There are mistakes—then there are utterly catastrophic blunders. Like sending adult pics...to parents. Trying to fart...only it's not a fart. These unfortunate people all felt that gut-wrenching feeling when it slowly dawns on them...they dun screwed up.
1. Spit It Out
I had just come back from playing soccer (I was 12 years old) and was severely thirsty. I saw a glass of what I thought was sweet tea on the kitchen counter and immediately tried to gulp it down. It turned out to be my father's glass of dip spit. For those that do not know, that is the spit that people who chew tobacco make as a byproduct of the process.
I threw up all over the kitchen counter and floor and they found me there a few minutes later dry heaving in the fetal position. I've never been able to even smell Copenhagen without gagging to this day and I am 26.
2. Fork Chin
One day, I was tipping back in my chair while holding a fork in my hand. I fell back and cracked my head open as well as somehow stabbed my self in the chin. I now find it impossible to eat without my scar making me cry a little bit inside.
3. Slippery When Wet
Oh God…here goes. Working at McDonald's three years ago, little kid spills coke on the floor. I happily wander over to clean it up. Mop that stuff up lightning fast with a smile and everybody is happy. Go behind the counter and retrieve the “slippery when wet” sign to place over the newly-cleaned area, and when I get there, distracted by something, I slip! Embarrassing right? You have no idea...
My foot slips out like a javelin and kicks a baby's high chair, the baby's head whiplashes against his table so hard both of his shoes fall right off. I just stared in horror at the family. I place the sign down like an idiot and run back behind the kitchen for my dear life. Then I proceeded to crack up in the most maniacal nervous laughter accented with breaths of horror. What had I done?!
4. Picking a Fight With a Fighter
I once got into a fight without knowing the guy I was fighting with did some kind of martial arts. He punched me extremely hard in my chest. As a result, my bones have somehow receded, and I now have a “hole” in my chest. I had trouble breathing for a long time after that. At least he didn’t hit me in the face.
5. Double Whammy
Getting pulled over by three police cars for doing 70 in a 45. My dad happened to call as I was talking with the officers. They asked to speak with him. After a few minutes, they handed the phone back and said, “You better go home, that is going to be worse than the ticket we are giving you.” And let me tell ya...they were right. I still shudder when I think of it.
6. Wrong Number
Was texting my brother asking for help with something so that my mom wouldn't get mad and called her the b-word in the text. Sent it to my mom.
7. The Sound of Silence
I stopped all power to a stage in a venue with 1,200 people raving hard. Longest 30 seconds ever while I switched the broken cable out...
8. Runaway Driver
I was working on one of those TV shows where you do stupid things in public and film people’s reactions. In the skit we were doing, a man would be jogging with a stroller containing a life-like baby doll, and I was going to hit him with a car. The jogger was wearing bright green—they dress funny on these shows so that you don't mix up the cast with pedestrians. So, I'm cruising up to the stop sign in a beat-up old ford, my adrenaline is really pumping.
This was my first time actually being involved in a skit. I see the bright green jumpsuit, and I rev it—but when I realized what was happening it was too late. I hit the wrong guy. It was just some dude jogging with his kid. I realized what happened when the guy I hit didn't jump onto the hood the way you're supposed to in these stunts. I honestly don't remember anything about the incident after that, I was in shock. The dad had a few broken bones, the baby was fine.
Needless to say, there was a huge settlement paid out. I'm currently pursuing an unrelated career.
9. Nepotism Doesn’t Work, People
I lost my father's company three million dollars in assets due to a typo. As an 18-year-old intern.
10. Mystery Pills are Never a Good Choice
I once took a very large dose of a research chemical thinking its effects would be similar to an acid trip…I was so, so wrong. I went clinically insane for about a year and required inpatient hospitalization. It took me two years after that to build my life back up and have a career, but I was never totally the same. Such is life.
11. That Escalated Quickly
I was sitting in my back garden with my best friend, and we'd recently acquired an air rifle. So obviously we started shooting it at things in an increasingly destructive manner—because we were 11. We shook up and banged out a can of Coke and then laughed as it went nuts spraying its contents everywhere. Then, we got a can of deodorant and it was even MORE ridiculous because it basically went bang but in a relatively harmless way.
Then we got a can of shoe polish—and this is where things took a terrifying turn. Turns out shoe polish is…a little bit flammable. A little bit more flammable than you might expect. The explosion set fire to my step dad’s shed. The can itself went straight up like a surface-to-air missile. Armed police arrived shortly afterward. At the time I lived in reasonably central London, and this was in 1991, which just happened to be slap-bang in the middle of the biggest-ever spate of IRA terrorist attacks on the city and a couple of months after some IRA members had driven a motorboat up the Thames and fired mortar shells at the actual Houses of Parliament.
The screams we got from the police were...extreme. But it was nothing compared to the look in my mother's eyes the whole time it was going on, because my friend and I knew that it was when the police left that things were going to get very bad indeed. The sense of apprehension was even worse than a riot cop carrying a rifle screaming in our faces about how stupid we were. It was horrifying. We were doomed.
And so it came to pass. She went absolutely mental. My mother is a mild-mannered person—but not that day. Not that day. It still terrifies me to think of it almost 30 years later.
12. Made It Worse
When I was six, I spilled grape juice on the tan carpet in the living room. I put a pillow over it, laid on the pillow, and vowed that I would stay there the rest of my life so my parents would never find out. I lasted about 45 minutes. My mom was more upset that I got grape juice on the pillow, rather than the carpet.
13. Kid Logic
Every single day my mom told me to be careful near the frozen pond next to our house. One day enough snow melted in order for my friends and I to play soccer in the field next to the pond. As you can guess, at one point the ball ended up dead center in the middle of the pond on the ice. My child brain figured if I could throw a stick on the ice, it was safe to walk on.
So after making sure the ice was stable by throwing not one but two sticks, I started my walk to get the ball. It was like a scene from a horror movie. I reached the center and the second I picked up the ball and attempted to turn around I fell straight through the ice and went under. I had to break the ice the entire way back to shore and had my clothes dried at a friend's house a few blocks away.
By the time I got there I thought I was on my deathbed but I could never tell my mom I was dumb enough to go out there or she would have probably killed me. I'm now 26 and have still never told my parents I did that.
14. I Meant to Do That
My mom left my eight-year-old brother and 14-year-old me alone at home to run an errand. I don't remember what he did, but he royally pissed me off, and I had a BAD temper as a teenager. So, I chucked a cordless phone at his face. He started bleeding everywhere and we both panicked—I had knocked out one of his teeth!
So he ran to the bathroom to see which one, bawling the whole time. As it turns out, it was his extra tooth. He was scheduled to have it pulled a few days later. So then, the angry tears turned to grateful tears at avoiding a trip to the dentist. We did still have to call my mom, though, so that she knew why he was suddenly missing a bonus tooth. He confirmed that he was glad I knocked it out and she went "uh... I have to think about this." I was grounded.
15. It’s a Small World
This story takes place in the mid 90s. I was 16. Skipping school, out screwing around in my car with friends. Took a turn too fast and put the car in a ditch. We got the car out of the ditch with the help of a passerby. Not a scratch on it by some miracle. Get home and dad asks, "So how was school?" in a way that told me he knew full well I wasn't at school.
If there is one thing my father instilled in me it is this—no matter how bad you mess up, lying about it will only make it worse. Own up, take your punishment and don't do it again. So I told him exactly what happened. He couldn't really take the car away. I'd purchased it from him for full trade-in value out of money I'd saved from working at a pizza joint. But he found other ways to make my life a nightmare for a few months after that.
