Lenny said it best on The Simpsons when he told the world, “Eh, everybody makes mistakes. That’s why they put erasers on pencils.” It's human nature to screw up from time to time and we need to be forgiving when those instances occur. However, mistakes come in different sizes and some are so massive that no amount of metaphorical erasers can fix the damage they cause. A collection of the most spectacular work mistakes was put together from Reddit threads and shared below for our readers' enjoyment...or as a precautionary measure, depending on how they want to look at it.
1. Even Losers Can Be Winners
Someone bought $100 in lottery tickets and then convinced my dumb coworker to give him a refund on the losing ones.
2. Safety First
A guy I worked with was measuring high voltages and let the HT probe touch the metal chassis of the instrument, which he also had his other hand resting on. We heard the zap from the other end of the lab.
3. Nothing’s Gone Forever
I work at a valet company. A week ago, a coworker pulls out his phone and shows me one of his friends Snapchat story. This friend also works for the company. The video is of him and another employee doing a burnout in a customer’s car. Needless to say, neither of them work there anymore.
4. Built Toyota Tough
Someone I worked with at a Toyota dealership didn't rack an SUV properly on the lift and it fell off. It really did way less damage than I thought, but he was fired on the spot.
5. Difference Between Life and Death
A guy working on a small herb farm was supposed to spray fertilizer on all the plants, but sprayed weed killer instead.
6. Don’t Judge a Truck by Its Size
TODAY was my buddies first day with his work truck. He was getting gas and assumed that because it was a big truck, that it took diesel. It did not take diesel.
7. You Get What You Pay for
I used to work at a fried chicken chain. It sucked and I eventually quit. A week after I quit, the night crew decided they didn't feel like putting the boxes away from a truck shipment. Someone could deal with it the next day. A few days and several reports of food poisoning later, they got in a load of trouble. Boxes were full of raw chicken. So glad I quit.
8. What Goes Around Comes Around
I used to work in a grocery store and I had an HR person repeatedly “lose” my doctor’s note stating that I have Reynaud’s Syndrome and couldn’t be in the freezer. I got a stack of them from the doctor and would have to bring in a new one every few weeks. Finally, I had a department head fax a copy in to corporate for me before dropping off yet another copy to the HR jerk.
The next week the HR jerk called me into her office and told me I was going to have to put the frozen load for bakery away. I told her I couldn’t do it and I had a note on file. She told me she didn’t have any paperwork on file for me and that she could “make me do anything she wanted to.” I called my department manager into the office and told him what she had said.
He got corporate on the phone and asked if they had received the copy of my doctor’s note detailing the fact that I had Reynaud’s Syndrome and had already previously gotten frostbite at work from being forced to be in the freezer when I wasn’t supposed to be. They said they had it, and he then told them what the HR jerk had said.
He then handed the HR jerk the phone. She had to hold the phone about a foot and a half away from her face because they were yelling at her so loud. It was one of the most satisfying days ever working there. She went on leave shortly after that and never came back, and the official story was that she was having health problems
9. Adding Another Entrance
Worked in a single story cinder block office with parking spaces out front. There was a big window that overlooked the parking lot. We had an older engineer—early 70s—that worked there. He pulled up one morning in his parking spot and must have gotten the brakes and the gas confused. He drove the car right through the window, taking out some of the wall with it.
I can still remember seeing him gripping the steering wheel with this terrified look in his eyes while he kept slamming on the gas. The car must have gotten stuck on something because it would just lurch forward and the engine would rev. Luckily he didn't kill anyone. He retired soon after that.
10. Do You Know Who That Is?
One time this complete idiot I worked with in the shipyards—a pipe welder—was torching a pipe next to lagging, which is what helps insulate Navy ships. Instead of taking five minutes, at most, to use a blade to remove said lagging, the idiot welded the pipe and torched the lagging. It doesn’t burst into flames but there was a LOT of smoke, and ended up getting the ship evacuated.
He got fired two weeks later because while his write up was pending, he put a ladder in the middle of a passageway, which is extremely tight when you consider the heavy equipment moving through. When he was asked to move, the welder told the person asking to screw off, and when you tell that to the shipyard director—well, you tend to get fired.
