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40 Times People Witnessed Their Incompetent Coworkers Make Such Dumb Mistakes, They Could Never Forget Them
Blunders are a part of being human. Whether it's walking into a glass door or sending an email to the wrong person, we usually have multiple ones every day. But every now and then, we manage to mess up so badly, we surprise even ourselves and everyone around us.
A few days ago, Reddit user xk543x made a post on the platform, asking other people, "What's the dumbest mistake you've seen an incompetent co-worker make?" And the replies have flooded its comment section. So we decided to compile the best (or worst?) ones and, honestly, I don't know if I'm impressed or disappointed by these folks.
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#1
At a Petco all the Guinea pigs were in a big plexi-glass enclosure with a center divider. Boys on one side and girls on the other. An employee decided that all the long haired Guinea pigs should be on one side and short haired on the other. It took forever to sort them out and all the females were pregnant.
Cactus McCoy 3 years ago
AAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Also go to your local shelter first if you decide de adopt pets.
Monday 3 years ago
Definitely good advice for dogs or cats, but if you want a hamster or Guinea pig you're mostly stuck with either breeders or a pet shop.
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AspieGirl88 3 years ago (edited)
Omg, what?? If they weren’t fired after that blunder, I hope they were never left to work unsupervised again! Talk about stupid. 🤦♀️
Ash 3 years ago
Most likely, nothing happened to them because the store ultimately got free guinea pigs to sell instead of having to buy more.
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Ellen Ranks 3 years ago
Yeah, they breed like rabbits. Used to have them and several times the baby boys had already impregnated their mommy before they were even grown.
Ash 3 years ago
They wean at three weeks and can get pregnant between 3 and 4 weeks, but boars generally aren't able to breed until closer to 6 weeks. If the boar piglets impregnated their mother, you left them together way too long.
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Cleshawn Montague 3 years ago
Sounds about right for Petco. They also push grain free which has been found to cause heart issues in dogs recently. When I asked why, the younger girl said, "Well, a lot if animals have grain allergies" I've worked as a Vet. Tech for a few years and have seen a handful of grain allergies. I said, "even Veterinary hospitals use Friskies".
Bored Panda managed to get in touch with xk543x and they agreed to tell us about the origins of the post. "I was just chilling and drawing in my sketch pad when I came up with the idea to ask Redditors this question," they explained.
xk543x thinks hiccups at work are unavoidable and most are not a big deal but if you manage to make others doubt your competence, then it's a problem.
At the end of the day, they believe everything depends on what the employer is paying their employee. "Don't expect someone to dedicate their life to a job who would be reviewing applications tomorrow if you died today."
RELATED:
#2
I was working in an open plan office that had a small kitchen area at one end, microwave, kettle, sink, toaster and water cooler.
We saw one of the managers fiddling with the toaster for a while, looked like she was trying to clean it. It never occurred to her to remove the crumb tray, she was poking around inside it with a knife while it was still plugged into the wall. People just sat back and watched, wondering how long before she got zapped.
Then she turns on the tap and lifts the toaster towards the sink. Someone stepped in then to stop her.
You might just write this off as someone being a bit dim but she was the Health & Safety Officer for the building.
AspieGirl88 3 years ago
Health & safety officer?? Please tell me that’s a joke. I’d never trust H&S ever again after this! 😣
Siss Larsen 3 years ago
I hope it is a joke, as I cant get over this level of stupid :-(
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Rose the Cook 3 years ago
Coworker was lucky to be only slightly injured when trying to remove something stuck in the toaster. She had been told many times before not to stick a knife into the toaster. Her excuse, " But it wasn't a knife it was a fork".
Pheebs 3 years ago
Seriously, you can just turn most toasters upside down and shake out he majority of the crumbs.
Memere 3 years ago
I actually *have* to turn mine upside down over the trash bin, after emptying the crumb tray! Because of the way its made, not all the crumbs go into the tray. I really need to find a better toaster, lol
Load More Replies... Cleshawn Montague 3 years ago
You didn't warn her about getting zapped? That's just a d**k move.
#3
Nearly leaving a child behind on a field trip. We took a large group of 4 and 5 year-old children to visit a farm/petting zoo/pumpkin patch. We had three vehicles. I was in charge of my own group, but I noticed one of the other teachers was being very lax in her supervision for most of the trip. When it was time to leave, I loaded my children on the bus (with some other adults) and did a head-count/attendance check. Before getting on my bus, I noticed that the other teacher had climbed onto her bus and sat down BEFORE the children boarded. She walked on first and had the kids follow her. I almost let it go, but gut instinct told me she wasn't counting her students. Once they were all boarded, I walked back and climbed on her bus. She seemed irritated when she realized I was checking on her... I was not a supervisor or anything, just a fellow teacher, so she didn't answer to me in any way. She said something like, "We're all good, let's go!" I knew how many were in each group, so without answering her, I did a quick count. Sure enough, we were missing one. I ended up leaving the bus and going to find the kid myself... he was still on the playground with children from another school. When we got back to the bus, the other teacher blamed the kid! She said he "wandered off." Really, she is the one who gathered the group and left the play area, meaning she is the one who "wandered off." She was pissed when I went to the administration about the incident.
AspieGirl88 3 years ago
She had the nerve to be p*ssed when you went to admin?? It’s a teacher’s job to supervise ALL the students in his/her care & they can’t lay blame on the young child for getting split from the group, as they don’t know any better. Teachers DO, though & must take responsibility. She should just be lucky the mother of that child doesn’t try to sue for negligence, as a lot of parents won’t tolerate that. 🤨🤷♀️
JP Purves 3 years ago
Especially if they were four and fives years old. And the lax teacher had the nerve to blame the child! At that age they have about as much sense as puppies and kittens.
Load More Replies... Andre Teloo 3 years ago
Same happened to me in second grade, we had a trip to the zoo. But there was no counting... Noticing that I was alone, I went to the parking spot and the bus was gone. So 7/8 year old me went to the ticket counter and asked them to call my parents. My dad picked me up an hour later and had a "nice" talk with the teacher afterwards. She was gone the next shoolyear. This happened in Germany in 1987/88.
Anna Tribe 3 years ago
Lol. Reminds me of when I was a teacher. Every kid in my class had their own number so instead of me doing a head count I. Got them involved by the first one saying the number 1, next 2 and so on. If a number was missed it was easy to tell who was missing. My classes enjoyed it lol but I've never met a teacher who did the same
CrazyDogLady 3 years ago
We did this at summer camps and still do the same on school trips. Works even with our teenage students.
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KILEY767 3 years ago
This happened to my 5 year old son at A PUBLIC SWIMMING POOL!! He did day camp run by the city and when I went to pick him up (early that day, thank God) nobody could find him. That is the most panicked moment of my life. They finally located him at the public pool they had been to earlier that day. Nothing was done about it. I went to the city to complain and got a half hearted apology. Paper did not want to run a story. Police said no law was broken. It was a load of c**p.
Terry Butler 3 years ago
The whole city closed ranks. Disgusting. I bet other parents would have wanted to know.
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Nimues Child 3 years ago
I was a head teacher at an after-school program during grad school. The very *first* day that I trusted other teachers to count the kids as we came back from the park, they left one behind. I always double-checked their work after that to be sure no-one was ever left behind again. I can still see that kid's worried face when I ran back to the park to get him. he was fine, but it haunts me.
AmAndA_Panda 3 years ago
Somewhat similar. Back when I still went to church, I dropped my daughter off in one of the children's rooms before service. When I went to pick her up, they said I'd never dropped her off in that class. Argued and argued that she'd never been in that class. My name and her name were on the sign in, but she was not in that room. I panicked, thinking someone else had obviously taken my child. No. One of the teachers had taken 3 kids to the bathroom. Apparently 3 was just too many because she didn't realize she only came back with 2. My daughter had just left with another class of kids that came in after.