Come to find out, the Good Samaritan who helped us out of the ditch was a coworker of my dad who recognized the car and had called dad to let him know about my adventures
16. Don’t Say a Word
I was 17. Drove my girlfriend home from school. We ended up in the shower together. Just as we turned off the water and she was stepping out, we hear her dad open the front door of the house. Of course, my truck is in the driveway so he knows I'm there, but I'm nowhere else in the house, obviously. My short life flashed before my eyes.
He came stomping down the hallway and banged on the bathroom door. My girlfriend, wrapped in a towel, answered the door and lied her butt off, "Spanxxx is down the street at one of our friends' house. I told him I'd call when I was out of the shower." Meanwhile, I'm standing frozen and shriveled in the shower behind the curtain preparing to meet the hereafter.
She finished getting ready and while she used the hairdryer I got dressed. I think she had to go to her room to get some portion of my clothes even. Maybe my shoes. We also made sure to use the dryer on my hair. Her dad had gone to the living room, thankfully at the other end of the house. We waited about 20 minutes like a teenage girl getting out of the shower kind of time and then she went to look for the clear path.
I tiptoed to the front door while she played blocker in the kitchen. I knocked on the front door from the inside and she came to the front of the house to "let me in" by opening the front door and screen door. Married that girl. Been together 26 years.
17. Direct Hit!
I tried to walk across a guardrail and ended up slipping and hitting my groin area in just the right spot to tear my urethra. I had a catheter for about three months after that.
18. 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.
19. Always Check the Decimals
I very nearly injected a premature baby who had Down Syndrome with ten times the amount of Lasix I was supposed to give him: I had put the decimal in the wrong place when I did the math on the dose. That baby would almost certainly have died if I'd given it to him. I had the liquid drawn up in the syringe and had the syringe actually in the port ready to push through before I looked inside the chamber and realised how uncharacteristically full it seemed.
Paediatric IV doses of anything are simply tiny. I was supposed to give him 0.1 mls, and nearly gave him 1.0mls. I needed a very large cup of tea after that.
Public Domain Pictures
20. Acci-Dental Emergency
One day, I got out of the shower and 11-year-old me came up with a great idea. Because I had my hands full, instead of using one hand to hold the towel and the other to turn the light off, I was going to jump up and bite the light switch to pull it down with my teeth. What could go wrong? So, I jumped up to bite the switch.
It was one of the switches with the string and a ball at the end where you pull it down, and as I came down, my two front teeth hit the ball… and snapped in half. I called downstairs through a mouthful of blood. “Mum... I think I chipped my teeth.” My mum came sprinting up the stairs, took one look at me, and said, “Chipped them? You’ve snapped them in half! There’s a perfect bloody circle in your teeth you idiot!”
So now, every now and then I have to get the other halves of my two front teeth replaced until I’m 21 and can get permanent implants drilled in. The funny part is that the light never turned off!
21. Stars in My Eyes
I dropped out of college to act in a TV show that got canceled after the pilot. It took me 14 years to go back to school.
22. Fries On Fire
I once put leftover French fries in the microwave, but I wasn't sure how long I should put them in for. The microwave had a button that said "potato" on it, and somewhere in my stoned, stoned mind I thought, "French fries are made from potatoes, perfect!" I went back to the microwave three minutes later and it was on fire.
Had to evacuate the dorms at 2:00 AM.
23. Do NOT Call This Guy With a Medical Problem
Firefighter-Paramedic/Nurse here. I dropped a newborn baby. What it sounds like really. As soon as the sucker popped out, she was quite slippery and fell out of my hands right onto an ambulance floor as I was handing her to my partner. In the end it was okay, but the mother freaked out entirely, understandably of course.
I also kicked a cardiac monitor/defibrillator into a pool during an active cardiac arrest. The patient was pulled from a pool, and as equipment was getting shuffled around, the monitor got moved and I inadvertently kicked it. It ended up at the bottom of a pool. They cost about $20K each. Luckily there was another one there.
24. You’ve Got Mail
I graduated from college without having learned a lot about life. I couldn't find a job, so I spiraled into bad and then into worse habits. One night, I had a few too many and stupidly got behind the wheel. I crashed my car into a mailbox that punched through my driver’s side window into my head. My blood alcohol content was way over the limit, 0.32%.
Legal repercussions followed and I had the pleasure of digging myself out of that hole. It ended up turning out well though. It was a wakeup call that caused me to get my life together and see things a bit more clearly. An employer took a chance on me eventually, which got my foot in the door for the industry I wanted to work in. Other opportunities have followed.
It was not the path I planned, but it's what happened.
25. Blood and Ketchup
The biggest mistake I ever made was getting a packet of ketchup in third grade. It was recess, third grade. Little me had chicken fingers or whatever from the cafeteria, and what do you need with chicken fingers? Of course, a couple of packets of ketchup! So I got a packet or two. And let me tell you, I was so excited to dig into those chicken fingers that I ran back to my table.
The condiments were around a corner from the general eating area, so to get back, I had to get around that corner. Unfortunately, at the same time, a kid in fifth grade, who seemed equally excited, was also running around the corner. An impact was inevitable, and as he saw this, he let out a scream. As he did so, we ran into each other, and his tooth went right into my head.
I felt fine for a little bit, but a bystander grabbed me by my shirt's arm and rushed me to the nurse's office. I still felt fine, but on my way there, my vision was starting to get blurred by the blood dripping from my forehead. I, understandably, freaked out. I was taken to the hospital and had my wound stitched up. I missed my friend's birthday party, but for the most part, that was it. Or so I thought.
Fast forward eight years, to high school. I was standing in line with my buds to buy a soda, when all of a sudden, I woke up in an ambulance. I had fainted for some reason, but I couldn't figure out why. The EMT told me I had had a seizure, which worried my parents and me. I saw a neurologist, got my brain scanned, and was cleared. They said there was nothing wrong with my head.
A year later, I had another seizure, while I was at home. No ambulance was called, but my parents took me to the neurologist again. This time, they found something up there: a scar on the front of my brain. At the time, I couldn't think of any reason why there'd be a scar there, but thinking back on it later, it had to have been the time I nearly got a tooth lodged in my skull.
I now take my pills and stay away from anything that would endanger me further, but it's not too much of a life-changer. Besides legally being branded as an epileptic, I'm fine for the most part. If I could talk to my third-grade self, I’d scream, “Just walk you idiot, the chicken fingers aren't going anywhere!”
26. Superhero Complex
I severely regret thinking I was invincible when I was 18-19 and sleeping around without protection every time. “STDs won’t touch me,” I stupidly thought. Uhhh, yes they will.
27. Toxic Leftovers
I accidentally gave myself really bad food poisoning in 2018. I wasn't paying attention to how long leftovers had been in my fridge and I reheated them and ate them. BIG mistake. Just 24 hours of misery right? No. I became severely unwell with a bad stomach ulcer. After two months of suffering, I began to develop this insidious anxiety and depression.
Two different doctors did a whole bunch of tests on me and concluded I had pretty much nuked my gut biome, introduced something called H pylori, and that the anxiety and depression were a result of that due to the brain-gut relationship. So, they prescribed me some meds. I took one pill and immediately felt excruciating pain.
I threw up a load of blood and my heart started racing faster than it ever has before. Long story short, the medication was eating through my stomach through the ulcer. It took me seven months to recover. Now I suffer from OCD because I'm terrified I will poison myself again, or poison my family. The depression went away, but the anxiety has remained, along with a bad case of emetophobia.
