Employee training teaches people how to do their jobs. However, it doesn’t seem to help those half-witted workers who are just plain old dumb. Let’s face it, there is no remedy for stupid. These Redditors shared their experiences about some of the dumb co-workers they’ve had to deal with while on the job. After reading these, you’ll be left shaking your head, wondering how these people ever got hired in the first place.
1. She Was MIA
I was a social worker. We were supposed to see clients who lived with families once a year. A mom of a kid kept calling her worker but got no answer. So, the mom called the on-call worker, who discovered the assigned worker had logged the visits in and made thorough notes. However, the mom said she had never seen her social worker in two years.
This led to her whole caseload being audited. What they discovered was chilling. They found that the worker had logged a visit with a client who had been deceased for months. While being audited, her supervisor decided to do a surprise visit to the client she was supposed to see. She never showed up and logged in the visit the next day.
2. What A Tool!
I had a guy take a cover off the base of a radar unit that had about 40 bolts holding it on. I gave him a ratchet wrench to do it. A half-hour later, I went to check on him. He only had about ten off. I watched him for a while. He would take the ratchet off each time to move it for the next turn! I had to show him how a ratchet works.
3. What A Harebrained Idiot
I worked at Petco. We had all the guinea pigs in a big plexiglass enclosure with a center divider. The males were on one side and the females on the other. An employee decided that all the long-haired guinea pigs should be on one side and short-haired on the other. Well, there was one thing that he didn’t think of. Not only did it take forever to sort them out—but all the females ended up pregnant.
4. They Were A Bunch Of Whack Jobs
I worked on a golf course during the summer. The area had lots of poison ivy. Two of my co-workers were instructed to weed a river edge area. If we encountered poison ivy, we had to either stop what we were doing or go get full suit protection with respirators. When I walked up to check on them, my blood ran cold. These guys were weed-whacking in the thickest poison ivy field I had ever seen.
They had no protective suit, glasses, or respirators on. I rolled up and noticed what they were doing and pointed out all the poison ivy everywhere. They were aerosolizing the plant’s oil. They both ended up in the hospital on steroids to prevent them from dying because of the oils they had inhaled.
5. Email Mishap
I worked for an attorney who did ex-pat tax preparation. We had a friend's girlfriend working with us to help purge files and set up a new office. She stayed on because we needed a secretary. For some reason, she thought that we were equals in the office and that we shared the same responsibilities of answering the phone and email, filing documents, and making copies, even though I was a tax-preparer, not a secretary.
She also refused to be called a secretary. She had a good-intentioned e-mail written to request tax documents from our clients if they hadn’t already submitted them to us. The email was going to be sent to our entire client list. She went and added all of the clients and sent it off. However, instead of sending the email to ourselves with the client emails in BCC, it was a giant thread.
All the clients could see each other’s emails, and if someone responded to that email, all clients would be able to see that person's private financial information. I had to immediately follow up with another email requesting them to disregard and delete the message. She got fired the next day. My boss and her couldn't see eye to eye on many things, but that mistake was the straw that broke the camel's back.
6. She Did Not Excel At Her Job
I once witnessed our chief accounting officer—who was our only accountant—type in values into two Excel cells by pulling out a calculator, adding the two numbers together in the calculator, and then typing the answer in a third cell on the spreadsheet. She had apparently been doing this for years, with sheets consisting of thousands of rows.
I explained how to use the program’s formulas and copy them, but she must have forgotten because I saw her doing the same thing again months later.
7. Prescription For Disaster
I was a float pharmacist. There was this lady who was a pharmacy assistant. She was dumb as bricks and extremely negligent but hadn't made enough mistakes to get fired yet. You would pull up the prescriptions that need to be filled from a queue, scan the bottle, and the label for the patient would print out. If the medication is incorrect, it will tell you that you're wrong, and the label won't print.
I could only assume that she scanned the incorrect bottle, went to get the right one, scanned that one, bent down to get a vial, then opened the WRONG bottle and dumped the contents of that one into the vial along with the right one. The prescription was for 200 tabs, and most bottles are 100 count. She then left it on the counter to get checked.