Wondering Alice 3 years ago
Recently a fairly newish teacher I didn't really know organised a trip. I was nothing to do with me, but I felt bad vibes about the organisation and offered to go along. It was decided a newish support staff should go. A few hours later, she phoned me - teacher had not checked kids profile for medical needs, a few kids needed medicine they didn't have. I said I'd jump straight in car and bring it over (a little under an hour away) then she said, if you are coming anyway, can you bring lunch - teacher had forgotten to bring food. When I got there the support was fuming, teacher had left her to deal with everything. I stayed till end. One kid got a bit behind, so I was taking her to the bus. It was across a busy road - not in big car park. When I got her there, the teacher looked at us both blankly - I had to tell him the kid was with him. I asked him what the head count was - and this is the unbelievable part - he shrugged and said he hadn't counted them out! I asked for his paperwork.
Wondering Alice 3 years ago
He hadn't brought any. Finally I phoned the school - he got mad because by now they were running late. By this time one of my kids had come to tell me his friend was missing. In the end we found not only did we have 2 missing, we had a random child (it was a cross school ALN trip). Really really crazy part, he asked me last week if kids would like to go on another trip. Nope
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Craig Becker 3 years ago
Just a ‘thing’ I’ve noticed in a lot of boredpanda stories: there are some elementary school teachers out there who are serious a******s. You don’t have to search too hard to find other stories about teachers acting dreadfully. I think the vast majority of teachers are good people - my mom was one of them! But there are some Bad Apples out there who cast shade on the entire profession. I won’t go into it, but my son had one in 3rd grade - as a parent it was very difficult to acknowledge that this teacher was, basically, an abuser. Not sexually or physically - but some adults are all about messing with other people’s heads. Imagine what such an adult could do to a kid.
However, incompetence might not be entirely the workers' fault. Many of them want to be good at what they do but often do not get the opportunity to improve. 2018 research from Totaljobs has revealed that 2 in 3 UK workers have changed jobs due to a lack of learning and development opportunities.
"Importantly, four in five (81%) employers agree that their staff perform better after training, highlighting the positive impact training has on both businesses and employees, who benefit from refreshing existing skills and learning new ones," the researchers wrote. "Besides the positive impact on an individual’s career, businesses as a whole are reaping the rewards, with nearly 90% of employers stating that upskilling an individual team member also improves their wider team’s output."
#4
Annual sales meeting.
Brand new guy is seated next to the CEO. He proceeds to put his head down and fall asleep on the table. During the meeting.
They woke him up at lunch to fire him.
Nor 3 years ago
Wait, I have so many questions to this! Does he suffer from something or was he just tired?
Jayne Kyra 3 years ago
Also OP´s comment: "Guys come in from all over the country the night before the sales meeting. Everyone hangs out at the hotel bar and drinks too much. He was just hungover...and stupid."
Poultry Geist 3 years ago
If I was a guy this would be about me ! I always get so tired when someone starts talking about something I’m not interested in ! My eyelids get heavy and my eyes start watering ! Also happens after I eat , when I 1st wake up, it happens a lot actually
Colt Seavers 3 years ago
Imagine thinking your annual sales meeting is so important it warrants firing a dude
#5
Had a coworker land a plane on the edge of the runway. Like the starting edge. Cracked a landing gear leg and bent a turbine blade in one engine. Then the scatter brained old moron doesn’t log it or tell anyone. Just parks it and walks away. The next crew doesn’t notice the damage, because it’s really not easily detectable. So they go flying and get a bunch of weird s**t going on with the port engine. When they turn back, the f*****g gear wouldn’t lock down. Fortunately they were able to get on the ground and stopped without making themselves or anyone on board dead.
All we did was fire him. No reports to our regulator, no criminal complaint about his conduct. In hindsight I should have made those complaints myself rather than leaving it to our management.
Peppy Piplup 3 years ago (edited)
What. The. F**K. Do you know how many plane crashes are caused by people not telling anyone that the plane's damaged?! This guy could have killed hundreds of people!
Keerthi Vardhan 3 years ago
I believe he should be tried atleast now.. This is no small matter AT ALL.. People could have lost their lives hadn't the next pilot turned around
Jrog 3 years ago (edited)
This is so clearly fake. First: "hitting the numbers", i.e. landing at the very starting edge of the runway, is a thing. It's not advisable to do so, but can be and is done. Sometimes it is just the captain showing off, sometimes is needed to allow for longer braking space in icing conditions, sometimes you do so to be able to stop shorter and use a more convenient taxiway to your destination. Second: landing short does not damage anything. Landing fast, yes. Landing hard, yes. Landing short? Nope. You are on the tarmac, and even if you are extremely short the ground in front of the tarmac is smooth enough not to cause any real damage. Of course, landing too short, i.e. basically out of the damn airport, can lead to damage but I doubt it is something that can be just walked away
Jrog 3 years ago (edited)
Third: bent turbine blade? Seriously? You need to strike something to damage a blade, and usually that lead to a "turbine salad", not a single bent blade. How landing short led to such a specific and limited engine damage? How did he damage a blade without any visible sign on the cowling? Let's even believe this for a second: The new crew didn't notice the engine vibrations or the alerts popping up in the cockpit and went on to take off? Unlikely.
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Panda-riffic 3 years ago
Doubtful. If this was in the US the tower would have caught it and radioed the Captain with a phone number to call. There would be a report after the call.
Kimberly Alison 3 years ago
“Old” has nothing to do with it. Plenty of dumb young people. Ageism.
#6
Working in pharmacy, a pharmacist gave a customer a flu shot and threw the used syringe in the container with the new syringes instead of the container to dispose them. Another pharmacist went to grab a new syringe later on and ended up getting stabbed with the used syringe. Caused a total s**t storm.
Monday 3 years ago
Dumb mistake perhaps but also a super easy one to make...haven't we all chucked our snack and kept the wrapper or put something inappropriate in the fridge before?
Aran Lindvail 3 years ago
Yeah, but if it's a mistake someone else can get a life-threatening infection from, you seriously need to double check.
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aucune.idée 3 years ago
Not sure how old this is, but nowadays this seems unlikely. Syringes should be sterile so they’re all individually wrapped… pretty easy to tell a used syringe from an unused, wrapped one
L Venn 3 years ago
It sounds like it could be possible the new ones were all wrapped, just that the person reached into that container and got pricked by the used syringe laying amongst the wrapped ones.
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Ralph Watkins 2 years ago
Getting a needle stick is a huge deal. Not knowing who it was used on is much worse. I've been stuck with a needle from a Hepatitis patient & had coworkers stuck with needles from HIV patients. None of got infected thankfully.
"In fact, training is so important to the workforce that 41% of people say they have secured a new job as a direct result of training, which explains why almost half of the workers are paying for their own professional training," the researchers continued.
Highlighting this trend, over two-thirds (67%) of employees at the time believed training to be more important than a few years before the survey.
#7
Planted a tree, F*****G UPSIDE DOWN.
Nimues Child 3 years ago
i'm trying to follow the logic behind planting a tree upside down. But...I just...can't.
pink_panda 3 years ago
I can kind of see it happening, maybe... Lots of trees are planted when they're small saplings and don't necessarily have leaves or a complex root structure. Branches and roots tend to have a similar fractal growth pattern, so I could see the symmetry causing confusion!
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BG 3 years ago
It works... https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/bjz48u/this_tree_was_flipped_over_by_agriculture/ 6gxw761kou...e6fe9a.jpg 
Christina Rosetti 3 years ago
It wasn't actually planted upside down. A different species tree was grafted onto it.
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#8
Removing the plastic wrapping from a pallet of 5 gallon cans of (highly flammable) acetone. He didn’t have a box cutter so he proceeded to melt it with a lighter
Cactus McCoy 3 years ago
He won't even notice the difference between workplace accident and idiot hell.