Cooking meat is a big deal for me now. The main symptoms tapered off around October 2018, but then I developed IBS. My doctor tells me it will never go away. During my depressive state, I quit the best job I ever had. I'll never get that back. I think that is probably one of the biggest mistakes I have ever made. One little slip-up in the kitchen cost me an entire year of my life.
And I'm still paying the price.
28. Don’t Live Beyond Your Means
I borrowed $120,000 to go to law school and then incurred $60k in credit card debt to finance a high-maintenance wife and lifestyle. I’m now making six figures but somehow living paycheck to paycheck because of the debt.
29. Reply All
My biggest mistake? While working on an account for a company, I accidentally emailed a batch of documents to a client, which included our whole project profit database. Which was definitely supposed to be confidential. The client went mad, the company went mad…it was a genuine mistake, but I was forced to resign and apologize to the business directors.
Happily, it turns out it was a blessing in disguise. I went freelance after that point, and I'm now earning more money with a more relaxed work-life balance. At the time though, it was the worst point in my and my family’s life due to stress.
30. A Near Miss
When I was 13, I was practicing archery in my backyard. My backyard faces about a mile of woods, with nothing but trees and a hill at the end. I was messing around and decided to turn around and pull back my bow, and then spin around and try to hit the target without aiming. Bad idea. I lost hold of the arrow mid-way and it flew straight over my fence and into my neighbor’s garage.
They were both outside in the front yard and saw the arrow clear the fence, soar between both of their cars, clip the ground, and then slide into the half-open garage door. It stopped at the back wall. Apparently, they had just been in the driveway moments before it happened, and if it had happened a couple of seconds sooner, my arrow could have hit someone.
Me being a kid, I naturally was terrified as I ran around to the gate and into my driveway, screaming "Is everyone okay? I'm so sorry!" They were more confused than mad, and once I explained what had happened, they had a bit of a laugh at my expense. My parents were called and the bows were locked up for almost a year before I was allowed anywhere near them again.
And that was the closest I've ever come to potentially killing/maiming someone.
31. Phone vs. Windshield
I was sitting in my car arguing with my ex-girlfriend on the phone. This was back when we had those big old Nokia brick phones. She said something terrible and then hung up on me. I was so furious that I hurled my phone at the dashboard. Well the phone obviously broke, and then bounced off of the dash and cracked my windshield.
That took the wind out of my sails pretty darn quick.
32. Black-hearted Buyer
I unknowingly sold a car to a drunk driver with a suspended license. He still had the actual license card on him, so it didn’t even cross my mind that it could have been suspended. Later, I found out that after I sold it to him, he drove 10 miles, stopped at a pub to drink, and then drove off and fatally hit an 11-year-old with the car before fleeing the scene.
Since I was still the registered owner of the car, the police came and broke down my door. There was an armed standoff and everything. I wish I had never sold him that car.
33. Disappointing My Father
I robbed a bank when I was 20. This is actually the first time I’ve openly said this, as it makes me feel very ashamed. I was prosecuted and it completely changed my life. I’d go back and stop myself from doing it if I could. The worst part about it is when I was in court, I was required to answer the question, “How do you plead?”
They had me dead to rights on camera, so my attorney told me that I would have to plead guilty. Saying it out loud wasn’t the worst part for me, though. After saying “guilty” for the courtroom, I had to turn around and look at my father, and I saw the heartbreak written all over his face. I’ll never forget the way he looked at me.
When we left, he didn’t yell. He didn’t hit me. He didn’t do anything to me that I thought he would. He just looked ashamed. To this day I don’t think I’ve truly forgiven myself.
34. Tackling Senior Year
I was a good athlete in high school and hoped to be a decent athlete in college. During my senior year in high school, I was playing backyard football with a bunch of guys during class. I knew it was tackle, so I figured I would tackle some people. Bad idea. I ended up tearing my ACL, missing my senior year, and experiencing knee pain almost every day, even though it has been almost five years.
It’s not the end of the world, but making that tackle was really stupid, and I regret it almost every day.
35. Miscalculation
So we live in a two-story colonial. My parents are away on vacation. I'm in the yard and tossing a baseball up in the air and catching it, just a nine-year-old entertaining myself. I think to myself, "Hey, let's loft it onto the first split level roof and then it'll roll off and I'll catch it!" Second toss, CRASH, shatter sister's window. Grandma was babysitting. Grandma reported. I was smoked.
36. Not so Fast
I skipped school by leaving the house, climbing on the garage and waiting for my mum to leave. I jumped down to let myself in as she drove off and set myself up for a day on my PS1. She then came back as she’d forgotten something and I wanted to die in a hole. The yelling was something to behold. Didn’t do that again!
37. Break Glass In Case of Emergency
My sister locked me out of the house and she was still inside. So I went around banging on all the doors, and she’s ignoring me. I started pounding on her bedroom window, and my hand accidentally goes through the window. Over ten years later and I still have a scar on my hand.
Max Pixel
38. Right Intention in Mind
There was a small lizard trapped in our garage under a pile of wood so I moved some of the wood so it could get out. I must have accidentally knocked over a larger plank in the process, which landed on my dad's car and went straight through the windshield. Lizard was fine though.
39. I Swear It’s Not My Fault
In college, I opened my class portal a few weeks into the semester to see my classes were all dropped, and I was no longer a student. I had no idea how it happened. I called my parents in a panic and the pregnant pause as my mom processed the information made my heart sink. Turned out it was a system error, and I was reinstated the next day, but boy was that a heart attack.
40. Good Idea at the Time
I made a slingshot out of a piece of wood and some elastic. Thought I should test it out by shooting the back window of my parents van. Slingshot worked.
41. Ahead of Schedule
17 years old, I had a party while the parents were out of town. I had to work the next day, but timed it so I would have plenty of time to clean before they got home that evening. Came home from work, and as I pulled up, a chill went down my spine. The sprinklers are on and their car is in the driveway. Driving down my driveway I was anxiety and fear personified. I walk in the house and my mom tells me, "Your dad had to leave before you got here otherwise he was afraid of what he might do to you."
42. All It Takes is a Few Seconds to Change Your Life
I used to work for a business that provided service for people with disabilities. Basically, it was a state-funded service that provided transportation for people who could not use public transit. Since we did some return trips from hospital to home for people who had gone to the hospital by ambulance, we had a spare wheelchair in the car, because these patients’ wheelchairs would be at their homes.
One evening I went to pick up an elderly man from a hospital with the car's chair. As I arrived, I found out that the man was an amputee and probably over 80 years of age. When we arrived at the given address, the man seemed slightly confused and claimed that he had never seen the place. I took him onto the lift that was at the back of the car since I thought that the darkness outside and tinted windows on the back of the car had just confused him.
Yet even on the lift, where he could see the building, he didn’t recognize the place. And that's when I made a huge mistake. I had been instructed to never take my hand off the wheelchair if it was on the lift, yet in the confusion, I did exactly that. I locked the brakes on the wheelchair so he wouldn’t accidentally roll off of the lift, and told him to wait a couple of seconds so I could check the list of residents’ last names, which was on the stairwell.
I managed to take two steps away from the car and wheelchair when I realized that I simply could not leave the man as he was. I either had to put him back into the car or lower him down onto the ground. As I turned around, I saw the man leaning back, pushing the wheelchair’s front tires off of the lift, while his hands were reaching for the knobs that release the brakes.
The man fell headfirst about 2.5 feet to the ground. I of course immediately called an ambulance, and a couple of minutes later, the man’s wife came to see what was going on. Tragically, the man passed away two days later in the hospital from blunt force trauma on the back/top of the head, which led to brain swelling.
I was prosecuted and deemed guilty. The sentence was just a 2,000€ fine. I could have continued in that line of work, but after a while, I had to get away from it. I just couldn't do it.