I always open the vial and look at the tabs or capsules to make sure they are right. Since the correct tablets were on top, I opened it, and it looked correct. What followed next gave me the scare of a lifetime. Later, when the person came to pick it up, the vial was jostled from hanging out in the pickup area. I always open it again to show the person what's there, which serves as another check for me as well.
Lo and behold, the two medications were mixed together! I apologized and corrected it, but I was furious. She put a high dose of one medication in the bottle, and the person was on a low dose of another. The patient could've had a critical hypoglycemic event because they were old, and both meds make you release more insulin.
I told her she wasn't allowed to put any bottles in recycling anymore; she had to leave everything she touched on the counter. I also couldn't ask her to enter prescriptions or do anything else because she was useless. She'd worked there for nine months, and despite close shadowing and training with the best assistants, she just didn't understand anything. Luckily, she eventually quit.
8. The Bold And The Brainless
I had a co-worker who was a guidance counselor at five schools in the district. She was supposed to work one day at each school unless she was called to a school for an urgent case. She would frequently call the school she was supposed to be at, stating she had an urgent case at another school. One day at lunch, she was talking about what was happening in her favorite soap opera.
This was before VCRs, and the show aired long before the school day ended. The principal was sitting at our lunch table. He got up, smiled, and told her, "See me when you are done with your lunch". After checking, he noticed that she hadn't seen more than a few kids per week for many months. The funny thing was that complaints about her work had gone down during that time. She was a terrible guidance counselor.
9. This Guy Had A Screw Loose
I managed a recycling center for the city. The baler went down with a blown fuse. These fuses were huge, and we were looking at it, trying to figure out if we could pull the fuse and where to get one. We had not shut off the power yet. Just then, this guy—who was well known for not having any common sense—stuck a screwdriver into the fuse.
It caused the brightest flash of light and blinded us all for a minute. When I got my vision back, I thought for sure this guy was going to be a goner, but he was not. In fact, he was fine. I regained my composure, fired the guy on the spot, and called a professional to fix the baler. To this day I am not sure how he was not injured. He was a walking workers comp claim just waiting to happen.
10. Get The Picture?
I worked in a paint shop and every time a new chemical was introduced to the shop, I would ask about the hazards. They would tell me that it was a green chemical and there were no hazards, saying, "It's baby-safe". Once I entered the shop and I saw a guy using a new spray. The side of the bucket indicated that it was dangerously poisonous and highly corrosive.
I told him that he should be using a mask and gloves to use that chemical. He said, "Don't worry, it's baby safe. They even have a picture of a baby playing in it". I took a closer look and nearly burst out laughing. Sure enough, it did. After seeing the image though, I yelled at the guy, "This is the baby. He is not playing. He is not swimming. HE'S DYING"!
11. He Wasn’t As Sharp As Steel
I worked in a machine shop. One of the lathe operators left the bar of cold-rolled steel that he was turning hanging out the back. When he turned the machine on, it literally deformed and turned into a helicopter blade that ripped the back of the machine apart and eventually flew off at high speed. Luckily no one got hit by it. If so, they would’ve been a goner.
12. She Was A Surefire Wreck
I worked at a bar in a small town where we made Moroccan coffees by lighting 151 rum on fire after pouring it into a chalice and sprinkling nutmeg and cinnamon in it. My co-worker was a bubbly and adorable sweetheart, but she was a train wreck. She was making one of those coffees, and after she lit the booze on fire, she decided she needed more of it in the glass.
She just started pouring 151 into the glass on top of the flame. Fire darted up the stream of liquid from the glass to the bottle—which popped the pour spout off—and lit the whole bar and a customer’s jacket on fire as flaming 151 spilled over the back of the bar counter. The customer started hitting his arm, trying to put it out, but it wasn’t working.
He ran outside and threw it on the asphalt and started stomping on it. We stood there, too shocked to do anything, for a good five seconds before anyone even reacted. It happened so fast. It didn’t seem real. There were no water pitchers anywhere, and we didn’t want to just pour water all over the bar because that’s where the computer and all of the electrical wiring were.