11. That Didn’t Take Long
My coworker sold someone an auto insurance policy but forgot to check the effective date. Turns out she had pushed the start date of the policy out a month. Guy got into an accident a few days later. Cumulatively, we probably spent 10 plus hours on the phone trying to get claims to cover this guy’s accident. She ended up messing up the effective date on about 10 other policies before she left.
12. Didn’t Think That Through
My ex-roommate and I were planning a trip overseas. He got his time off approved but forgot to turn in his PTO—paid time-off—request. He had accrued two weeks of it and wanted to get paid while sitting on the beach. He waited until the last minute to turn it in, his last shift before our departure. Only problem is the PTO request form required a signature from the general manager, who was off that night.
So what did he do? He forged his GM’s signature and turned it into payroll. Like they wouldn’t notice it looked different. Or like his GM wouldn’t see the flag pop up in payroll and wouldn’t remember that he definitely did not approve ex-roommate’s request. Of course, payroll confirmed with the GM, and the GM said, “Nah, I didn’t approve that and that’s definitely not my signature,” and ex-roommate was fired within 24 hours.
13. Skipping a Few Steps
I'm a welfare caseworker. A few months ago, I got a call from a client wondering what was going on with her case. I read the case comments and found that one of my more intellectual coworkers shut down this case and assessed a FIVE YEAR overpayment on this client for her cash aid, basically saying that all the aid she had ever received was fraudulent and she needed to pay it all back.
Her reasoning? There was a glitch in the system that made this woman's child show as a resident in a different county. Rather than following established protocol and calling this woman, or ordering a fraud investigation from our literal unit of full-time investigators, or anything else that would make sense, she went out of her way to make this woman's life hard.
For the record, I called the other county and the worker I spoke with confirmed that the child was no longer a resident, his father had reported to them that the family was moving to our county five years ago, and they'd been trying, unsuccessfully, to update his county residence ever since. Because I caught the phone call, I had to unscrew the case and close out the overpayment.
14. A Bloody Bad Time
I work in a blood bank and we sent some blood to the floor for a nurse to transfuse into a specific patient. Different nurse picked it up, doesn't look at the label, doesn't look at the patient name, doesn't do any of the three electronic checks and sticks it into a patient. Transfused the whole bag and then decides to “let us know she made a simple mistake no big deal thanks bye.”
Thank God the blood type matched or she would've killed that patient. We're freaking out and filing reports to managers and the FDA. She gets a slap on the wrist and is transfusing the same patient later that day
15. You Snooze You Lose
This one time I worked at a company who made shelter cloth. Like for orchards. It was woven from plastic thread. There were these huge banks of needles that just ran and ran making these giant rolls of cloth. The night shift guy was pretty new and the night shift was just him and the machine. It would take most of the shift to do a full roll with setup and take down.
The lunchroom was baffled because the production floor was pretty noisy. So the night shift guy basically just had to babysit the weaver all night and then change the roll out and set up for day shift. I came in early one morning because I wanted to pick up some gear I’d left in my locker and I walk into the unholiest nightmare you have ever seen.
A Gordian knot at least 30 feet high. The dude had sat there until like 2 AM. The darkest part of the night. Then he decided to smoke a joint in the lunchroom and had fallen asleep. He woke up hours later to the sound of the weaver smashing itself to pieces. One of the needle banks had moved during the night and he hadn’t seen the warning indicator.
So then it had worked its way loose. Then snapped, then flipped over and snapped the one next to it. Then it had made hundreds and hundreds of meters of screwed up Frankenstein cloth with giant kilometer long thread bunches. I walked into him screaming. He had woken up 15 minutes prior and had not got past freaking out.
I could think clearer than him so I went and got the big forklift and pulled this huge birds nest off the machine. He took it way out back of the yard and hid it from view. Then we grabbed some spare needle banks and slammed them in and likewise hid the busted up ones in the dumpster. Then we started feeding in a new roll and just got the machine going again when the day shift came in.
They were surprised that the night guy had got through the overnight materials so fast but since it happened sometimes when the machine behaved they didn’t make a big deal. I went back to university about two months later and never found out if the story continued. But the crazed look of the night shift guy screaming and holding his chest has stayed with me for 30 years.
16. Who Put That There?
Someone was using a scissor lift to paint the inside wall of our warehouse. This warehouse area had, in the past, contained a small office, which according to code required a sprinkler head inside the office. There was a long pipe extending down from the ceiling that now just had a sprinkler head pointed at the ground because the office had been removed.