PADNA 2 years ago (edited)
Every warehouse i've been to ever use their fingers/gloves to cut through plastic. What the actual F? Then again, i know a real life story that happened in 2013 where a mechanic decided to multitask and get a smoke while repairing a forklift cart. Problem is... it was a gas engine vehicle and whole god damn warehouse (storing wood and plastic goods) went caboom. I don't think he made it out of there.
Stephanie A Mutti 3 years ago
At Pizza Hut, dumas smelled gas, opened the oven side door and lit his lighter to look in. FOR REAL saw my life flash before my eyes and thought 'how lovely that the last thing I will see before I die is this idiot's head getting charred by the explosion". Wasn't a gas leak apparently.
However, if you want to merely appear as if you're knowledgeable and capable, there are tricks to form such an impression.
For example, speak quickly. In one study, Brigham Young University researchers had 28 university students listen to recordings of six people whose voices had been manipulated to sound slower or faster than normal.
The student volunteers rated the speakers most competent when their voices had been sped up and least competent when their voices had been slowed down.
#9
Took the wrong coffin to a funeral. Someone else had to drive to the cemetery with the correct deceased on board, and thankfully they made it before the viewing.
AspieGirl88 3 years ago
I’ve heard of this happening before, except they realised too late. The wrong coffin was buried in the wrong plot & a service had already happened (they had to dig it up again). The family were of course devastated that they’d have to go through it all again, because they’d been mourning someone else & not the loved one they thought they were laying to rest. Also, the family of the other person were upset that their loved one was buried in someone else’s plot, even if it was just a little while. Hard to believe such mistakes can happen & I can’t help wondering if there were mistakes made that weren’t even corrected. 😥
Hugh Cookson 3 years ago
Ridiculous when you think about it - buried / not buried / burned / not burned - who actually gives a flying fck, you're still dead !!!
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Urbangirlatl 3 years ago
Makes you wonder how many graves have the wrong person in them, just bc no one caught the mistake....
Wondering Alice 3 years ago
At my dad's uncles funeral they brought the wrong coffin. We missed our slot and had to wait. While the funeral directors tried to apologetically explain, we all fell about laughing. The uncle was habitually late for everything in life and was regularly told he would be late to his own funeral. I hope he was somewhere he could see giving us all one last laugh
Robin Roper 3 years ago
Viewing at a cemetery?! This isn't done where I live. Maybe open casket at the funeral home or church, but never at the cemetary.
Dane-ish 3 years ago
Not sure where you're from (midwest US here), but I've been to more funerals with open caskets (viewing) at the cemetery then without. And these (open) were after the main services at the church or funeral homes.
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Jenný Samúelsdóttir Herlufsen 3 years ago
This happened in Iceland not so long ago. 4hw viewing happened and the grievers were taken aback but the priest just said that it was unfortunate and basically "poop happens". The funeral was delayed for about an hour while the right unalive person was delivered
#10
I used to work for a landscaping company and over the course of a summer I witnessed one of my co-workers accidentally set 3 different things on fire (a hedge trimmer, a truck, and himself)
Nor 3 years ago
The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire We don't need no water, let the m**********r burn Burn, m**********r, burn
Lady Z Azrael 3 years ago
Dude jamming to that in my brain meatses now lol
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Hazel Sage 3 years ago
Lmao, this would be my sister! Over the years, she has set four dish towels and two or three oven mitts on fire. And that doesn’t even count the dozens of “a la flambé” food incidents. We finally had to ban her from the kitchen! Even she agrees that it was for the best.
Also, if you're a woman, consider wearing makeup. Research suggests that wearing makeup can make women seem more competent.
In 2011, Nancy Etcoff at Harvard University led a study in which more than 250 adults looked at photographs of 25 women with different types of makeup. One-quarter of them wore no makeup, one quarter was made to look "natural" (some makeup), one quarter was made to look "professional" (a bit more makeup than the "natural" group), and one quarter was made to look "glamorous" (the most makeup).
Interestingly, the respondents rated the "glamorous" women the most competent and the barefaced women the least competent.
#11
Tried to retrieve his lighter from a deep fat fryer with his hands. boy was that fun to clean up.
Huddo's sister 3 years ago
My sister's hand fell into a fryer when she worked at Maccas because she slipped on an oil leak. Manager blamed her shoes for not being grippy enough.
#12
I worked as a Radiation Protection Tech at a power plant that was re-fueling. My job was to sit outside of a contaminated area and if anyone wanted to take something out of the area (tools, etc.) I had to make sure it didn't have any radioactive particles on it. To do this you wipe the tool with something like a tissue and then hold the tissue up to a machine called a frisker. If the needle on the frisker goes above a threshold then the tool has to be cleaned or left in the area. One day I come back to relieve a guy who had been sitting outside the area for 2 hour. He tells me there's been no issues and everything has cleared. I look at the frisker, lean over and turn the machine on.
Jihana 3 years ago
Ouch! I used to work in the field of radiation protection, so this story really hurt
Scotira 3 years ago
Do you remember if you really had to turn the detectors "on" where you worked @Jihana? Makes me wonder (and scared 😅) as to where this happened. The institute I work at, has radiation scanners around every corner, as we deal with all kinds of radioactive materials and radiation in general. So if one of those scanners would be "off" there would be an immediate radiaton alarm going off. Alerting anyone in the vicinity and the radiation protection team on site would be called up. (Just happened recently bc a scanner was accidently unplugged. Gave us a small scare 😅)
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pink_panda 3 years ago
Driving is pretty safe too! Except for the humans.
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Cyndielouwhoo 3 years ago
My father worked at a power plant for a while when I was little, if I was older at the time I would have been more concerned about his excessive laughter whenever The Simpsons' showed Homer and colleagues at work.
Research from Harvard Business School suggests that asking for advice can also make you seem more competent.
In one experiment, 170 university students worked on a series of computer tasks and were told they'd be matched with a partner who would complete the same tasks. (The partner was actually a computer simulation.) When they'd finished the tasks, the "partner" either said, "I hope it went well" or "I hope it went well. Do you have any advice?"
Students who'd been asked for advice found their "partner" more competent than those who hadn't.
(The researchers thought that when you ask for advice, you're validating the person's intelligence and experience, so they feel good about you in turn.)
Of course, you could just work on your skills. But who has time for that, right???
#13
Not a mistake necessarily, but I once witnessed our chief accounting officer (and our only accountant; it was a small company) type in values into two Excel cells, pull out a calculator, add the two numbers together in the calculator, and then type the answer in a third cell. She had apparently been doing this for years, with sheets consisting of thousands of rows. I explained how to use formulas and copy them but she apparently forgot because I saw her doing the same thing again months later.
Peter Smith 3 years ago
A department head and his deputy blocked out two days a week each week. They would spend those two days with one of them reading out transaction numbers from one spreadsheet whilst the other checked that they existed in another spreadsheet. My colleague took ten minutes to build a solution that saved them four man days a week.
Urbangirlatl 3 years ago
Took a very simple Excel "test" for a job that included demonstrating I knew how to cut and paste, as well as add a column of numbers. Later it was explained they implemented the test bc they found someone adding columns with a calculator.
Baby Fratelli 3 years ago
I’ve been told that accountants do this because excel rounds numbers up even with lots of digits after the decimal point, not sure if the calculator doesn’t do the same tho
pink_panda 3 years ago
Me trying to use Excel, too lazy to look up how to do the formulas again.
Shelby Moonheart 3 years ago
I had a boss in college that would do that too. He would tell me the result to type into the spreadsheet. He didn't trust Excel.
Furmama0501 3 years ago
I work at a CPA firm (I am a full charge bookkeeper). My CPAs are older and would much rather still do things all by hand. I tend to be their "tech support" when it comes to the computer.