We grabbed a wet bar rag from the sanitizer bucket and poured it over the fire, and put it out. The best part is the girl who lit the customer on fire was the daughter of the Fire Marshal of the small town where our bar was.
13. He Got Cracked
The office we worked in was shut down due to the pandemic, 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 went and turned his camera off.
However, he forgot to put himself on mute. More than a hundred 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.
14. Feng Shui All The Way
Someone who had just been hired decided that a spare computer lab needed to be redesigned for better feng shui. He did so without realizing that the lab was designed in a haphazard way thanks to a fluke of the building interfering with the computer network. The entire lab was then rendered useless. He was gone within an hour.
15. What A Bird-Brain!
I worked in a veterinary hospital for a good number of years. One day, unknown to me, some little girl had found a lifeless/declining seagull with her family and brought it in to see if we could help it. Unfortunately, it had died by the time they arrived. Our veterinary technician took the bird for disposal but was too busy to deal with it. That’s when he made a gruesome mistake.
Instead of taking a quick minute to put it in the freezer, he just packed the box with the deceased bird into our storage area with dozens of similar boxes and just left it there. Days went by—while he was still working—and I came back on shift, and something was seriously rank in the office. Customers were complaining.
No one knew what the cause was. Eventually, I found the box buried beneath other supplies. I walked up to my head receptionist and said, "So...seagull"? I watched the absolute fury grow in her eyes. The tech did not last long after that.
16. I Had To Clean Up Her Act
An employee poured sink cleaning solution into the ice cream machine instead of the cream mixture. I had to stop them. They said, "I'm sure it'll be fine. It was only a little", not realizing that it would poison people. I didn’t even know how she could have possibly mixed the two up. The containers didn't look anything alike.
The cleaning solution came in big plastic jugs with screwtops, and the ice cream came in cardboard cartons that you had to cut open. 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.
17. The Wanderer
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 along 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, "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". Meanwhile, she was the one who gathered the group and left the play area. She was the one who "wandered off". She got mad when I went to the administration about the incident.
18. Location, Location, Location!
When my brother passed, the hearse took the funeral procession to the wrong cemetery. My brother was being buried at a different cemetery than the rest of our family had been, next to his son. As we pulled into the cemetery, there was an obviously confused groundskeeper staring at us. He knew he hadn't opened any graves that day.
I called the funeral home, and they called the hearse, which made a loop around. As we drove back past on the way out, I rolled down my window and shouted to the groundskeeper, "We've changed our minds".
19. Some High-Level Fall Out
I worked as a Radiation Protection Tech at a power plant that was refueling. My job was to sit outside of a contaminated area, and if anyone wanted to take something out of the site, such as tools, etc., I had to make sure it didn't have any radioactive particles on it. To do that, I had to wipe the tool with something like a tissue and then hold the tissue up to a machine called a frisker.
If the needle on the frisker went above a threshold, then the tool had to be cleaned or left in the area. One day, I came back to relieve a guy who had been sitting outside the area for two hours. He told me there had been no issues, and everything had cleared. But I noticed something that he hadn’t. I looked at the frisker, leaned over, and turned the machine on.
20. She Was A Fish Out Of Water
We had a volunteer who 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. Two hours later, I returned to the office, and she was in tears.
She said, "I swear I didn't do anything! There were just fish everywhere all of a sudden"! I looked at the computer, and the aquarium screen saver was on. After her little breakdown, she had to take the rest of the afternoon off.
21. He Was All Washed Up
One of the plumbers at the university my stepfather worked for unscrewed the big bolt/stopper thing at the elbow of a urinal flusher without shutting the water off first. It flew off with enough force to give him a massive bruise on his chest. Then, the gushing water proceeded to flood three floors of the building while he ran around looking for the shut-off valve.
22. This Patient Almost Got Rubbed Out
I used to work as a pharmacy tech. Most antibiotics for kids come as a powder in a bottle. We add distilled water to make it into a liquid upon receiving prescriptions, as the solution only remains stable for 10 to 14 days, depending. One day, a father dropped an amoxicillin prescription for a child. The product was prepared and given to the father. He left.