The operator of the scissor lift did not realize this pipe was here and ran into it with the scissor lift. The pipe broke off in spectacular fashion, spewing disgusting 30-year-old black water all over the warehouse for an hour before anyone came in to help him because it was the weekend. The water had pooled up so much it created a river, which flowed directly into the office area.
I was watching on the cameras since I was at home, far from the warehouse. The look on the guy's face was truly heartbreaking. I do remember the CEO of the company being there in his weekend attire helping clean up. He walked into the office area where the guy who broke the sprinkler was. I could see the dread on his face.
Almost brought a tear to my eye when I saw the CEO give him a pat on the back and a hug. That place was full of wild stories like this.
17. Self-Parting Gift
In 2009, we had some layoffs—like a lot of businesses—and one of those let go was a mechanic. Since most of the mechanics bring in their own toolboxes, when one leaves the company they need to load up their box. The screw up was that the supervisor of the shop that day did not pay attention/stick around while the mechanic was loading his box.
The mechanic not only took his box, he helped himself to several company-owned pieces of equipment totaling $18,000. But because the supervisor was not doing his job, there was no proof that the mechanic took those items. This is the same supervisor who didn't notice when a huge spool of copper wire somehow rolled itself out of the building.
Said supervisor no longer works here either.
18. Costly Mistake
I'm a cashier in a pharmacy. Anyone that works in the medical field knows that patient privacy is super important. When a patient picks up their prescription, we have to scan the receipt of their medication to the computer. This is unique to each individual prescription, so if it does not match, we accidentally grabbed someone else's medication.
It catches mistakes before we make them. The alternative to scanning is typing the RX number into the computer. This doesn't guarantee a match. Only comparing the number on the receipt with the number on the computer will work if the barcode won't work. One day, while I was on break, someone came in looking for a prescription.
The girl covering my post clearly confirmed the date of birth, but grabbed someone else's prescription by mistake. Two people with the same last name were next to each other in the fridge, but she didn't scan the receipt, so her mistake was not caught. She typed the number she saw on the computer, had the person sign for their medication, and gave them someone else's medication.
Not 20 minutes later, the patient calls and tells us that what he received was not intended for him. We of course apologized and he came back to get his medication. The sad thing is, once something leaves the store, it cannot be returned. We can dispose of it, but we cannot use it for someone else, even if it is sealed. This particular medication cost $4,000, and we had to throw it out.
This plus the breach of privacy did not stand well and she was written up for her mistake. She doesn't use cash much anymore and is confined to packaging.
19. Should’ve Asked a Fourth Time
I was once a bank teller. One day, a guy comes in to pay off a line of credit that he shares with his son. Apparently, his son is a drug addict and ran the line of credit balance up to $10,000—maxing it out. The guy comes in, talks to my fellow teller, pays it off, and signs to close it out. He asked my coworker at least three times that it was closed.
She assures him that it is, but she is also addicted to her phone and lends most of her attention to it. Guy leaves. Several months later, the same guy comes in enraged with a line of credit bill. He comes to my window and explains the situation. He thought it was closed. It turns out that our bank’s policy—not sure if this is universal—is that both his son and him have to sign off to close it out unless there was some sort of special circumstances that never happened.
Dude owed another $10,000 because of course his son isn’t going to sign off on closing it out if he can run up the balance again. He says he is going to sue. I point him in the direction of someone more qualified than me. My manager tells me he has a good case and will probably beat our corporate bank in court. I’m just a teller.
Some days it’s good to be at the bottom. Glad it wasn’t me that messed it up.
20. We’re Gonna Need More Knives
I worked at Arby's in 2016. It's approaching 10 PM and everybody working really wants to go home. The guy making sandwiches accidentally gets some bread stuck in the toaster oven. For some reason, he uses a knife with a plastic handle to try and get it out. The knife gets stuck so he uses a second knife to get the first knife and the bread out.
That knife gets stuck, and he uses a third knife to get the other two knives and the bread out. Now, all the knives are stuck in the toaster oven and the plastic handles start to melt.
21. Good Luck Paying That Off
I was in the Navy and a first class Collateral Duty Quality Assurance Representative was heading up a jack job on our jet—it was basically a Boeing 707 with the passenger seats gutted. I was in my shop getting ready for a work order on another jet with the rest of my shift and we hear this terrible loud noise. We all head out to see what's up.