#14
New temp-to-hire admin, she was supposed to order lunch for a big meeting. They told her where to order from and how many omnivores, vegetarians, and vegans. She showed me the order she was going to place, and I corrected her, pointing out she didn't have any vegan food or enough vegetarian. She told me I was wrong and ordered anyway, even with me screeching at her not to do it and explaining what was wrong. Omnivores got beef. Vegetarians got chicken. ("It's not meat.") Vegans got salads with egg and cheese. ("But it has vegetables.") ...she was not hired on full time
Peppy Piplup 3 years ago
So in summary, the people who can eat both only got meat and no vegetables (not a balanced diet), the vegetarians got nothing because they don't eat meat (because she thought that chicken wasn't meat for some reason????) and the vegans got salad... covered in a thing they can't eat? Wow, everyone loses. How did she mess that up so badly?!
Monday 3 years ago
Well the vegetarians could probably take the vegan food since a significant portion of vegetarians still eat eggs...but the vegans would have nothing.
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Benita Valdez 3 years ago
Why do so many people think vegetarians eat chicken? I mean don't get me wrong, I consider chicken only as poultry and not meat (avid beef lover and it's deliberate) but it's still an animal as are fish. How is this so difficult?
Seanette Blaylock 3 years ago
To me, any animal flesh (mammal, bird, fish) counts as "meat". I'm an omnivore.
Load More Replies... Zack Podany 3 years ago
"But it has vegetables." Some days when I come to BP I feel better about humanity. This is not one of those days.
Pumpkin Spice 3 years ago
Omnivores get the beef and salad on the side, vegetarians get the egg and cheese salad, vegans get creamy vegan pasta. How on earth did you mess this up??
James G. Currie 3 years ago
As for how she messed up, she *assumed* that the caterer would automatically know to make the vegan dishes with vegan pasta, vegan sauce, and faux eggs and faux cheese. She *assumed* that she knew better than the person that had been working for the company for a long period. Remember, to assume, is to create a conclusion out of nothing. (Hence the old joke about making an "@$$ of You and Me.") To presume is to accept facts, and use them to come to a conclusion.
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Nicki Violet 3 years ago
Im a vegetarian turning vegan and it is astounding how many don't understand where food comes from. Potlucks are a nightmare since everyone wants to talk me into eating things. I would rather buy my own food than explain repeatedly what I don't eat.
Ralph Watkins 2 years ago
I worked in a place where people had various religious diets. The local deli dept made up dishes specifically for that sort of thing. Our meetings & parties went very well. More meat for me. I then found out that Most Hindus don't like celery. Awesome. More for me.
Stephanie A Mutti 3 years ago
The same family member of mine that doesn't understand birds and fish are animals [just not mammals] also doesn't consider chicken and fish meat.
Mark Forcyth 3 years ago
The big mistake the temp-to-hire made is she didn't consult at least a dictionary let alone the food caterer. These types of diet are NOT some touchy-feely vague opinion...they are dietary restrictions. IE: I fed the baby steak even though the parent said formula. Besides, steak is full of healthy protein!
Yelena Yardeen 3 years ago
I do not and will never understand people who think chicken isn't meat. And there are a lot of them.
K Sarfo 3 years ago (edited)
If I were the boss here I would also look at OPs hands off approach to this important meeting. Not only did they not have the ability to stop the temp, they did not fix the mistake nor bring it to the attention of someone with authoroty or ability to fix said mistake. This was a two people screw up and op is one of them. The irony of posting about it on a page like this is lovely.
Christina Rosetti 3 years ago
The OP was *screaming* at her not to place the order. What did you expect her to do to stop her, kill her?
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#15
My wife worked at a gas station and found out her coworker, who had been there for years, had been refilling the napkin dispenser by cramming them one at a time through the front slot. She walked up and unfastened the back and apparently his jaw hit the floor. He had never considered that there might be a better way to do this.
Nightshade1972 3 years ago
I'm reminded of one I read about (don't think it was here) where a guy was hired as a temporary fill-in for a company's lone IT guy, who was going on vacation for two weeks. The company showed Temp Guy the stuff that Perm Guy left behind for him to do. "This should be enough to get you through the next two weeks." Temp Guy starts doing the work--and gets *all* of it done, properly, by almost the end of his first workday. He goes to his boss and asks for more work. Boss is very skeptical, "because that pile of work would've taken Perm Guy the full two weeks!" It turned out that Perm Guy had been BSing his bosses about how much time he needed to do an alleged "two weeks worth" of work. He'd do a little work, futz around a little, do a little more work, goof off a little, do a little more work, take a long lunch...etc. When Temp Guy came along and was able to show them that he had, in fact, done "two weeks" of work correctly within the space of his first day, they fired Perm Guy...
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Ki Li 3 years ago
When I was a waitress one of the other girls was filling the straw caddy like that. One at a time (it was the kind that you push the lever and one rolls out at a time) I showed her how to lift the lid and just fill the straws all at once. She was shocked. She said she'd been doing it that way so long and nobody ever corrected her
#16
I hired a new employee on Friday and gave him directions to the job site for Monday morning. He got there early and helped thieves load all of the building material on their truck and take off. The webcam showed him stopping traffic so they could leave.
El Dee 3 years ago
Something similar happened where I used to work. A van and driver came in during working hours to the stores department and claimed to be from another of our locations to pick up an order. We DID have an order for them, it was loaded on - meanwhile the driver goes for coffee INSIDE the stores dept - and the driver and van left never to be seen again. He had inside help and HUGE 'guts'
Mark Forcyth 3 years ago
Letting a new hire loose on a job site without oversight is like leaving a pupil on the first day of first grade on the wrong side of the freeway from the school.
Nightshade1972 3 years ago
I'm reminded of one I read about on NAR where a female was a professional racer (I forget if it was bike or car). During her down time, she started dating a guy. She told him this was her slow season, when racing picked up again she wouldn't be able to see him as much. Initially he seemed to take it in stride, but when racing season started, he was annoyed. One day she comes back from an out of town race to discover her onsite shop has been destroyed and torched. Unbeknownst to her then-bf, she had CCTV all around her shop. Turned out that her alleged "bf," and a few of his buddies, decided to trash her shop so that she'd come running to him for sympathy, at which point he could convince her to give up her silly racing hobby and spend all her time on him. Since she could clearly see him and his buddies on the footage, she pressed charges instead and dumped his sorry butt.
#17
A grabbed the arm of an intern once, right as he was about to grab a 00 gage (the big wires that feed electricity the whole building) bare handed to move it out of the way to show us a problem behind. It was hot. He claimed it was fine cause he was only gonna touch one wire at a time. The lead electrician "respectfully" requested said intern be removed from his sight before turning himself into carbon and paperwork. I agreed with this sentiment and had intern watching OSHA videos for almost 3 days straight as punishment.
Bruce Ferrell 3 years ago
Bad attitude. Safety training is NEVER punishment. If the person can't learn get then the hell out. A manager who thinks training is punishment... Sack 'em NOW.
Load More Replies... Scotira 3 years ago
🤣🤣🤣🙈 sorry, I had to laugh at carbon and paperwork... OMG carbon and a sh*it ton of paperwork indeed 😅🤦♀️
Benita Valdez 3 years ago
Oh God OSHA videos for 3 days? I'm cringing and not sure that was a just punishment; might have been a little too harsh. I really hope he was the perfect worker after that torture
Cleshawn Montague 3 years ago
I have had to watch OSHA videos for 2 weeks at every job I've had.
Random Anon 3 years ago
I'm not saying all are like that, but people fresh out of school tend to be too keen on the practical side and tend to touch things. Yeah you need to really drill the don't touch things until tested into their skulls in such environments. It took a while to get the freshies used to always checking for current before putting their hand on things, even studs and rebar, you may not know what's grounded where.
#18
I worked at a company with a shared inbox. One guy sent all of his emails with a distinct font and color. He was super untrustworthy and sucked at the job.