Two hours later, he came back. He said that the medication smelled funny. I thought, "Duh, medications often do". I still wafted the scent with my hand to my nose, and he was right—something was off. I give the bottle to the pharmacist. He agreed and made another bottle right away. The original bottle smelled like straight-up alcohol.
In the lab, we kept multiple solvents for many uses—water, simple syrup, mineral oil, ethanol, etc. One of the techs added ethanol to the antibiotic instead of water. We were all flabbergasted at how the mistake could have occurred because all the solvents are different sizes, have different colored labels, and are identified in giant letters. We identified the tech who was guilty of the mistake, and they couldn't even say how that error occurred.
23. Techno Twit
I worked for a non-profit that hired a guy in fundraising purely “for his Rolodex”. They didn’t care about any of his job functions as long as he kept bringing in more rich people to fundraising parties. When the pandemic hit and we were forced to go remote, it became clear how incompetent he was with technology and how he had been coasting for years in the office by sticking to phone calls instead of emails, etc.
We had our first major online fundraiser coming up, and I warned my boss that this dude had no idea how Zoom worked. He never muted himself, had his camera up his nose, and treated it like watching a YouTube video. However, he was the guy inviting all the rich people to the event, so they didn’t want to “lecture him about a computer program” and “hurt his ego”. Big mistake.
Then came our massive 200+ person Zoom event. He set his laptop on his bathroom counter and proceeded to take a shirtless, nasty old man dump—complete with grunting, splashing, and squelching. It was so loud it drowned out the speaker. They had to end the event early because they had no way to mute him, and it kept going for a full two minutes without stopping. I nearly threw my laptop out a window that night.
24. He Was Dumb No Matter How You Slice It
I was making pizza. A guy broke the pizza board that you use to slide the pizza into the oven. I found the other one, and he lost that one too. 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. There was no more pizza that day.
25. No One Wanted ‘Smore Of That
I worked at a summer camp. The employees were usually college students, but one time we hired this guy in his early 40s. At the onset, it seemed like no big deal, he was just trying to act like he was 20. Slowly things got weirder. He kept getting in trouble for strange things. He got caught at least three times working shirtless with the kids.
He would be out canoeing and rip off his shirt and life jacket, or he would be lying in the middle of the park with no shirt on. No one was really comfortable with him because he seemed like he was trying to relive his glory days. Then, we had an overnight training. It started at 9 AM and went to 3 PM the following day. We were about to discover just how bizarre he truly was.
It was a camp, so we set up our tents around the site for the overnight portion. He was his usual self at the start of the day, but throughout the day, he kept sneaking off to his tent for a few minutes at a time. He had set his tent up much further away from everyone else, so he would disappear for 10–20 minute increments.
He was acting weirder and weirder as the day went on. He took off his shirt while the boss was talking and threw it in the fire screaming “WOOOO”!! He started talking about his ex-wife a lot and was yelling at the birds. Things got really uncomfortable when he started talking about the birds and the bees. Around dinner time, he got up, ran to his car, and peeled out of the parking lot so fast that his tires were screeching.
We thought he was gone and were happy, thinking we could move on with our training. About an hour later, we heard his car fly back into the parking lot. Our manager started shaking her head, saying, “Oh God, he’s back”. I thought it couldn’t get weirder—I was wrong. Soon after, we saw homeboy running at top speed out of the woods and cannonball into the lake. He then got out—in his birthday suit.
He walked over to where we were all sitting and started doing the helicopter. He put his arms around both of my bosses and declared his love for them. At that point, we could all smell him. He reeked like a distillery. He asked us when we were all taking our clothes off and encouraged us to “get this party started”. Finally, he was escorted out.
Someone went to clean up his tent and found he had been smoking out of pop cans and had a bunch of booze bottles. The worst part was he was scheduled for a shift the next Monday at 11 AM, and he texted us saying he would be late for his shift because he had a meeting with the boss. Needless to say, he didn’t make it to the shift after that.