He rushed through the motions and dropped the jet onto the hangar bay floor. He dropped a $140 million aircraft while they were changing a tire.
22. A Faster Way to Paint
We had a guy who wasn't trained in the use of forklifts decide to get on one without a spotter and move a pallet of multiple five-gallon paint buckets to—do something. I'm not sure what he was thinking. Instead of moving them properly he rammed the tines of the forklift into the containers ON the pallet, meaning several five-gallon buckets of paint ruptured.
All over the forklift and the floor. He freaked out and turned it, smacking into a shelf-rack frame and bending that, which ended up needing to be replaced. And the paint fouled up the forklift mechanisms. Naturally, he was fired. Pretty much on the spot.
23. That’s One Way to Test It
I watched a tech troubleshooting a cutting laser. Apparently, the safety stop was locked up and he finally got the laser running, but tested it by waving his hand in front of the aperture. Instant third degree burns almost all the way through the palm of his left hand. Smelled like a char-broiler. I never saw him again. I hope he didn't lose all his fingers but I wouldn't be surprised.
24. Crossing the Line
I was working at an amusement park. Guy was operating the log flume. A manager shouts out “crossing” cause she was going to cross through the seats to the other side. Guy operating repeats back “crossing” and shows the hand sign that indicates his hands are off the controls. Then he decides to play a little joke and move the flume from one boarding position to the second while the manager was STILL CROSSING.
I cannot express how much they stress the importance of safety here. He was fired before the log flume came to a full and complete stop.
25. Smoking Can Kill in More Ways Than One
It happened when I was in the Guard. Some of our vehicles were inside of the drill hall. I don’t recall why anymore, but for those not familiar with Guard drill halls, they often have a massive garage door setup along one wall so you can move equipment in and out. One of the vehicles was a crane, and when this guy went to move it back outside, he forgot to put the boom down.
It took out a huge chunk of the wall. A couple of friends and I had been smoking by that entrance—yeah, I know, not allowed—and if we’d lingered just a minute longer, the tumble of bricks absolutely would have seriously hurt or killed someone. But, being the Guard, nothing happened to the guy. Still a pretty spectacular screw up, though.
Basically destroying a building. I still have one of the bricks as a souvenir.
26. Quick! They’re Handing Out Free Laptops
I'll volunteer as tribute. But in all seriousness, we check out laptops like library books from the help desk I worked at. There's a whole paperwork form you fill out and you have to show ID, etc. It was when I first started out and I wasn't super clear on everything going on. First job. I checked out probably 10 or more laptops to people with no ID or contracts.
I didn't realize I messed up until someone was with me at the counter when I started checking it out. I covered my own ass and I think we got all the laptops back but holy hell I almost died.
27. Good Riddance
A grad student was invited into a professor’s office for a meeting and was left alone for a moment. There was a pile of cumulative exams on the professor’s desk that had just been freshly graded. These are subject exams for grad students, which are wickedly difficult, and you need to pass four to continue in the program.
This jerk decided he’d take a look at the stack of exams, then upon finding that some of his fellow students did poorly, he took pictures of their grades so he could use them to ridicule them and pass the results around the department. This was a big deal because numerical grades are never given out for these exams, only pass/fail, and also, it’s a pretty big FERPA violation to distribute others’ personal academic information like that.
He was found out almost as soon as he sent the pics around and was dismissed and forbidden from campus immediately. Someone else had to pack up his desk because they were that serious about him never setting foot in the building again.
28. That’s Using Your Head
Not spectacular in a damage cost sense, but the dumbest thing I’ve seen for sure. The guy was about 21 and we had to wear “bump caps” which are like a very thin, small hard hat. Well, we worked in a cabinet shop, and he was using a 3” staple gun. He was having some problems with what he was building and starts tapping himself in the bump cap with the gun.
He had his finger on the trigger and staples his hat to his skull. He kept trying to pull the hat off but it was distorting his face because it was pulling the skin up with it. When the staple hit the bone instead of going through, it spread out under the scalp. They ended up taking him to the hospital to get it removed, and fired him when they got back to work.
29. Slow and Steady
I worked the closing shift in a deli, and one of our more daunting cleaning tasks was cleaning out the chicken rotisserie oven. Part of this included pulling out the drip tray from underneath it. It's about 2' wide, 2' long, and 4" deep, and collects chicken grease all day. It was disgusting and ranged from clear oily liquid to thick gelatinous pink globs.