43. Forgetting Something
Parents were away for the weekend, so I took my dad's keys and took the car for a small drive. I was never allowed to drive unsupervised because I didn’t have a license or anything. It was a thrill, I came back, parked, and left the keys in the same drawer he left them in. Monday arrives, I come back from school and my dad asks me to come look at the car, with a death glare.
I had forgot to pull the seat back after adjusting them for my 14-year-old legs.
44. Check the Parking Brake
When I was about 11 years old, our car was parked on the side of the road with me inside and my parents putting groceries in the trunk. I knew that if I rotated the key just a bit and put it in first position, the radio would start playing and I would be able to open the window. So I did just that.
Instead of stopping at the first position, I probably went too far, and the engine started running and the car jerked forward. Mind you, we were parked with the front of the car towards the sidewalk. I was lucky that there was no one in front of the car, but my parents really freaked out. My dad really scolded me for that, one of the few times he ever did. Really scared me.
45. Setting the Mood
I thought it was a good idea to play with some candles while having a Lord of the Rings marathon. Turns out that was a bad idea because I ended up getting distracted and set the family couch on fire. I frantically put it out and threw a blanket over it. I didn't leave that couch for a week.
46. It Adds up
My parents paid for my mobile phone subscription. Got a girlfriend and called a lot more. Too much more. Racked up a 600 Euro bill. My soul left my body that day.
47. Something’s Not Right
My sister and I—in 2010—had just gotten unlimited texting for $25 a month. I was 15 and didn’t pay for it. Between us, we sent and received almost 30,000 texts that month, which without the plan would have charged us $0.15 a text. End of month, the bill comes round and the cell company never applied the unlimited texting so we received a $4,500+ bill.
They fixed it quickly, but I never thought I was going to die that much before.
48. (Thank) God Is Watching
When I was sixteen, I was forced to go to church with my family. They knew I hated every minute of it, and so as a sort of compensation my mom would let me leave a few minutes early and pull her car up front as services were closing. So one Saturday my best friend spent the night and I dragged him to church with me. Well, at the usual moment, Mom handed me her keys and me and my friend went to pull the car around.
Now of course since my friend was there, I just had to show off a bit. I pulled Mom’s car out of the parking space, where she parked right next to my Pop’s truck. When I pulled her out, for some reason I decided I should try a burnout or something funny. It was a horrible mistake. I totally had no idea what I was doing and crashed Mom’s car into Dad’s truck.
When the shock subsided a bit, I got out to survey the catastrophe. I was standing there in all my shame and glory as the entire church filed out. Luckily we were on holy ground and there were too many witnesses, because I’m sure my parents would have sacrificed me there on the spot. Can you believe that they never bought me my first car?!
49. Felt Like Eternity
The surest I've ever been that my life was over was in the five seconds between my mum catching me smoking and actually speaking back when I was 14.
50. Quick on the Draw
When I was 13 I had my two closest friends over for a sleepover because my parents weren't home for the night. We were in that phase where we were really into guns and Call of Duty and we thought we knew everything about guns because we played C.O.D. 4 all day, so my friend brought over his new airsoft pistol. There was a small closet next to the new 50-inch plasma flat-screen my parents just bought and we were taking turns shooting at cans we put on the shelves.
It was my turn and I tried to do one of those cowboy-quick-draw shots where they take out their gun and fire within a half-second. I shot too quickly to really aim and the airsoft BB went straight into the screen of the TV. The screen went black and I hurriedly turned it off and then back on again and strange lines crisscrossed the screen and spider webbed to the point where the BB struck.
They got home an hour later and I didn't want them to find out randomly later so I brought my mom down and showed her. Did not go well.
Pexels
51. Dude, Don’t You Ever Wash Your Face?
When I was about nine years old, my mom went out and left my sister and I at home with our dad. He was an extremely heavy sleeper, so whenever he was our sole guardian we knew we had our run of the house after about 10 pm. On this particular evening, my mom had left her makeup on the bathroom counter. This was too tempting for me. I gathered my tools and went to work on my sleeping father.
After a few minutes of carefully applying all of my nine-year-old boy makeup expertise, I moved on and forgot about it. Fast forward. Apparently, dad slept through his alarm the next day and rushed out of the house to work without stopping in the bathroom. Dad was a truck driver, and not much of a fan of practical jokes.
I can still remember when he got home. He opened the front door and just stared at me, not moving. Not speaking. It was the one and only time growing up that I was genuinely afraid of my dad. I thought, "Crap, he's gonna kill me."
52. Lift With Your Legs
My bedroom was upstairs and it would get really hot, so I had an air conditioner in the window all summer. I had two friends over and somehow we had a necklace that belonged to a girl we didn’t like. We decided that it would be a good idea to throw it out the window—nine-year-old girls are petty, apparently. The plan was that I would hold the air conditioner, friend one would open the window, and friend two would throw the necklace out.
Well, turns out air conditioners are heavy as hell, so of course, it fell. It landed on the stairs to the back door, and both the air conditioner and stairs were destroyed. I freaked out and started saying my parents were gonna make me do chores for my entire life to pay for it. I ran and hid in the woods and bawled.
My parents weren’t even mad. My dad said, “It’s just an air conditioner, we’re just glad no one was hurt.” Looking back, I really admire them for their reaction. We weren’t doing well financially, and it would have been really easy to get mad at me for being stupid and ruining an expensive appliance. We didn’t even have to replace the air conditioner because my dad is a wizard and fixed it.
53. Looney Tunes Logic
When I was about ten, I was playing with a friend who lived down the street. His younger brother and my younger sister both wanted to play hide and seek. We begrudgingly agreed and said we would be "it" first. We found this bucket of liquid and for some reason thought it was glue. It was at this point we decided to spread it all around the safe zone thinking if we couldn't catch them it would stop them so we could tag them.
It wasn't glue. It was some kind of solvent. My sister ran through it, slipped, and landed directly on her head. Blood and tears everywhere. Thought she was dead. Was convinced I was either going to jail or my parents would kill me.
54. Long Con
I was getting bad grades in one class because I wasn't doing the homework. The teacher sent home a printed grade report, which I forged my mom's signature on and returned. When report cards came out, my mom emailed the teacher asking for an itemized grade report to see my grades. I knew my mom's email password, so I signed in and deleted the teacher's email as soon as it came in, then deleted it permanently from the deleted folder.
But then she told me to ask my teacher in person for a grade report since she hadn't gotten the email. I thought I could get him to print a copy, which I could photoshop to look better. Instead, when I asked him, he just emailed it to her again, while I was at school and could not get to a computer to intercept it. Yeah, I got in trouble. Then I got in huge trouble later when my parents learned that I had been regularly forging grade reports.
55. Dodged a Ticket
My parents had just left for vacation when I got pulled over doing 85 in a 45. The cop didn't write me a ticket, but gave me his phone number and told me to have my parents call him by 6 pm. He told me if he did not get a call, he was going to issue a warrant for my arrest. Mind you, this was before cell phones were very reliable. I left a message with the receptionist at their hotel letting them know they needed to call home as soon as they checked in, and that it was an emergency.
The cop told them that there was no way he could write me a ticket that didn't result in me losing my license, and being that I was just a dumb, young kid being dumb, he didn't want to do that. He instructed them to put the fear of God in me and he would put the matter behind him. Needless to say, it was not my finest moment as a son.
56. Flew too Close to the Fuse
When I was about 10 years old, it was a couple days before the Fourth of July so we had a bunch of fireworks sitting around. We had some Piccolo Petes—these horrible fireworks that just screech loudly for 10 seconds and do nothing else—and I took them in the backyard. Now about 10 minutes beforehand, my mom had told me not to light off any fireworks before the Fourth.