26. He Was Zoned Out
One of my reports missed a 9 AM meeting, and when I asked him why, he said, “You said the meeting was at 12, not 9”! Of course, I was very confused because the meeting invite said 9 AM and everyone else on the team knew it was at nine as well. So, he sent me a screenshot of his Outlook calendar, and it turned out he just had all his stuff set to the wrong time zone.
27. Grin And Bear It
I worked with someone in the dementia ward who thought it was a good idea to put all the patients’ false teeth into a bowl together to soak. It took us weeks to try and match the correct patient to their teeth. None of them were marked up in any way with the patients’ names. I doubt the correct teeth ended up with the right patient—it was all guesswork.
28. He Got Singled Out For His Stupidity
My wife worked at a gas station and found out her co-worker—who had been there for years— had been refilling the napkin dispenser by cramming the napkins in one at a time through the front slot. She walked up and unfastened the back, and apparently, his jaw hit the floor. He had never considered that there might be a better way to do this.
29. He Thought He Was As Right As Rain
I have a list a mile long of the nonsense our completely incompetent project manager did. He insisted that a $3,000 load of fertilizer still absolutely had to be delivered as previously scheduled despite the company warning against it, as we were expecting heavy rains that day. The entire pile was washed away within a couple of hours.
30. Going Against The Tide
I managed a construction security team for a beachfront project which required 24-hour on-site patrol. I ran the daytime team, and my friend ran the graveyard shift. As it was a dredging operation, we had to have two guys posted near the shore to make sure civilians weren't running into the area. Think of a square on the beach with a guard on each corner.
One night, we couldn't find one of our night guards, and his phone was sending calls to voicemail. When I discovered where he was, I was stunned. It turned out that he had set up a folding chair in the sand at 2 AM and fell asleep at his post, only to get wrecked by high tide an hour later. His phone and everything in his pockets was destroyed, and he went home soaking wet without telling anyone.
He later got fired for driving a company ATV off a sand bank and getting it stuck.
31. Step-Off
I was doing a tile repair in the lobby of a Taco Bell. I had to build it up on a heavy layer of thin-set mortar. I had my son's buddy helping me. He was a super nice kid but not the brightest. We got the whole thing laid down and level. There were about ten 12x12 inch tiles, two rows wide. I said to him, “Okay, whatever you do, don't step on it”. He replied, "Okay, boss", stood up, and stepped directly on it. I had to pull it all up and redo it.
32. Cool It, Lady!
I was working in IT at a hospital. We had received a call regarding a computer that was not turning on, so I went to one of the offices. This wasn't strange because we got these types of calls all the time. Ninety-five percent of those calls were due to "user mistake", so I was bracing myself for the worst—however, not to this extent.
When I arrived, I confirmed that the computer would not power on. I first examined the plug. It was affixed to the wall and appeared to be in good working order in the computer's back office. I asked, "So, what were you doing when this computer stopped working"? She responded, "Well, I thought it was too hot, so I used the water cooling option".
The computer featured a fan port on the top of the machine that looked like a funnel. She pointed to the fan port when she said "water-cooled". When I returned to my desk with the sloshing PC, my IT colleagues were bewildered as to why I had pulled the machine without permission. Then, I emptied the water into a garbage pail.
33. She Was Almost Toast
I worked in an open-plan office with a small kitchen area at one end with a microwave, kettle, sink, toaster, and water cooler. We saw one of the managers fiddling with the toaster for a while. She looked like she was trying to clean it. It never occurred to her to remove the crumb tray. Instead, she was poking around inside it with a knife while it was still plugged into the wall.
People just sat back and watched, wondering how long it would be before she got zapped. Then she turned on the tap and lifted the toaster towards the sink. Someone finally stepped in to stop her. One might just write this off as someone being a bit dim, but she was the Health and Safety Officer for the building.
34. Wheel On Out
I worked in home healthcare. My client was moving to another area, so I was training my replacement as the new area was quite a bit of a drive for me. We went over loading and unloading my client from a wheelchair to a vehicle and from a vehicle to a wheelchair. Things were going well, and I thought the new guy got it.