We had to slowly pull it all the way out, and “carefully” carry it around the corner to the sinks. New guy decided to do it one night after I had already cleaned all the glass and counters, etc. Only he underestimated how full it was, and instead of “carefully” turning the corner, he whipped the tray out and pivoted, spun himself around to head toward the kitchen door, and literally flung chicken grease and goo all over everything.
He flung that thing like a Frisbee, and it splattered all over the glass cases, the counters and the floor. We were there like an hour late cleaning it all up. He was fired just a few weeks later, when he was caught drinking on the job.
30. Learning From Mistakes
I was the resident doing a craniotomy for a patient with a brain mass. It's a procedure where a window of bone is removed from the skull, the brain surgery is performed—in this case, removal of the mass—then the bone flap that was removed is replaced. The mass came out easily enough and we finished up the surgery without any issues.
Then my co-resident picked up the bone to put it back in the skull—and promptly dropped it on the floor. That day I learned there is a protocol for cleaning the bone flap so it can still be used. The patient actually did well, but my colleague has never been able to live that one down.
31. From Bad to Worse
One of my coworkers at a grocery store accidentally locked the only master keyset in the security office and then attempted to break the door down with a claw hammer before anyone could find out. 10 minutes of furious attacking only succeeded in attracting the attention of everyone in the store, breaking off the handle and bending the entire lock, making it inoperable for the locksmith who was brought in later.
32. Doubling Down
I worked at a supermarket back in the day. Customers cash their paychecks at our customer service desk every week. Normally, you print on the back of the check, file it, and give them their money. A coworker gave this guy his money and then handed him his paycheck back. The guy then got back in the same line, and my coworker cashed his check for him again.
33. A New Type of Ink
Yes, I have one, but unfortunately, it was me. So I had a placement in our hospital’s laboratory. On my second day, I had to fill up the documents with the results of the blood tests of one patient. One co-worker watched me. I was so nervous that I mixed up the pen and the blood sample, so when I thought I pulled off the capsule of the pen I actually pulled off the capsule of the blood sample.
I was so into it that I just noticed it was the wrong one when I started writing but then it was too late and all the blood spilled out all over my hand and the table and of course the document. By the way, I wasn’t wearing gloves, but fortunately, it was "just" from a cancer patient, so I didn't get infected or anything.
34. Back to the Drawing Board
I was at a data center installing the fire alarm system. A guy I worked with cut this long run of wire in half between a bunch of pull stations and smoke alarm devices. Typically, a building has to have certain fire circuits be one giant loop of wire that connects to a secure room with a locked panel. Depending on the Fire Marshall that inspects the building to clear it, they can be pretty lenient to full on anal about every little thing.
This guy apparently cut the SLC circuit in multiple spots and T tapped it, basically diverging and dead-ending the circuit which makes it way more prone to issues in the future that service people have to fix. The Fire Marshall walked out of the inspection and failed us when the whole building was meant to be ready to open by next week.
The general contractor was pissed and had us work late to fix everything for three weeks. Now that I've been doing this a bit longer, it's common, but damn, it sucks.
35. World’s Most Expensive Dent
I was working at a refinery one time and a new unit was being built. Someone bumped the insulation of a large distillation column with a lift. There was only a small dent but the whole section had to be replaced. $30,000 later, the person that bumped it was looking for a new job.
36. Think Before You Post
A woman decided to take a picture of a check received in our department and posted it on social media with the caption, “Should I cash it?” It was for over $35,000 with all pertinent information showing on the check. I think she was fired before she even got her first like.
37. American Style Tea
This girl I work with had never opened before, and I was telling her how to brew the iced tea. I told her to grab a tea bag, place it into the coffee holder, put it back, and then turn it on. Easy, right? I also mentioned that the bag is its own filter so you don’t need a coffee filter. Apparently, she took that to mean cut open three bags of tea, dump them no filter into the coffee holder, put it back and run it.
I was honestly super distraught when I came in at the end of her shift and saw what she did. She’s done more stuff, but that’s the best one.
38. Lesson Learned the Expensive Way
One of my first jobs was at a plant that made mining trucks. These things can be as big as a house and very expensive. I was an expeditor, so it was my job to monitor inventory and make sure our orders for parts were on track to be delivered on time, and to resolve any issues if it turned out that something would be late from a supplier.
