so I brushed him off. He insisted I come to give him a hand. Reluctantly I put aside my stuff and went to help him. I got to the line and he just pointed at the flames shooting out of the deep fryer. I quickly grabbed the fire extinguisher and put out the fire and told him, if there’s a fire, you say fire! Not come here for a sec!
Restaurants are a fantastic source of the dumbest things that you’ve seen happen at work.
Answering for my dad. The new guy who didn’t speak a whole lot of English was hired for a fairly simple factory job that involved operating some potentially dangerous machinery, but there should have been enough training and instruction on how to operate the machinery safely so that no accidents should occur.
My dad was a manager in charge of safety inspections. He was checking the machine that this guy was in charge of working. Somewhere in the communication that followed, the bad-English dude misunderstood something my dad said and turned the machine on while my dad was inspecting it. Oops.
My dad still keeps his middle finger in a jar in his closet, it’s pretty gross/cool.
Sleep while on the phone with a customer. We saw him sleeping behind his desk with his headset on and auto-taking CS calls. All calls are (screen)recorded so when our boss replayed one of those you could hear him softly snore and a confused customer asking: hello? Hello? Someone there?
I work at a coffee shop. A usual customer would sometimes come in at night and get her usual coffee, except when she got it at this time she’d get one cup with the coffee, and another cup with cream and sugar. She got them separate because she’d heat it up in the morning, and she found it doesn’t taste as good all mixed together for whatever reason.
Anyway, one night she was explaining her order to a lovely but very blond coworker of mine. I thought she could handle it, so I left her to it. I ended up getting a call an hour later from the lady saying that “Yeah, I don’t think I realized this because I am literally half asleep, but that girl gave me a cup of the cream and sugar, but the other cup she gave me was just empty. Like I just paid two dollars for some cream and sugar… and an empty cup…”
I certainly get that her order is a little strange, but I really don’t know why you’d charge her for a cup of coffee and not give her any coffee.
Years back I used to lifeguard in the summers while home from college. A 16/17-year-old kid coworker of mine panicked while someone was choking. Instead of giving them the Heimlich maneuver, he tackled them to the ground when they resisted and started doing chest compressions and mouth-to-mouth.
It was honestly the most confusing thing I’ve ever witnessed. I was sitting outside the pool area on break for lunch and didn’t initially see what happened but I caught the end result where our head lifeguard picked him up and chucked him into the pool in one fluid motion.
The lady who was choking nearly died. The piece of food stayed stuck but she could sort of still breathe. The ambulance came, and the EMT took down notes and was just shaking his head. The young dude got fired on the spot after they left.
Worked in an IT department for a company, and I noticed there was one guy who worked in sales who never finished work on time (my shift finished later than his). One day I asked him why he never finished on time and he said it took him ages to do his email correspondence and had to finish them up before he could go home.
He was writing the same email over and over to each recipient because he didn’t realise you could send it to more than one person at a time….or that copy and paste was a thing.