We took my client to the doctor. The client said he wanted the new guy to load and unload him by himself as I won't be there to supervise. It made perfect sense since I was still there in case something went wrong—and it did! The client told me to go into the doctor's office and get him checked in while the new guy unloaded him.
I should have stayed with them the entire time, but the client was insistent that the new guy could handle things. We had gone over this several times in training and believed he would be fine. The new guy got the client out of the car and into the wheelchair fine. He then backed the chair away from the car so he could grab the client's bag and close the door. But there was one crucial thing that he forgot.
The numbskull neglected to engage the brakes on the wheelchair before letting go of the chair. The wheelchair was on a slight incline. He turned to grab the bag, and the client started rolling backward down the slope. I happened to notice and dashed out of the office. The receptionist was out the door right behind me as the client was rolling down the parking lot.
The new guy was still digging in the car. So, the receptionist and I took off after the client. The dude rolled down the parking lot, across the road, and into a ditch. My client missed his doctor's appointment as we had to take him to get checked out at the local emergency room. We also had to talk to the local authorities.
The client was fine, and the new guy lost his job. I ended up staying at that job for another two months, making the long drive daily while they looked for another replacement. A new guy came on board and couldn’t seem to grasp why we were so focused on making sure he understood how the brakes worked until we told him the tale of the runaway wheelchair.
35. Someone Rescue Me From This Guy
When I was in the coastguard, there was an incident when a vessel called in what they thought was another vessel in distress, but they couldn't be sure. The watch commander kept refusing to launch the rescue boat until he had more details. We were in the Far North. The life expectancy of a person in the water without a survival suit was measured in single-digit minutes.
We could always get more details when the boat was en route. The exact position of a bunch of floating corpses was of limited value. After three or four minutes, I just said “forget it” and launched the boat. It turned out the suspected casualty's radio was banjaxed, but they were otherwise fine. Their boat had a very low freeboard and looked a bit “sinky”.
I fully expected to be canned for it, but I was not. The old man had a long conversation with the guy about how nobody will ever find fault with sending an asset to a possible false alarm, but failing to send an asset to a real emergency is not good. Before I had joined, the same dude had shrugged off a red flare report as a hoax. Two people lost their lives in that one.
36. Guest Not
During the pandemic, we were not allowed to check in regular, private guests in our hotel, only people visiting on business. One night, a couple came in begging to get a room because they had huge water damage in their place, which made it unliveable at the time. My co-worker turned them down. The next day a sketchy dude came in and asked for a room, claiming he was there for business.
He didn’t have any proof and paid for half of the room with cash. My colleague didn't take a credit card from him. In the morning, we made a chilling discovery. The dude was gone, the hotel room was completely trashed, and the TV was missing. My colleague hadn’t taken an ID or passport, and the name and address he gave didn't exist. The hotel also had to pay a fine since she checked in a private person who had no proof of doing business in the city.
37. Sweet Jesus, What An Idiot!
I was doing culinary training in advanced patisserie. We were making sugar sculptures from isomalt. We had to bring in torches to “weld” parts of our sculpture together. Our instructor explained step by step what to do with the isomalt and explained that when we had our pieces molded and cooled, he would show us how to use the torch.
Many of us were busy molding and cooling our pieces before assembling our sculptures. One of the students who shared a station with me was overly hasty and thought he could just assemble his sculpture without the instructor. He turned on his torch, set his sculpture on a surface that was covered in plastic wrap, and proceeded to set fire to everything around him.
At that point, I was roaring at him to stop, but he just brushed me off and screamed back that he knew what he was doing. Before we knew it, the plastic wrap was on fire. We quickly grabbed fire blankets, and the instructor managed to put it out, but not before we all had the bejesus scared out of us. The instructor chewed out the student for being so reckless.
38. This Employee Made His Mark
I worked at a retail store that sold big appliances. One gentleman who had been working there for a few years was working the register. A couple came in to buy a washer and dryer using cash, more specifically $100 bills. To check if they were real, my co-worker had to mark every bill with one of those counterfeit pens.
If the bills are fake, the mark will be a dark color, and if they are real, it will be yellowish. Every single mark turned black, so he called the authorities. Officers came, and what they found was hilarious. It turned out my co-worker used a permanent marker, not the special pen, to check each of the $100 bills.