We had a truck scheduled to leave the plant on a certain day. Part of the contract was that for every day the truck was late, my company had to pay a penalty of like $100,000. So this was a huge deal. We had to watch this thing like a hawk to prevent any delays. Except I neglected to notice a bracket that was worth about $10 had run low and no order had been placed to replenish our stock.
It was scheduled to leave our plant by the end of the day and it couldn’t because we didn’t have a $10 bracket. And it was only reported to me at the end of my work day because it’s a simple install that should only take a few minutes at the end of the line to do. I called my usual emergency suppliers and had to beg one to get their guys to stay late to give us an order so we could attach whatever this part was on to our truck so it didn’t cost us $100,000.
We paid triple what we normally did, but the bracket came in within a couple of hours, and the truck was able to leave the plant in time to make the delivery deadline. It was a really, really good lesson in never neglecting the small stuff. That was about 15 years ago and I’m no longer in that industry, but it’s a lesson I have carried over to all the jobs I have had since.
39. The One Time They Don’t Check
I worked in a really strict hotel cleaning business. When we finished cleaning a room, we’d call our supervisor to let them know. They’d check it, and call us back if anything was wrong. I’m talking like, we’d get railed if we left a single hair in the bathtub, or didn’t fold the toilet paper at the end and would have to bring all of our stuff back to that room just to clean it back up.
Anyway, when things got really tight, sometimes the supervisor wouldn’t check the room at all, but this hardly ever happened and when it did it was usually someone who had worked there for a long time. Everyone was frantically getting called by our supervisors to figure out who had cleaned X room. They didn’t have time to check the room because the guests were already checked in.
The person who cleaned it somehow completely missed a whole bunch of glass on the carpet. The guest cut up their feet and hands—somehow their hands—and made a complaint. It was a huge screw up considering our biggest complaint was probably a dirty shower screen at the time.
40. I Told You so
I'm a dishwasher at a busy restaurant downtown—my town. I had to train a newbie who was 16 years old. I knew him kind of well so I went easy on him for the time being. We stack bowls up on a nearby table for servers and I told him, “Don't stack more than six, or the balance of the bowls will become unstable and they'll fall.” He nodded and we worked.
30 minutes later, I look at the bowls and towers of 14 high bowls were there. I immediately and carefully moved the bowls and told the newbie, “Bro, six high on the bowls.” He said, “I ran out of room.” There was enough room for the bowls we had stacked and I showed him a shelf where he can put more. He nodded and went back to working.
15 minutes later, bowls fall and imagine my surprise when I see him standing in the middle, with a 10 high stack next to him. Breh.
41. A Few Milligrams Won’t Hurt
Doctor wrote a prescription for 80mg of blood pressure meds instead of 20mg. Lady came into the pharmacy because her husband couldn’t get out of bed and his blood pressure monitor wasn't giving a reading. They called an ambulance right away and thankfully, he was OK.
42. Test Drive Gone Wrong
I worked at a nice Chevy dealership a couple years back. It was right when the Corvette ZR1 was just getting released. We got one in that was a pre-order from one of our wealthier clients. It was one of the first off the line—Jay Leno actually has the first. Anyway, one of the salesmen thought it would be a great idea to take it for a quick spin.
I don’t know what he was thinking! How would he account for the miles on the car? This, by the way, is unheard of and never really happens. Well, you guessed it. He crashed it. A $120,000 car—at the time—super charged V8, ordered a year in advance for a customer.
43. Wrong Patient
Somewhat related—20 years ago, my wife had an ectopic pregnancy that went all wrong. She ended up having emergency surgery. So around 2 AM a nurse comes in to hang a new IV bag. I'm woken up by her moving around. I'm half awake but I notice the IV is really small. I get up and stagger over to look at the bag and it's got another patient's name and room number on it.
I don't recognize the name of the solution so I go tearing down the hall screaming bloody murder for a nurse. She runs in and looks at the bag and mutters, “oh crap”. Then, she totally recomposes herself. “Sir, it's just an antibiotic, nothing to worry about,” and she hustles out. My wife proceeds to vomit non-stop for the next three hours.
No, we didn't sue the hospital.