One day he sent an email to a customer from the shared inbox but put my signature on it, to make it seem like it came from me instead of him. He left the font and color the same as all of his other emails.
He didn’t last long there after that.
Yelena Yardeen 3 years ago
I had an (incompetent) intern sign an email as me once from a shared inbox. When I asked him if he did that (I wanted to give him a chance to explain) his response was "yes and I think I used very clear English". ...... Readers, he had not used clear English and made me look like a moron to our clients.
Dan 3 years ago
I like Comic Sans for non formal stuff like emails to family or writing stories
Gigantor the Bog Monster 3 years ago
Times New Roman or Courier New all the way
Load More Replies... #19
The designer, creative director and head of production all missed that there was an eight day week on a calendar. We sent 10 000 copies of a useless calendar to a client. Rightly so, they refused to pay for it.
Brad Mills 3 years ago (edited)
I’m sorry, but I have enough Mondays on my calendar. Monday = Monday; Tuesday = Monday Part 2; Wednesday = Monday Part 3; Thursday = Monday Part 4; Friday = Monday Part 5.
#20
I worked in a paint shop and every time a new chemical was introduced to the shop, I would ask about the hazards. They would tell me that it is a green chemical; there are no hazards. "It's baby safe" they would say. Once when I entered the shop I saw a guy using a new spray. The side of the bucket indicated that it was dangerously poisonous and highly corrosive. I told him that he should be using a mask and gloves to use that chemical. He said "Don't worry, it's baby safe. They even have a picture of a baby playing in it." After seeing the image, I yelled at the guy, "This is the baby. He is not playing, he is not swimming, HE'S DYING!"
Sven Grammersdorf 3 years ago
Any chemical that's green can't hurt you. It's the yellow and clear and blue ones that are dangerous, and don't ever turn your back on a purple one!
James Edwards 3 years ago
They even have a picture of a baby playing in it, LOL. Iam going to use that one.
Jp@nda 3 years ago
And the messed up part is no matter how stupid these people are, and even though it was completely preventable, and more than likely their fault, unless they were high at the time, if you get hurt on the job your company is going to have to pay, especially if it's an OSHA recordable incident
M O'Connell 3 years ago
It's a standard label on virtually all buckets, demonstrating that you should never leave a child alone with a bucket because even a tiny amount of liquid presents a drowning risk. istockphot...d23182.jpg 
#21
I worked for a non-profit that hired a guy in fundraising purely “for his rolodex” and they couldn’t care less about any of his job functions as long as he kept bringing more rich people to fundraiser parties. Well when the pandemic hit and we were forced to go remote, it became clear how incompetent he was with technology, and how he’d been coasting for years in the office by sticking to phone calls instead of email, etc. We had our first major online fundraiser coming up and I warned my boss that this dude had no idea how Zoom worked - never muted himself, camera up the nose, treated it like watching a YouTube video. But again, he was the guy inviting all the rich people to the event, so they didn’t want to “lecture him about a computer program” and “hurt his ego”.
Then in our massive 200+ person zoom event, he set his laptop on the bathroom counter and proceeded to take a shirtless, nasty old man dump complete with grunting, splashing, and squelching. It was so loud it drowned out the speaker. They had to end the event early because they had no way to mute him and it kept going for a full two minutes with no sign of stopping. I nearly threw my laptop out a window that night.
Cactus McCoy 3 years ago
If there was no call host on that session who could easily mute his mic, turn off his camera and even remove him easily this company is as incompetent as that employee.
Iifa A. 3 years ago
First thing I thought! I do online meetings and lectures and you bet of 160+ participants there's one that has overview of the technical issues during the session and a host. Both can mute and unmute. It seems the company has incometent IT department all together, setting up user friendly tutorial type of training should have been mandatory for every employee who uses virtual communication.
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Fitz_N_Fartz 3 years ago
Something is not quite true about this. Host could have cut them off with impunity, guess the story needed a little more 'filling'.
Random Panda 3 years ago (edited)
Honestly, if i was there i would also almost throw my laptop out of the window too, we have to apreciate this person for not throwing their laptop out of the window
Seanette Blaylock 3 years ago
Why "shirtless"? Unless there's some really bizarre anatomy involved, just hauling pants and underwear down exposes what's necessary for restroom use.
Jp@nda 3 years ago
I know right?!? But apparently there is a whole subset of people who either undress somewhat, or get completely naked to use the bathroom. I learned this a couple years ago and when I asked why, they said it's because that's how they grew up doing it so that's how they're comfortable 🤷♀️ whatever floats your boat right?
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Joe Reaves 3 years ago
They say OK we're going to have to wrap this up early and everyone else leaves I mean he might still be in there but no one else id what the aim is.
Load More Replies... #22
I don't know exactly the problem, but my wife and I had a house built, 3 months after our closing the company that installed the HVAC wanted to do a routine maintenance as part of the warranty. The guy came in and looked at the system setup in the attic and just "oh this is Jerry's work" in a very apologetic voice and scheduled someone to come out and redo 90% of the work before the warranty began.
I don't know what Jerry did, but it was apparently well known in that company to likely need to be redone.
Remi 3 years ago
Maybe Jerry was fired and they were doing "routine" check-ups to find all the things Jerry effed up
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Random Anon 3 years ago
Well then please inform Jerry to pleasure himself with a splintered termite infested log.
#23
I worked on a golf course during the summer. Area with lots of poison ivy. Two of my coworkers were instructed to weedy a river edge area. If we encounter poison ivy, we either stop what we are doing or go get full suit protection with respirators. These dumba**es were weedwhacking in the thickest poison ivy I had ever seen. No protective suit or glasses or respirator. I roll up and notice what the hell they're doing and point out all the poison ivy everywhere- they were aerosolizing the oil. They both ended up in the hospital on steroid to prevent their death because of the oils they inhaled.
Alex Taylor 3 years ago
It sounds as if the 2 guys didn't know what 'poison ivy' was, and that nobody checked this before letting them loose with their weedwhackers. Having said they - if this was the case, why on earth didn't they ask what it was before doing the job?
Chich 3 years ago
I have caught two people intentionally exposing themselves to poison ivy in order to get sick days off work. Maybe they were trying this but did not realize how dangerous ivy can be.
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AspieGirl88 3 years ago
Were they instructed on how to correctly deal with it beforehand? If not, I’d have to say they aren’t entirely the ones at fault. If they WERE told how to handle it, then yeah, I’d agree that’s (almost) enough to earn a Darwin Award! 😅🤷♀️
Paul Richards 3 years ago
Almost but not quite as stupid as the couple of teen morons who smoked poison sumac in a pipe trying to get high, yes they died.
Jespren Ray 3 years ago
When I was at a summer camp we were doing some yard clean up and we’re given instructions on wearing long sleeves, gloves, and trying to avoid the poison ivy…it didn’t work, everyone was covered in itchy splotches the next day-except me. Out of the whole group, turns out I wasn’t allergic to poison ivy (and later in the week, I’m also not allergic to poison oak). I ended up moving a bunch of contaminated items that week since I was the only one immune.
Snowfoxrox 3 years ago
I had a co-worker eager to earn some extra money took a side gig clearing a hillside. He and his buddy knew about poison oak, but didn't bother to put on the protective gear provided because it was hot. Dude had ginourmous blisters all over his body! Ended up in the ER.
Random Anon 3 years ago
Look if you don't understand the hazard, ask. If you still don't get it, then follow instructions to the letter. How bad you want that Darwin award seriously?
#24
A guy was using the overhead crane in a machine shop I worked in. It had two hooks on it, one was raised right to the roof, the other was lowered and beside another guys machine. The guy using the crane was looking at the hook by the roof and mobilized the crane, he was wearing earmuffs and the shop is loud af so when he started almost killing everyone in the line of machines with the other hook he couldn't hear the rest of us screaming. The hook almost threw the first guy into his lathe, hit the next guy's tool board, flipped over to the side he was on almost put him into his lathe, rinse and repeat for the next three machines. When it bounced over the last one it grabbed the A-Frame that held all the bar stock and started lifting 30-40T of steel off the ground someone finally made it to him and slapped the controls out of his hands. That was his last day at that job.