39. Half-Witted Helper
I hired a new employee on a Friday. I gave him directions for Monday morning’s job site. I had no idea what stupidity he had in store for me. The employee got there early and helped some guys load all of the building material onto their truck. Then they took off. They were thieves, and the webcam showed the employee even stopping traffic so they could take off with the loot.
40. This Guy Was The Pits
I was working with the maintenance guy on the bottom of a grain leg in a concrete pit. It was about 6 feet wide, 15 feet long, by 7 feet tall. It was a tight workspace with a conveyor in the middle and one ladder out. We had a stuck nut and bolt that he sprayed penetrating oil on. He immediately forgot what he had just done and decided to heat it with a torch.
In an instant, there were flames up to the ceiling, and smoke filled the space. He was trapped in a corner while I was able to get an extinguisher. By the time I got back—30 seconds—he had it knocked down by frantically smacking it with gloves and smothering it. He was a good guy, just ditzy sometimes.
41. I Wanted To Send Her Packing
A woman was hired into a position that I was doing the work for and promised a promotion to. I tried to stay positive, but she was an idiot. She came to me asking for help double-checking all the inventory that had been sent out over the past year. It was an important task because we were a pharmaceutical manufacturer that worked with controlled substances.
The company was way behind the times, so while the current inventory was accounted for via a spreadsheet, most of the records prior to that were just paper packing slips in sleeve protectors in a binder. I helped her get started and went back to trying to get my own work done. Then, I heard a commotion. She was berating our manufacturing crew because the count was off by 13 cases.
She was going bananas, calling people names, and getting our operations director involved. He came over to me and calmly asked me to double-check her count. She stood over me like a gargoyle while I flipped through the binder. I got to one day’s particularly large shipment and pulled the very obviously multi-page packing slip out of the sleeve protector. She went white.
42. A Clear Case Of Stupidity
Back in the day, I worked as a tree surgeon, and each morning, the crews would assemble in the garage, where the boss would hand out a 3x5 card with the address and instructions on what needed to be done. There was a guy who misread the address on the card, and they went to the wrong address. The instructions were to cut down all trees and shrubs in preparation for demolition work.
Before the crew left, the boss said the house was being torn down for new construction, so the job was to clean out the whole lot. This guy got the crew to the wrong address, and the foreman never checked the card. Therefore, he started cutting down big trees and throwing them through the chipper. The whole lot was cleaned of all shrubs and trees by mid-afternoon, and they went back to the shop.
The boss was hopping mad. He said, “Where were you guys? I went out to the job, and you weren’t there”. I wish I were there to see his face when the foreman told them they had finished the job. I can’t imagine coming home and finding my big two-foot thick trees, along with all my mature azaleas and rhododendrons, gone.
43. Keep On Trucking
I worked at a small-time aircraft maintenance and supply place. They had opened a new hangar down the road and ordered new toolsets. It was a holiday weekend, and the resident moron was visiting family in the same city as the tool supplier, so they sent him to pick them up. They bought him a ticket to go down on a Wednesday, and then on Monday—after his vacation—he would rent a box truck and pick up the tool sets.
Having this guy pick up the tools was only slightly cheaper and not that much faster than other options. He rented the truck and picked up the tools the day he got to town. He then proceeded to park the unlocked truck somewhere in the city. He picked up the empty truck on Monday. He didn’t call the authorities, the company, his supervisor—no one. He just drove the empty truck back. It cost the company over $150K.
44. She Was A Doggone Dimwit
I worked at a vet clinic. We had a contract with a local pet cemetery to do cremation services for the animals that pass or get euthanized. The remains are shipped back to us with a packing list that we have to sign and mail back stating that we got all the urns and that they were in good condition. We had one employee unpack and put away a shipment of urns and sign the form.
She then proceeded to throw the box in the dumpster with the last urn still in it. But that’s not the worst part. What made the situation really infuriating was that the urn contained MY pet's ashes. The package came in on my day off, and when I came in the next day, I saw the clinic's copy of the packing list with my pet's name on it, but there was no urn to be found.