So I'm out there playing with my magnifying glass burning leaves and stuff, and I decide to see if the magnifying glass can light a firework wick. But of course, I was going to stop it before it actually went off! So, I see sparks flying, and I panic. I drop the magnifying glass and run inside where I meet face to face with my mom.
She takes one look at me and says, "What did you do?" So I just stood there for a couple seconds sweating bullets, knowing what's about to happen. Then, from the backyard, you hear the unholy screeching of the firework begin to sound. You could see the look on her face slowly change from "I know you're up to something" to "You're an idiot."
57. This Is Not a Playground
One time I was with a friend in the yard trying to hit golf balls over the top of the house—why, I literally have no idea. Ended up whacking one of those puppies into the siding and causing a dent. Also, another time, I hit a tennis ball through one of the garage door windows. I should probably have stopped playing sports in the front yard.
58. Automatic Locks
I once locked my mum’s car keys inside her car while she was at work. I was opening the trunk of the car and I was going to go into the car afterward, so I threw the keys into the car, shut the trunk, and went to open the car door. It was locked and the keys were inside. My mum had to break the back window of the car to get in to retrieve the keys, and had to drive around with a garbage bag taped over the window for like a month.
59. Saved by the Laugh
On Thanksgiving Eve, when I was about 12, my mom, grandmother and I were finishing up the dishes. We were unloading the dishwasher and drying/putting away dishes. My mom and grandmother were sitting and I was standing opposite them. I grabbed the cover of a crystal sugar dish. It looked like it had about a DROP of water in it. So to be a jerk, I pretended I was going to throw it in my mother's face.
She gave me a look like "don't you dare", so I threw the drop of water in her face...only it wasn't a drop. The entire dish was FULL of water. I soaked her face. Water dripping off her glasses and down her face to her shirt. If looks could kill, I would have been dead on the spot. I was terrified. I figured I was grounded for life...but I got a respite. My grandmother started hysterically laughing. Not just giggling, guffawing to the point of tears.
She saved my hide. I love my grandmother.
60. Speed Racer
I was 17 and hadn't been driving long. My car was a super slow Saturn that I stuck a fart can on and I saw an equally slow Civic with a fart can and wanted to race him. We took off doing about 70 down a 35 like idiots when in the oncoming lane I spotted my Dad's car, but too late. It felt like slow motion as we passed each other and made eye contact.
Immediately, I went into full panic mode and didn't come home for hours as if I was hoping he'd forget. He didn't bother to chase me down after that. When I got home later he was waiting at the kitchen table and my gut was in my throat. He asked for my car keys and grounded me for two weeks. He kept track of my odometer to make sure I wasn't leaving the house while he was out.
Didn't die, but felt like I wanted to be the emo 17-year-old I was.
61. Kid’s Have the Darndest Games
When I was a kid, my friends and I used to play a game on our trampoline called "ladybug"—I don’t know why it’s called that. So, our trampoline had a safety net so you can’t fall off, but ladybug was where one person was on the other side of the net and we had to body check them off. So one day we were playing the game and I body checked the person into a ditch.
They broke their arm. I thought I was gonna die.
62. Not to Dump All This on You
This was when I was around eight years old. I went to bed, and I'd always had the habit of going to the toilet in my sleep. Half sleepwalking to the toilet, taking a poop/piss, and moving back to bed with the very vaguest knowledge of what happened the next morning. One night, I did so as usual. I got up, went to the toilet, sat down and started my business.
For some reason, my mother came in after me, and started shaking me. I had no idea why, so I just kept going. I had to poop, ya know? She then started pushing me towards a seat and was encouraging me to dump on the seat. Confused, and half asleep, I did so. What the heck, it's her problem getting feces off the chair.
Turns out I never originally made it to the toilet, instead, I took a dump in the middle of the carpeted hallway. She was actually trying to guide me to the toilet. Not the most dignified moment of my life.
63. Too Tied Up
I was playing around with a dog's choke chain and managed to get my wrists and ankles so wrapped up in it I couldn't get it untangled. I had to yell downstairs for my mom and she had to borrow our neighbors’ bolt cutters...
64. What’s Fast Isn’t Always Right
It had recently snowed and my car was covered with ice. In the age of instant gratification that we live in, scraping with a cheap plastic scraper was taking WAY to long. My bright idea? Use a snow shovel for a wider area of attack. I broke my back glass and passenger side window. My stepdad laughed for ages.
65. Parting Gifts
When I was about 7-8 I was extremely afraid of public restrooms and really had to poop at the grocery store. I decided to sit down to relax my stomach until we got home but in doing so, I accidentally pooped. My sister walked into the aisle and asked what I was doing and I said "looking at stuff." On the ride home, my Dad asked if I farted so I said "Uhhh, yep" and everyone thought it was gross.
By the time we got home everyone had figured it out and I was really embarrassed.
66. Monkey See, Monkey Poo
When I was about four or five a few of my cousins were over visiting and we were swimming in the pool. I always really looked up to them because they're 8-12 years older than me and of course I wanted to emulate them. So, we're swimming in the pool when my cousin Jonathan decides to rip a massive fart underwater. Obviously, being the kids we are, this is hilarious.
Nathaniel (other cousin) and I try to out-fart Jonathan. Nathaniel farts a few times and we busted a gut laughing and now it's my turn to save face and become "one of the guys." I strain and strain and a few little toots blossom forth but nothing great. The guys are really egging me on now and I start to push harder than ever in an attempt to be cool.
"At last!" I thought, as my sphincter stretches apart for what I'm sure is about to be the most epic fart ever seen by my cousins. It was poop. In the pool. I just remember laughing so hard even though my swimming shorts were housing a log of brown polonium. My cousins were in absolute hysterics. I got out of the pool, still laughing, and proceeded to tell my mother what happened.
She grabbed the garden hose, turned it on full blast, and roared, "If you're gonna behave like an animal then you're gonna be cleaned like an animal!" I was then blasted with 55F water. I'm 22 now and I still haven't lived this down and I swear that this story is told at least once at every family get-together we've ever had since. It's not so embarrassing now because I was so young, but I still cannot believe that I did it.
67. Light It Up
Getting caught by my dad with a cigarette the same year he lost his mother to lung cancer. Think I was 18. We were camping, and he was coming to the island's big fire where all the people out in the dock have beers for the night. He was bringing me one. He didn't say a word about it.
68. How About a Whole PACK of Condoms!
I brought a girl home when I was 16. She spent the night and the next day my dad walked in as we were sleeping, introduced himself, took me to the kitchen and handed me a box of Trojans. The economy family value-sized box. In front of my entire family. Upside down. open. And he had separated each of the 150 condoms from the roll. Cue me scooping armloads of condoms into this freaking box while everyone is watching.
69. Lost In Translation
When I was, maybe 14 years old, my family and I went on vacation to the Dominican Republic. First, let it be known that place is awesome. Such a good time. What I was unaware of though, was that it was also a huge European vacation destination. Well a day or two goes by and I'm pretty bored. All I've done is spend time with my family, and of course, normal 14-year-old me knows vacations aren't meant to be spent with the family!
Finally, I see a group of English children who look to be about my age playing soccer (football) on this field within the resort. Well, genius me decides these kids are not going to like me unless I'm English. So what do I do? I decide, by god, I'm going to become English and hang out with these guys. So I approach them and it actually goes a lot better than I thought.