Nimues Child 3 years ago (edited)
When I was teaching, the lights went out at school one day. We soon found out that a tow truck driver hadn't secured his hook, snagged a telephone pole and pulled it down, killing the power. It was by a new car lot and had a transformer on it. Between the pole and the transformer bits, he had destroyed 5 brand new cars. It was his first day on the job...and his last.
Nightshade1972 3 years ago
I used to be a grocery cashier in a store near a major intersection with a transformer. Can't tell you how often some idiot would speed around the corner, take out the transformer, and kill power in the surrounding area for hours until it could be fixed. Sometimes the transformer went out because it was in a flood-prone area, and if it got underwater, out it went. That would take even longer to get fixed.
Load More Replies... James G. Currie 3 years ago
Heard a similar (although less dangerous) bit years ago. -- Let's call him Johnny... Johnny wanted to play with the BIG trucks, so he applied and was hired by a mining company in Northern Ontario. Was hired, and completed his training. A couple of weeks after first solo, driving the ore from the mine at one side of town to the smelter on the other side of town. Because of the MASSIVE weight of the loaded trucks, they were required to follow a specific route on purpose built roads. This route snaked through town multiple times (think a sine wave), and took 30-45 minutes each way. Johnny had an idea one day figured he could be more efficient and deliver more loads by driving the most direct route through town... A few kilometres later, his massively oversized truck is buried to the axles in a residential street, and he has caused millions in damages to the surface streets... No more Johnny on the payroll.
Paul Davis 3 years ago
This story speaks volumes about the brutal incompetency of management in that shop as well.
Nimues Child 3 years ago
+1. At my job you are not allowed anywhere near the shops without training and are never allowed to be in them alone.
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#25
Poured sink cleaning solution into the ice cream machine instead of the cream mixture and I had to stop them, they then said "I'm sure it'll be fine, it was only a little."
No that would poison people. I had to clean out the whole machine top to bottom and refill it. I ended up throwing away nearly a whole bucket full of contaminated ice cream mixture.
I would also like to add that the containers didn't look anything alike, the sink stuff came in big plastic jugs with screw tops and the ice cream comes in carbord cartons (like orange juice) that you have to cut open. so I don't know how she could have possibly mixed the two up.
AspieGirl88 3 years ago (edited)
Pour a teaspoonful of bleach into their coffee right in front of them & say “I’m sure it’s fine; it was only a little bit” … perhaps then they’ll realise their error! 🤣
#26
Was making pizza. Guy broke the pizza board(the thing with the handle you make the pizza on and then slide the pizza into the oven) I found the other one and he lost that. So I told him to make pizzas on one of the plastic cutting boards. He put the pizza into the oven on the board and just left it. The board melted No more pizza that day
LuckyL 3 years ago
I bet OP lost it too after melting the cutting board!.
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Scary Carrie 3 years ago
This guy assumes that we are all so stupid that he needs to put a definition in parentheses for all of us yokels. Someone should tell this person that this "pizza board" he feels the need to define, is actually called a "peel".
#27
A few years ago, I was working in IT at a hospital. The following is a genuine account of what occurred: We had received a call regarding a computer that was not turning on, so I went to one of the offices. This wasn't strange because we got them all the time. To put it mildly, 95 percent of those calls were due to "user mistake," so I was bracing myself for the worst... However, not to this extent. When I arrive, I confirm that she is correct; the computer will not power on. I examine the plug first. It's affixed to the wall, and it appears to be in good working order in the computer's back office. "So, what were you doing when this computer stopped working?" I inquire. In response, she state As a result,"Well, I thought it was too hot, so I used the water cooling option." As a piece of background, this model of computer featured a fan port on the top of the machine that looked like a funnel. She pointed to this fan port when she said "water cooled." "...There aren't even any water-cooled PCs here." When I returned to my desk with the now sloshing PC, my IT colleagues were bewildered as to why I had pulled the machine without permission... Until I emptied the water into a garbage pail
James016 3 years ago
It may have been salvageable, I used to work for a tour operator and frequently people would spill things on their computers. So we would tell them to remove the battery and put the laptop into a warm dry area such as the hotel's laundry. This would actually work as long as they didn't try to power up the laptop between spilling and this, that is the key thing here. Another time in one of the hotels, they had a freak storm and where the computers were got flooded so the computers got soaked. They put the PCs in car and left them in the sun for a few days (it was a hot country) The computers worked after that.
AmAndA_Panda 3 years ago
OP also said he confirmed the computer wasn't powering on. So they did try to power up between when the water was poured in and when he figured out what she did.
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Hannah Hudson-Lee 3 years ago (edited)
I worked in IT at a hospital, and I once had a senior consultant DEMAND a full new PC (incliding a new monitor, keyboard, and the works) because theirs had a spider on it. I removed the spider, but they still demanded a new PC and wouldn't touch the old one. So I took it to the workshop, cleaned it, put a new asset label on it, updated the portfolio directory and took the same PC back again. Then they were happy. Edit additional: I am sympathetic about arachnophobia, I used to live with an arachnophobe and always helped with the spiders compassionately. But this was a whole new level.
Jessany Trotter 3 years ago
At a hospital…. So there’s a possibility that the person who killed the computer is responsible for human life…. Jesus. ⚰️
SupernaturalPanda 3 years ago
Worked in a hospital years ago and one of my duties was when a baby was born labor and delivery would call down and give me info so I could create a chart for new baby . Once chart was created the necessary paperwork was auto printed to labor and delivery floor. Had nurse call down and chew me out cause paperwork wasn’t printing for one newborn baby boy. Turns out her printer was out of paper. She’s a nurse folks. Scary huh ?
Dav Carro-Ripalda 3 years ago
That is a very obvious PICNIC issue: Problem In Chair, Not In Computer.
Ralph Watkins 2 years ago
Where I worked most of the IT people were not properly educated or even computer geeks. I kept getting a blue screen of death on my computer. They had no idea what it was. Even when I showed them they wanted me to do software solutions even when it would turn on, beep, & get that blue screen. I know as a user I am not supposed to open the case. I did anyways. None of the fans were working. It was so loaded with dust. IT said they don't clean them. On my lunch break I bought two cans of compressed air & cleaned out my computer. It was horrendous. Worked fine after that.
#28
I knew a guy who was a foreign exchange dealer in London. He made a trade but apparently forgot to press go (or whatever) When he got back from lunch the company had lost £10m. The whole department had to work together all afternoon/evening to make enough to cover his losses so he wouldn't be sacked. A hell of a team building exercise. ;)
ezPZ 3 years ago
Woah, covering 10m loses in one day, damnit, i wouldn't mind earning like that for a day
LazyPanda 3 years ago
You mean *working* like that for a day? Sounds like it was hell. Only person sitting back "earning" were the company owners
Load More Replies... AmAndA_Panda 3 years ago
Soooo...in theory the company could have made 20 million pounds that day? Which means they were still down 10 million.
Mary Mosher 3 years ago
Nah, that's not how trading works. You don't just pick up $10 million in an afternoon.
humdrum 3 years ago
The flash crash on 2 May set off by a ‘fat-fingered’ Citigroup trader (added a zero) could cost the bank $50 million.
Load More Replies... Random Anon 3 years ago
Yeah the consequences are severe but I feel this is more a mishap than deficiency of grey matter.