Fortunately, another co-worker had the idea to check the dumpster, and the urn was still there.
45. It Wasn’t A Pretty Picture
I worked in a camera store. My co-worker worked in our lab that printed pictures and processed film. We had a machine that developed film automatically. All we had to do was load it and change the chemicals every once in a while. Since film is light sensitive, if it's exposed to light before it goes through the chemicals, the film is ruined, and there won't be any pictures to make from it.
My co-worker was working on his computer when the film machine started beeping. He went over to the machine and opened it up while the film was running through it, exposing the film. Our head lab guy started yelling at him, "Close it, you're exposing film"! Not only that, but the machine had a screen that said what the problem was and when film was being processed.
I had no idea why he felt the need to open it. The guy barely lasted a month.
46. He Was Out Of Order
I worked at a chain pizza store. It was Saturday night, and it was busy, as Saturdays usually are. This employee took it upon himself to unplug the router, disabling the store’s internet and thus online orders without telling anyone. When I arrived Sunday morning, the internet was out, and I spent all morning trying to fix it.
Finally, we called our internet service provider, and they sent out a tech on Tuesday morning. We were without online ordering Saturday night and all of Sunday and Monday and probably lost about $3K in business. Once the internet was back up, I was able to check the networked security cameras. I watched him unplug it and later plug it back in incorrectly.
When questioned about it, he lied, stating the cables got knocked out on accident. He was fired on Tuesday.
47. He Was A Security Breach
I worked security at a hospital desk during the start of the pandemic. A security bulletin had gone out about an escaped psychiatric patient with a history of being violent and obsessive towards pregnant women. He had gotten loose during a patient transfer because he was being taken to a secure prison psych facility. We were told to be extra careful of who we sent to the OB/GYN floor. I was worried—but I had no idea just how nightmarish it would be.
He showed up at our desks and asked for directions to the maternity ward. Before I could make up an excuse to stall him, my co-worker told him where it was! I freaked out and said how that was the escaped patient, thinking my co-worker hadn't paid attention or something. My dumb co-worker said, "Oh, yeah, I know. That was definitely him, but I'm sure that it'll be fine. The whole ‘violent and obsessive towards pregnant women’ thing is probably an exaggeration. People can be so sensitive".
This idiot didn't even think to call security and let them know he was on his way up. I yelled at a different co-worker to call security and then had to run and hurl myself into the elevator with him and distract him until security got to us. My co-worker was fired really fast. That was the only time I was actually happy to see someone let go.
48. Witless Waitress
I worked in a restaurant that didn’t serve booze on Sundays, so there was no one behind the bar, but our lemonade was kept there. Someone, one of the new waitresses made a dire mistake. She filled a child’s cup with pre-mixed margarita, thinking it was lemonade. The worst part was that the child drank it all before his grandparents noticed the cup smelled like booze.
They were religious, non-drinkers, and the grandfather was a state police officer. They were obviously outraged, but our manager was able to talk them out of pressing any type of charges. The waitress was allowed to keep her job but quit shortly after that.
49. His Mistake Was Clear
I worked at Starbucks. I had a newish co-worker come up to me and ask why the water was going straight through the coffeemaker and not changing color. I had seen him brew coffee regularly before, so I went over to check. He was trying to brew coffee without grinding the coffee beans. I still have a good laugh about that every once in a while.
50. Bride Of Chuckie
I was a wedding photographer. I worked with many videographers I liked—but then there was Chuck. This dude was entirely incompetent at his job. He had messed up my pictures more than a few times before. I was working with Chuck for a very large Catholic wedding that probably cost more than I made in a year.
Chuck was walking backward down the aisle for that "dramatic" feel when he suddenly walked right into a giant decoration. It was a 5-foot-tall glass vase filled with glass beads and feathers. The thing came crashing down during their ceremony, shattered, and beads flew everywhere. The church went completely silent before the officiant slowly continued.
The bride and groom tried to ensure him that everything was okay, but the bride stared daggers at Chuck for the rest of the night.
Sources: Reddit,