44. Worst Trade Ever
I work at an entertainment company in LA where every executive has an assistant. The head of the company has had floor seat Laker tickets for the past 13 years. The waitlist for those tickets is over a decade long. Executive told the assistant that he also wants fohttps://www.shutterstock.comur non-floor seat tickets for a certain game. Assistant thinks he means instead and switches his floor seats for non-floor seats, releasing these precious tickets forever.
The executive screamed so loud that the floor above us came down to make sure everyone was OK—I am not joking. Apparently, the tickets were worth over a million dollars and he gave them away for free. The executive had to shell out for other tickets but not the same ones, so now every game he goes to he has to stare at the people in his precious seats.
45. You Had One Job
I work at a group home for people with mental and physical disabilities. Most of the residents cannot walk or even stand on their own so staff will help them stand or hold onto them while they walk so they don't fall over. Well, I had one coworker who was—stupid. For multiple reasons, but this one takes the cake. She helped one of the residents stand up to use the restroom, had her put her hands on the handlebar attached to the bathroom—similar to a bathroom stall—and left to get things that the resident needed to take a shower.
She left her standing there alone for a solid three or four minutes. Of course, the resident fell and hit her head pretty good. Had to go to the hospital and get stitches—she ended up being fine afterward. How on earth my coworker wasn't fired is completely beyond me.
46. Rollercoaster Ride
A coworker received a promotion and a large raise. He was told he should thank the CEO, as he initiated the entire promotion. My coworker went on a rant about not asking for any of it so he's not thanking anyone, and it escalated from there. By the end of the day he was fired. My coworker actually turned a promotion into a termination.
47. Big Pharma
I was promoted to VP of my company. The company was in trouble, and the CEO had asked me to figure out why and fix it. I arranged for a random drug test. All employees, the CEO, me, everyone. All on the same day, and everyone went down at the same time. Even said I would ignore weed, but anyone with anything stronger would be gone. We get the results back and I fired everyone who had tested positive for any drug other than weed. The CEO and myself were the only two people left working for the company.
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48. My Boss Is a Heartbreaker
I had a doctor who constantly ignored patients in serious pain. He thought all of them were faking it to get pain killers. After a senior director at Microsoft, who he refused to do an EKG on, died from a heart attack in our ER, it was the last straw. I went to management and told them what I had seen. Thank God they fired him. I couldn't take it anymore.
49. MIA: Missing in the Air
Not a pilot—but was an air traffic controller. I have a million screwed-up pilot stories, though. One very sad story was a pilot who flew in on “emergency fuel” in his MiG he flew around to air shows. He was erratic and didn’t listen to instructions well, but landed safely. He left my airport a few days later, then went down in the mountains and was never found.
The finding was: Likely low fuel due to scraping his fuel tanks at an air show prior to arriving at my airport. He never even had it looked at while he was at my airport. He was aware he had scraped his fuel tanks, he came into my airport using emergency fuel, yet he pressed on after that, to his death. The truth is, pilots are just people. They’re flawed like the rest of us.
50. Mic Drop
I worked in a bar with an awful boss. He would always flirt with the young female bar staff and make us all uncomfortable, even though he was 50 years old. We all knew his wife and two young children, but about six months into me working there, he began to “date” a 22-year-old customer. By date, I mean he used to go downstairs to his office and sleep with her—all while he was on shift.
No one was allowed to talk about it, but we all knew. He knocked her up quite quickly and ended up breaking up with his wife, but he still flirted with his staff relentlessly even when his new baby was born. He once told a male employee that he liked asking female bar staff to pick up things from low shelves so we would bend over and he could check out our butts.
He always broke health and safety rules if he could get out of doing a task he didn’t want to. He was prolific at asking bar staff to clean human waste—vomit/poop customers had done on the floor—even though legally anyone cleaning that stuff needed to have passed a certain health and safety qualification. I spoke to my assistant manager about this and she confirmed that only management can do it, and I should refuse next time.
One day, he demanded I clean up vomit in the male toilets, and I refused, repeating what the assistant manager told me. My boss went absolutely mad—he wasn’t used to people standing up to him. He told me to come downstairs to his office to speak about it. At that moment I knew I wanted to quit, so I told him I won’t be going downstairs with him.
He asked me why, and I replied: “The last girl who went down there with you ended up getting pregnant.” Lost my job instantly, but it was totally worth it.
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Sources: Reddit,