I end up spending most of my time hanging out playing football with these chaps. It was awesome, I legit had these kids thinking I was English, they introduced me to their (topless) sisters and mums, and I genuinely liked these people. Unfortunately, I held a dark secret that finally surfaced on the second to last day.
Pretty normal day, we're all hanging out playing ping pong, everybody's shouting having a good time, I'm shouting, of course in my English accent, when all of a sudden my WHOLE American family shows up behind me asking what I was doing...in front of all my new friends.....and their topless mums and sisters. Ugh, I have never felt more shame EVER...
Just seeing ALL those looks of confusion and disappointment (and of course pure laughter from my dad and sister). To this day I still haven't lived that incident down. Eight years and they still give me heck...Make sure your American family isn't standing behind you while you lie to a bunch of English people...about being English...
70. What a Sight
My Grandmother caught me standing on the sink bent over in front of the mirror looking over my shoulder all because I wanted to see what a fart looked like.
71. The Party Don’t Start ‘Til I Walk In
Alright. Me being ten years old at my neighbors birthday party. Were all stupid little kids jacked up on Mountain Dew. 3 o'clock in the morning and were playing truth or dare. My friend dares me to take off all my clothes and run down the hall screaming "I'M A PARTY BOY." My neighbor has a huge hall. So me being a badass takes off the clothes and runs down the hall with underwear on my head screaming "I'M A PARTY BOY." As I'm turning around my neighbor’s mom opens the door, looks at me from head to toe, and whispers "Good night," turns and closes the door, and runs upstairs. I pissed myself.
72. Oh Chute
When I was very young, maybe five or six, I decided that it would be a great idea and super fun to slide down the laundry chute from the third floor of my house to the second. I thought this would be very easy and super fun because it exits into a big bin full of clothing in the laundry room. What I didn't realize was that there was a bend in chute itself.
All was going well and the first time through there were no problems, so I thought to myself, "Hey let’s do that again!" so I start sliding down the second time and end up getting stuck in the bend in the chute. I'll be honest, it freaked me the heck out cause at that age being stuck for a couple of minutes felt like an hour.
I started yelling and crying and my brother, who had been playing computer games, came over and looked down the chute and saw me stuck there and, let me say, he freaking lost it. I got myself unstuck and went crying to my parents, who consoled me of course, but I am sure they laughed about it after I left. Or maybe I got grounded for it cause it was so freaking stupid. Anyways there you have it.
73. What Are You Looking At?
I thought my family was out of the house during middle/high school. While I was taking a hot tub I decided to do some buck naked headstands under the water, at the same time my mom and sister looked out in the yard...
74. A Bird’s Eye View of the Action
When I was 41, I went to visit my parents and had to take a dump. For some reason, when I sat on the familiar, family throne, I had the urge to jack it like a teenager. I heard a sound above and just briefly caught a glimpse of my 70+ dad's face disappearing from the skylight he was re-sealing.
75. The Defense Didn’t Hold Up
Occasionally I would cut school in high school. Typically, I would wait until my mom left for work and then go back home before heading out again. This one day I saw her leave, so I went home. About ten minutes later the door opens so I book it into my closet. She comes upstairs and opens my bedroom door and proceeds to open the closet...of course, she sees me and yells “What are you doing home?"...I counter with "Well what are YOU doing looking in MY closet??" She took me to school :(
76. A Blessing from Above
When I was probably seven years old me and my brother would be hanging out upstairs in our room. But there was only one bathroom in the house and it was downstairs and allll the way on the other side of the house. Our solution: pee in bottles and throw them out the window. Little did we know we threw them out the window to the backyard where my entire extended family was...
77. Caught in a Compromising Position
My Dad walked in on me squatting over the business end of a hairdryer. I'd not long got out the shower and wanted to blast my gooch with warms. So there I was, naked, with my back to my bedroom door, hovering over the hairdryer. I didn't hear Dad walk in due to the hairdryer. He just yelled "BUSTED!" and walked out.
78. First Time is the Worst Time
Well...
In high school, I was on the verge of losing my virginity to my girlfriend of two years who also happened to be my neighbor. The scene was set perfectly, both my parents were gone (dad was out of town and mom was working until nine) and I had just asked her to prom that day... So things are getting hot and heavy, and all the sudden I hear a noise downstairs, but assume it's one of my cats wreaking havoc as usual.
Things continue and about a minute later my (extremely conservative) mom walks in, and as the door opens she lets out a faint scream and runs downstairs. BUSTED. Now while this moment was awful enough, after going downstairs to face my mother who had immediately called my (also very conservative) dad, she goes on a rant about how irresponsible I am and how protection doesn't always work, and I'm proof of that.
So that's the story of how my relationship was ruined (just got really awkward after that) and I found out I was an accident. Maybe the act itself isn't anywhere near as embarrassing as some of the ones on here, but I swear the situation made it mortifying.
79. It Takes One to Tango
As a teenager, after watching a cop show about a kidnapping, I got really curious about what it would be like to be tied up. With some flexibility and creativity, I managed to get myself gagged and pretty securely bound to a kitchen chair. I could still get loose but not without some wiggling. My mom came home early, and I couldn't get loose in time. She FREAKED, thinking I had been robbed. Then, when she untied me, I explained, she thought I was a freak. Haha.
80. The Mile-High Flub
I was an airline Duty Manager in the Operation Control Centre. I was like the Maytag repairman: I only worked when there were problems, and my job description was to save the operation, meaning: find solutions where there aren't any. One September, Air Canada crews went on strike, so my airline lent two aircraft with full crews to operate Air Canada flights.
That's minus two aircraft for my fleet. On Sept. 2, a terrible tragedy occurred: Swissair 111 went down off the coast of Peggy's Cove. Less than eight hours later, one of our flights en route to London did an emergency landing in Halifax because there was smoke in the cockpit—same thing that had happened to SR111, except ours was a different aircraft type and only a minor technical problem.
Because of all the media attention, the aircraft had to be grounded for over 36 hours to make sure everything was all right. That's a total of three aircraft that I can't use. From that point on, we went into full crisis management. My phones were constantly ringing and I had to solve each and every single problem. When a crisis like that occurs, we're bound to forget certain things.
For operational purposes, the crew that was supposed to fly the aircraft back from London to Toronto was sent to Lisbon to fly dead-head onto Toronto. Only, the Lisbon flight was subsequently canceled and it was the Lisbon World Fair...there wasn't a single hotel room in the whole city and around. The crew purser, Marie, kept calling me asking me what to do.
I kept telling her that I was trying to find a solution. To this day, I can still hear her sweet little voice: "Berg, it's Marie, We're stuck in our uniforms, sleeping on the floor of a McDonald's. I'm a bridesmaid on Saturday. I have to get back. Please Berg, I have to get back." I was so busy, this one got by me. The crew came back the following Wednesday and she missed the wedding.
I still feel extremely bad about it, especially because she was so nice about it. She never freaked out and she kept her crew calm and they just waited...
81. It All Comes Tumbling Down
I accidentally knocked over two aisles filled with wine glasses. Lucky for me, everyone was too busy freaking out—there was apparently a customer nearby who also got a few cuts on his legs—that they didn't notice me slowly slipping away and reappearing a few seconds later to ask what happened like I was totally innocent.
No one ever suspected it was me, but I still felt horrible because it was over a few thousand dollars worth of stuff that I broke, which may not sound like much, but when you're 15 years old working on $11/hr, five hours a week...
82. A Super Screwup
Back in high school, I had a job as a web designer at a small webshop servicing non-profit organizations. My bosses didn't let on that I was as young as I was, and they handled all the face-to-face client meetings. My job basically entailed designing and preparing the website for our clients. One of our big clients was Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation.