#29
I worked in a place notorious for having bad recruiters and hiring bad temps. They had this one guy, on a 3-month lease, and we couldn't get rid of him fast enough, in the summer of 2001. First, he claimed all these Microsoft certifications, and after a few days, we realized he didn't even know how to use a mouse or how scrollbars worked. So we put him on the worst detail: all he had to do was go to one of 20 popular websites, and use a stopwatch to time how fast he clicked "enter" and how fast it took the web page to load. We were testing some web caching software. Then he had to go on another machine with the software, and do the same thing. He had never used a browser. So we had to teach him how THAT worked. The concept blew his mind, and we wonder how an adult had lived in 2001 who didn't know how a browser worked. We knew he lied about the certifications at this point, but he had 90 days we were stuck with him. Very quickly, however, he discovered how to find p*rn. And started browsing that instead of testing websites. This was in the days of MSIE 5 or 6, so of course, they became infected with popups and viruses. We'd catch him at it, and he'd deny it every time, and we'd have to complete wipe the desktop and reinstall Windows, only for him to do it again. We caught him doing it with other machines in the lab, too. The guy literally had no impulse control, claiming the whole test lab was infected and just absolute lies that a kid would tell who had no idea how computers worked. Thank god we never caught him jerkin' it, but I feared reviewing the lab security tapes should it have gotten to that. "You were browsing p*rnography again. We have told you many times, that's against company policy." "No, I didn't." "I am literally looking at you browsing p*rn." "That's not me." "There's [p*rn site] on your task bar." "That was always there." "You have a popup from [lewd site name]." "That was someone else who was here, earlier." "Who?" "You know, that hairy guy. With the beard." "There is no hairy guy with a beard who works in this lab. You have been the only one here besides me." "I know I saw him. He browses the p*rn all the time!" Ugh. Like a mentally deficient 12 year old. I was so glad to get rid of him.
Alex Taylor 3 years ago
Any employment lawyers out there? Quote "We knew he lied about the certifications at this point, but he had 90 days we were stuck with him." Surely the fact that he provably lied about his qualifications would have given the company grounds to sack him immediately?
Party Poison (They/She) 3 years ago (edited)
IANAL, but that plus the first porn incident would certainly be enough! And, Scotria, they caught him with the porn, so they certainly could prove that.
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Paul Davis 3 years ago
I've never heard of temps who couldn't be let go at the snap of a finger, 90 days or whatever. Sounds like they actually hired this worthless idiot. As with most of these stories they reveal as much incompetence by the idiot managers as by the idiot employees.
Chich 3 years ago (edited)
Had a very religious guy who would come into the office early and surf porn on other people computers. He was easily caught and tried to deny it. Became known as the 'Porn again christian" afterwards.
Weed in the Garden 3 years ago
Mind if I borrow that line? I live in a very conservative area and that would be a great bumper sticker!
Load More Replies... James G. Currie 3 years ago
Ugh... Sounds like the girl I was in an on-line argument with several years ago. She was proudly touting that she didn't need AVS or Security software on her computer (and not because she was an Apple fangurl - she was on a Windows platform)… She stated, with conviction, that she was MSCE Certified, and that the ONLY way for a computer to become infected with a virus is if someone in PHYSICAL control of it installed it. -- She didn't like it when myself and a friend (a Grey Hat) told her she was wrong, and that we could open her "drink tray" anytime we wanted... All we needed to do was figure out the IP address of the modem attached to her computer. (The friend used to wage friendly hacking wars with a group of friends, trying everything they could to knock each other off-line.) She kept screaming about her being a Computer Security Specialist because of her certification, and eventually unsubed to the discussion. Heaven help her employers...
Joe Average 3 years ago
Send him home. If you have to pay him so be it. Or give him a mop bucket and a mop and put him to work for the remainder of his contractm
Nimues Child 3 years ago
"If I tell these lies enough times you will believe it." No. No, I won't.
Zack Podany 3 years ago
Was this through a temp agency by any chance? I've heard more than a few stories of them practicing creative writing on CVs.
#30
When I was in the coastguard, there was an incident when a vessel called in what they thought was another vessel in distress, but couldn't be sure and couldn't raise them on VHF. The watch commander kept refusing to launch the rescue boat until he had 'more details'. Like, dude, this far North the life expectancy of a person in the water without a survival suit is measured in single digits of minutes. We can get more details when the boat is en route; the exact position of a bunch of floating corpses is of limited value. After three or four minutes I just said 'f**k it' and launched the boat. It turned out the suspected casualty's radio was banjaxed, but they were otherwise fine; their boat just had a very low freeboard and looked a bit 'sinky'. I fully expected to be sh*tcanned for it, but I was not; the old man had a long conversation with the guy about how nobody will ever find fault with sending an asset to a possible false alarm, but failing to send an asset to a real emergency is...well, it's Not Good. The dude had previous before I joined for shrugging off a red flare report as a hoax. Two people died in that one.
Party Poison (They/She) 3 years ago
Why is he still in any position of power when two people died because of his inaction?
Joe Reaves 3 years ago
Especially in an organisation whose unofficial motto is - you have to go out; you don't have to come back.
Load More Replies... Robin Roper 3 years ago
I love the Coast Guard; their contribution to the safety of our citizenry is woefully under-appreciated.
PurpleUnicorn 3 years ago
Recent I quest finished 4 years after fatal rescue helicopter crash. Fisherman injured at sea, bad weather, doctor ashore said nothing could be done, but someone sent out the helicopters anyway. After successful extraction of the casualty the chopper providing top cover diverted to refuel, disappeared off radar. Turned out they'd crashed in poor visibility into a rock that wasn't on the charts. So while I think there was fault on 2 sides - failure to update systems etc and inappropriate scrambling - it was attributed to accident.
#31
The office we worked in was shut down due to covid and the company went 100% remote. A new senior engineer was hired to work directly with our product team and also manage a team of developers. During our company wide weekly zoom meeting after he was done presenting for the company he turned his camera off but forgot to put him self on mute. 100+ people heard this man playing Fortnite and talking down about the company to someone else in the background among other things. He only lasted a month.
#32
When I was in the Navy, this known dumba** and pathological liar was on armed watch with an M-14 patrolling the topside decks. Literally all you have to do is walk around for 4 hours with a rifle on your shoulder. This dude came back to the Quarterdeck (main entrance to the ship) WITH NO GUN. He tried to claim it fell off his shoulder and into the water while tying his shoe. How a rifle would fall off your shoulder, pass through your hands that were tying the shoe, and through all three lifelines (like guard rails) is still a mystery. My theory is that he was doing drill team stuff - like tossing it spinning in the air - and lost it that way.
Justme 3 years ago
I’m not military but I’m going to guess that it’s not a good idea to do drill team stuff with a loaded M-14.
Sven Grammersdorf 3 years ago
If the safety is on then it's safe. That's why it's called that.
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Marco Conti 3 years ago
I think you can pretty much bet your paycheck he was being an idiot with it. When I served (Second Lieutenant) I have had all sort of s**t happen on my watch, from the idiots playing with a loaded rifle that took the head off some guy walking in the guard shack to an actual firefight between guard towers over some girl both soldiers wanted to claim as their own. Fortunately, at the time we still had M1 Garands and they run out of rounds rather quickly, allowing me and my guys to approach both towers and disarm them. The QRF arrived almost two hours later. Some Quick Reaction Force! If we had to wait for them and those guys were better armed it would have looked like Fallujah (this was the Italian army, late 70s, for the record).
François Carré 3 years ago
It was probably hard to refrain from asking him if the rifle wasn't up his a*s by any chance.
#33
I didn't see it happen, but I used to work at a factory making N95 masks, and one night the entire place ground to a halt. Turns out that an incompetent co-worker running the machine that made the basic form of the mask decided that the best way to clear a jam in the thing was to ignore the sign that said "don't put your hand in this part of the machine," removed the safety cover that was clearly marked with a label that said "no, seriously...do not remove this," and stuck his hand in there. The machine did to him what Gollum did to Frodo on Mount Doom, and as a result a factory the size of an Ikea shut down for half the shift.