I sliced up the site and put in filler text, knowing full well that only people coming from our internal IP would be able to see the development. I should mention that my company was small, close-knit, and had a great (albeit vulgar) sense of humor. Rather than going the standard lorem ipsum route, I did the what ended up being the worst thing imaginable.
I instead filled in something along the lines of "Herp derp I'm Christopher Reeve, I drive myself with a straw. Weaknesses include kryptonite and falling off horses." It got worse, but I'll let your imaginations fill in the blanks. There were about four paragraphs of filler text. I came into work after school one day and all three of my company's owners/my bosses were waiting for me.
I thought they were pulling some prank, but they asked me to come into their office. At this point, I knew something was definitely up. My boss: "Chris and Dana saw the site." Me: "What? Who?" Him: "CRPF. Chris and Dana Reeve. The director wanted to show them the progress. Apparently he didn't check before he showed it to him in person."
At this point I think my stomach hit the floor and kept going straight on to the Earth's core. My boss told me he'd let me know what the next steps were, but just to know that I was in deep, deep trouble. Anyway, I didn't get fired (despite how adamant Dana Reeve was about that fact) and I had to write an apology to the Reeves.
I found out later that Chris actually had a pretty solid sense of humor and thought it was funny. RIP, Mr. and Mrs. Reeve.
83. His Loss
I left a huge folder for a multi-billion (yes, that’s a “B”) lawsuit on the subway. Some homeless guy finds it, calls the opposing attorney, and ransoms the darn thing. Luckily, there was nothing in the file that wasn't secret or not public record. Needless to say, I was fired.
84. Full Transparency
I accidentally sent out the salaries of every one of our executives and the owner to about 100 people in the company. I had requested info from HR (just a list of eligible employees for something) and what they sent had the default sheet 1/sheet 2/sheet 3 tabs at the bottom of the workbook...
Sheet 1 was the list I had requested, Sheet 2 was, for some reason, executive compensation.
85. They Don’t Call It Pop for Nothing
I used to be a product merchandiser for Coca-Cola a few years ago. Basically, what I did was go to grocery stores, meet the driver dropping the delivery, and stock the shelves as fast as possible, then get to the next store, repeat. My second day on the job, I was stocking 2L bottles at this mega grocery store, running a bit behind because the order came in late, so I was moving fast.
Dropped a bottle of Sprite on the floor, and it hit cap down. That little jerk shot up in the air and cleared four aisles. Luckily, it didn’t hit anyone. Then, on my last day of working for Coke, same thing happened, except this time it went flying straight for the cash and nearly hit some lady in the head. As I headed to the back room to get a mop, every employee was lined up, applauding.
One of them offered to clean it up, as it was the funniest thing he'd seen working at the store. That was the last bottle I stocked working for Coca-Cola.
86. This Mistake Goes up to 11
My worst mistake would have to have been when I was running live sound for a major festival. The show was supposed to start fifteen minutes ago and I was trying to figure out why we only had the left channel playing. I scrambled, traced every wire, and was getting calls from the guy who contracted me asking what the heck was going on.
Just as the band was about to quit, I noticed one key element: The volume knobs on the right-stage amp rack (about eight different amp modules) were all turned to negative unity. We always leave the racks in the exact same state, so we can do on-the-fly setups. The last person to pack it up decided to zero out the entire thing.
87. The Mad Chemist
I am a chemist, and over a period of about a year, I was doing a series of very dangerous reactions. Essentially, I had to mix a strong acid with an alcohol solvent and several other chemicals, put the chemicals in a strong glass bottle (high-pressure reactor), seal the bottle, and submerge the reaction vessel in 175-degree (c) silicone oil.
If any of you have heated up a closed container, you know this builds internal pressure inside the container. I kept a valve on top of the reactor to monitor the pressure; the container was rated to be safe at pressures up to 150 PSI. Unfortunately for me, one particular day I started warming up the reaction, and the heat was applied to the solution just fast enough in just the right way to start a runaway polymerization reaction.
If you're a chemist, you just cringed. This runaway polymerization reaction gave off massive amounts of heat very quickly, thus shooting the pressure of this flask from 130 PSI to HOLY HECK RUN FOR YOUR LIFE! The resulting explosion was so loud it sounded like an 18-wheeler slammed into the side of the building. Luckily for me and my lab associate, no one was in the room when the explosion went off.
Hot shards of glass were spewed across the entire room, as well as a nice spray of hot silicone oil. Even worse, this explosion happened right next to the CEO's office. He ran out looking for me, to which I assured him, "We totally have everything under control (oh God oh God please don't walk in there and notice I ruined your hundred thousand dollar lab)."
Luckily, the damage to the facilities was minimal, no one was hurt, and I got to keep my job!
88. You Drive Me Crazy
I worked in a warehouse once unloading trucks of mostly food and sometimes cigarettes. I was unloading a few pallets of cigarettes and accidentally hit the gas instead of the break. I reamed the boxes. I thought I was fired for sure, as reaming a box of cigarettes costs quite a bit. Turned out, I missed the Marlboros and hit some mini cigarettes that were packed on top.
Things are only like $5 a carton. Boss was happy he didn't have to fire me for it so it worked out. Another time I ran the thing into a shelf, which knocked it over and then knocked over the one next to it like dominos. I didn't have a driver’s license at the time, so I'm not really sure why they kept having me drive that forklift.
Now I'm behind a computer screen away from heavy machinery. I'm sure everyone is safer for it.
89. Having a Gas
When I was a kid, I used to work at a gas station. It was one of those one-man stations where the attendant sits in a little booth in the center of the pumps. This was before the days where you could pay at the pump. You would go to the booth, give your credit card to the cashier (through the little slit under the plexiglass) and they would open your pump.
One day, one of the pumps jammed, and I had to go out to fix it. As the station was very busy, I hurried out to the pump, and then I heard a sound that made my stomach drop: the click of the door closing behind me. I had locked myself out of the booth. Needless to say, the variety of people who were trying to get gas and now couldn't were quite upset.
Not quite as upset as the people who had their credit cards locked inside the booth, though. I ended up having to call my manager at home from a payphone to bring another key to let me back in. I was left dealing with irate customers for the hour it took him to arrive, and turn away other irate potential customers, one whom was completely out of gas and stuck there.
My manager had a chuckle when he arrived and I later learned that this eventually happened to everyone, and that you could use the stick used to measure the gas levels in the tank to push through the tiny slot in the front through the booth to unlock the door.
90. Don’t Mess With the Internet
Not my mistake, but I think our CEO wins this. I used to work for a telecom company and our CEO went to a site to look at our new fiber optic shelter. While going around the shelter, he accidentally stepped on fiber that was transmitting more than a quarter of the data of our country. All our country had outbound connection problems for 18 hours.
It affected more than 10 million people.
91. Spam-a-Lot
I once worked for a music PR company. My first job was to send a promotional email out to about 1,000 journalists. I forgot to BCC every one and instead just CC'ed them. 90% of the mailing list unsubscribed. As you can imagine, those 1,000 journalists were this PR company's bread and butter. I…did not keep my job for long.
92. A Black and White Issue
I was officiating a soccer game of 15-year-old boys. The teams’ respective colors were RED and WHITE. There was one African American boy on the Red team. As the game progressed, it got more dangerous and out of hand. At half-time, I informed both benches that I would be calling the game tight, and that the next flagrant foul would not go unpunished.
30 seconds into the 2nd half, the African American boy had a hard foul. I blew my whistle very aggressively and yelled, "TAKE A REST BLACK!" After realizing what I had said, I immediately tried to correct myself. I stumbled over every word. The damage was already done. One player on the other team said to me, "Not cool dude.”
93. Foot in Face Disease
My story involves harming small children. I was working at a video store and was turning on all our display televisions. The controller was dead, so I was doing it the old-fashioned way by going up to each television and hitting the power button. Some were higher up than others, so I had to climb to get to them (probably against company policy).
Well, I climbed up a pillar to turn on a television near the top of the wall and when I jumped off, I landed right on top of a 6ish-year-old kid who was watching from right under me. When he got up, he had a perfect red shoe print on his face and was screaming. His dad came over and said not to worry, and proceeded to scold his kid for standing right underneath me. Whew!
94. Paper Thin Excuse
I worked payroll for a contractor for a railroad company and I was in charge of making sure all of the companies got paid. I did pretty well and liked the job, but one of the companies who had the biggest contract with us (millions) had an invoice that was just one page while all the other contracts were pages upon pages of figures.
I ended up misplacing the invoice for a month, so they didn't get paid. This caused our company to lose this contract and pretty much go out of business. I was really young, and looking back on it, there were so many things that I should have done differently but just didn't realize. Plus it was, in my opinion, way too much work for one person, which I had said a few times before.
Either way, I felt really bad...still do. I ended up quitting a little while later. The owner didn't tell anyone why we lost the contract, but me and him both knew.
95. A Whole Lot of Baggage
Another paramedic here...I've made some mistakes, of course, but this one was a doozy. My partner and I got a call to a station for an "altered mental status, suicidal ideation" patient, a 22-year-old female. She seemed a little bewildered but was pretty much oriented if a bit distraught. The authorities just didn't know what to do with her.
They could have put her on a hold, but because she was acting a little weird, they couldn't rule out that she might be on substances. More precisely, they were being lazy. I was talking to her and she told me that her boyfriend kicked her out of the house. She wasn't from around this city and had moved here to be with this guy.
She had no family, nowhere to go, and she felt that she was having a nervous breakdown and wanted to go to a hospital as she didn't feel safe...she was on the edge and thought that perhaps she should be committed for a few days while she collected herself. She had three huge suitcases with her...two of them had all of her clothes and small personal items, and the third had several of her paintings and art supplies.
Everything she had in the world was in these bags. We brought her and her things out to the ambulance and loaded her up. Took her history and vitals, and went en route to the hospital. We arrived, unloaded her, brought her into triage, and got her assigned a room. Then she asked me, "are you going to bring my bags in?"
Then my heart sunk. I looked at my partner and we both knew that we had left them outside of the station. "Dude...get her into the room and I’m gonna race down there and get those bags!" I raced down there code 3 (lights and sirens) and heck those bags were gone. Went into the station, asked if they had them, and they did not.
I started driving around the block, getting further and further out until I was driving in circles up to about five blocks out. Nothing. I slowly drove up to the hospital and went into this patient's room. I felt horrible. I told her, "I am so sorry, but we left your bags outside of the ambulance and I can't find them anywhere."
This girl, who was already on the brink, now had nothing in this world at all. Just the clothes on her back. "Are you serious? You forgot them???" and then she started to cry. Her life was falling apart even faster because I was an idiot.
96. The Mac Daddy of Mess ups
At the first advertising agency I worked at, one of our clients was an oil drilling company. I was working on some very standard ads for them, one of which had the headline, "FASTER, FARTHER, DEEPER." I made a typo that caused the ad to read, "FASTER, FATHER, DEEPER." Thankfully, my Creative Director caught it before it went to the client.
We all had a big (nervous) laugh about it and the original ended up on the creative department's wall.
97. Giving New Meaning to Pie in the Face
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 still just continues to spin on her hair.
The packed dining room erupted in laughter and she ran out crying with flour all over her face and jet black hair.
98. Cookies and Scream
Working for a chocolate factory, and we were to sell 500,000 chocolate-covered Oreos to Walgreens…whoever was in charge ordered 5,000,000. Long story short, company later went under and all us employees enjoyed 4.5 million chocolate covered Oreos.
99. Safety First
I forgot to replace the filters on my full-face mask before going into a containment area where asbestos abatement was happening. I was filling bags with pure mag asbestos for 10 minutes before I realized it.
100. Wrong Room, Lasting Trauma
A friend of mine is a medical intern medical. There was a patient in her hospital that 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.
101. You Had One Job
Back in the dark ages, I worked for a small-town daily newspaper. There was one large discount store that refused to advertise with us, and would only use the other paper in town (our sole rival), which was more of a "weekly shopper"-type paper. For unknown reasons, the store finally decided to give our paper a chance.
Ad ran, and there in the double-truck, full-color ad, was "Men's shirts $9.99"—minus the ever-important R in "shirts." Yep. Needless to say, they stuck with the other paper.
102. Gone Fishin’
When I was a teen, I worked at a full-service gas station. One day, a guy came in towing a boat to get gas. A guy a couple years younger was working and thought the owner had taken the gas cap off of the boat. He placed the gas nozzle in a fishing rod holder. It is basically a hole on the top of the side of the boat.
He proceeded to pump about $40.00 worth of gas onto the floor of the boat. The owner was understandably upset.
103. What Time Is It?
One time I woke up late for school because my alarm didn't go off. I am incredibly blind without my contacts and just glanced at the clock and was very late. In a furious panic to try somehow make it to the bus I put my contacts in, dunked my hair in water and grabbed my backpack and jacket as I sprinted to the bus stop.
It was the time of year where it's dark outside well into the morning, so it was still pitch black. No one was at the bus stop, so I figured I missed. I still waited for quite some time in case it showed up. When I realized I was so late it wasn't coming I walked back to my house, knowing I would have to wake my mom up to take me to school.
Fortunately, when I walked through the front door, she was already up waiting for me! She greeted me with, "WHERE THE HECK HAVE YOU BEEN?!?!" I responded that I was sorry, but late for the bus and needed her to take me to school. She glared at me and told me it was something like four in the morning.
I had somehow misread my alarm clock in my state of panic and tried to explain that I really did think I was late and was really at the bus stop. She just assumed I had snuck out with friends the night before and was just coming home, something I had been doing off and on for a while at that time. So, I was grounded for sneaking out, when in reality I just woke up too early to go to school.
104. Could’ve Been Worse
I think I was four or five. There was a rock quarry/gravel pit about a mile from my home that my parents didn't want me going to because a bunch of unseemly youths hung out there. So, of course, this is where my flying experiment took place. I tied four kites to my bike and thought if I rode fast enough and then took my bike off the steepest bank of the quarry, the kites would lift me off and I'll glide to the bottom.
Probably lucky for me, but the strings of the kite wound into the bike spokes and completely locked it, throwing me and I slid all the way down the edge of the gravel pit rather than make a measured jump. Scraped up to my elbows and from my knees down, all I could think on that painful walk home dragging my busted bike full of kites was how my mom was going to kill me.
Suffice to say, when your five-year-old walks in looking like the finale of Carrie you don't immediately jump to punishment.
105. Not the Best Lie
I had just gotten my first ever job at ACE hardware and a week in, my buddies hit me up asking if I wanted to head to the beach for next week and I was like, “Yeah of course!” So I told my boss at work a family member died and I couldn’t come in the next week. So my boss called my dad who also works for the owner of the company in a different department and starts telling him, “I’m so sorry for your loss please let me know if I can do anything to help!”
And my dad was like “What do you mean? What happened?”
And he ended up telling my boss I lied about the entire thing. I still got the week off and went on the vacation but the next few days at my job were nerve-wracking to say the least.
.jpg){kind=link}