Zack Podany 3 years ago
Sadly, unless he stuck a different part of his anatomy in there, I don't think the injury prevented reproduction.
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Stephanie Barr 3 years ago
You'd be amazed at how many industrial accidents involve disabling safety features that "get in the way" and ignoring warnings.
Memere 3 years ago
I worked as a workers compensation specialist for 11 years at a major candy company here in the U.S. We had the corporate office, 4 factories, 7 warehouses, 45 retail stores, and 250+ field sales personnel. I've got stories!
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MoMcB 3 years ago
Lord of the Rings reference. Gollum bites off Frodo's finger
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Moezzzz 3 years ago
I had a non English speaking dude come into the ER with his hand completely mangled due to sticking his hand down into a cotton gin. It was awful- just nubs at that point. I had a yelling match with the companies HR rep that demanded I stop trying to give him morphine until he had a urine drug test. Like, look lady, I get you need to know if he was high when he destroyed his hand, but I'm not about to withhold pain meds from a crying Hispanic dude with no fingers left. Told her "I'm giving him morphine. If anything else comes back, that's on him- now get the hell out of the ER". (ER doc asked me to "get rid of her").
Memere 3 years ago (edited)
This reminds me of a work comp claim from one of the factories owned by my last employer. The guy was assigned to the pallet stacker, & instead of hitting the stop & following lockout/tag out protocols, he would just stick his hand in to straighten a crooked pallet before the next one was placed on top. His left hand got smashed between two pallets doing that, he filed a WC claim, & was taken off work for 6 weeks with pay - 4 weeks before Thanksgiving. Two weeks before he came back, he got an attorney & filed suit for settlement money for the scars on his hand. He came back to work & on the very day his attorney was meeting with the insurance company about the settlement, the dude does the same damned thing, but with his right hand! Boom - another WC claim, and another 6 weeks off work, paid. Luckily we were able to fire him after the 2nd injury due to the number of write-ups he had. Oh, and he had relatives working at the same factory - yep, they all had "work injuries" on a regular basis, usually right before holidays!
Memere 3 years ago
Just for info, the reason he didn't want to hit the stop & shut down the stacker was that he would have had to notify the manager & then open up the stacking cage to pull the pallets to get to the crooked one. If a crooked pallet wasn't straightened up, the finished stack wouldn't move out of the cage, the whole stack would get jammed.
Load More Replies... #34
Tried to cool down hot oil (in a chute, all ready to be emptied) with a nice big bucket of water…..I heard “THOMAS NO” only to turn around and see a GEYSER of hot oil shooting towards the ceiling before it hit and splashed down around him. Nobody was hurt some f*****g how
Edit: because it has come up, the chute that the oil was in was on wheels and had a wooden handle, it absolutely didn’t need to be cooled lol
Rose the Cook 3 years ago
After closing, a tightwad employer insisted that rather than changing a vat of dirty oil I throw ice cubes into it while hot. Supposedly this would cause any particles to rise to the top to be skimmed off. I explained why this was a bad idea then told him to do it himself when he refused to listen. Later he called asking me to come back in and clean the mess.
Miss Alice 3 years ago
Please tell me that you didn't go back to clean up his mess that was 100% his fault.
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SerumSeven 3 years ago
It's what we have to yell in the U.S. every other day. "Don't chute! I'm oil by myself!"
Load More Replies... Susie Elle 3 years ago (edited)
Housemates of mine wanted to fry falafel and put a pan with oil on the hot stove and just left it there heating with a lid on (that had a tiny ventilation hole in it). Needless to say, the oil caught fire as soon as they took the lid off due to the sudden influx of oxygen and they managed to carry it outside to the backyard. I heard someone yell "THE OIL'S BLAZING, QUICK, GET THE HOSE!" I nearly fell down the stairs trying to stop them. Not only would they have burned the entire backyard down but also potentially the entire block because the landlord had a wooden shed in the yard and a firehose has some mighty pressure on it.
Well then 3 years ago
My niece did this at my mom's house. It was 11:30 pm, 30 minutes before she turned 16. Put oil on to make french fries, goes to her room and proceeds to get on Facebook. My sis comes in from the garage and the stove and cabinets are ablaze. I lived around the corner. I'm stepping out of the shower, phone is ringing. I answer and it's my bff screaming, "GIRL YOUR MOMMA'S HOUSE IS ON FIRE". She lives across the street from mom. Threw my kids in the car, and hauled it over there on two wheels. House had to be gutted and they had to move to an apartment for 4 months.
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Zero 3 years ago
Awhile back there was a video of someone dumping a bunch of ice into the active deep fryer. I couldn't bring myself to watch to the end so no idea how it ended, but presumably nothing too bad else it wouldn't have been posted.
Evelyn Ann 3 years ago
I've done it for fun with ice cubes, dry ice, and frozen lettuce. One ice cube = fun. More than that? It'll explode and burn the place down. We had a new guy forget to dry out inside of fryer after filtering. I opened the next morning, turn fryer on to a popping sound. It spat oil in a 20' circle within a minute of starting to heat up...i made "armor" out of cardboard and grabbed a pizza pan as a shield to get close enough to turn it off. Hate to think what would have happened if it had gotten up to temp
Load More Replies... Nightshade1972 3 years ago
Years ago, I lived in a multi-building apartment complex. One of the buildings (not mine, fortunately) burned to the ground when someone tried a less-than-brilliant way of disposing of hot cooking oil. They dumped it out their upper-floor window, it landed on the bushes below, then someone (dunno if it was the same person or not) disposed of a lit cigarette by tossing it out a window on the same side of the building. Cigarette, meet hot cooking oil. Whoosh!
#35
I have a list a mile long of the s**t our completely incompetent project manager did, but the best was insisting that a $3000 load of fertilizer still absolutely had to be delivered as previously scheduled despite the company warning against it as we were expecting heavy rains that day. The entire pile was washed away within a couple of hours.
Random Anon 3 years ago
Some of these project managers are living in ivory clock towers. All they ever do is check off tasks and tracking time, but completely lose the big picture.
Sven Grammersdorf 3 years ago
If the contract with the customer says it has to be done by that day, then it has to be done that day.
Sue User 3 years ago
I took " the company" in the story to mean the buyer. And that is where you get written override of delivery date.
Load More Replies... #36
One of my reports missed a 9 AM meeting and when I asked him why he said “you said the meeting was at 12, not 9!” Of course I was very confused because the meeting invite said 9 and everyone else on the team knew it was at 9. So he sent me a screenshot of his outlook calendar and it turns out he just had all his s**t set to the wrong time zone.
Paul Davis 3 years ago
It seems to me he was still supposed to show up at 12 PM that time zone, which was 9 AM for everyone else.
stardust 3 years ago
Maybe he was on a vacation, and he switched his device times, and he forgot to turn them back when he came back??
Load More Replies... Amy 3 years ago
I had my Uni send a letter for the induction at the start of the second year of term. They sent a follow up with a new date, same time. Get a text on the new date from my friends asking where I am. Turns out it was the new date, and an earlier time. Luckily I had the letter with me whilst I sprinted to the lecture theatre to show the professors!
Susan Thomas 3 years ago
This is why many companies list meeting times in UT (Universal time) and you do your own maths.
Barbara L Bristow 3 years ago
Worked with a guy who was making collection calls. When he was asked why he hadn't called Calif yet, he said, "Time difference." He thought Calif was 5 hours behind PA
#37
Wouldn’t say incompetent, but was quite an entrance. A new person joined and on day 1 remote was somehow able to delete the production teams entire Dropbox file directory, which was about 25 TBs of video, design files, production files etc.
Was about 2 tense weeks working with Dropbox to get it back, but yeah that new person was uncomfortable…
john li 3 years ago
I used to play an mmo called bdo. One year when we are supposed to get the winter update where it's supposed to add snow in the world and Christmas trees in the towns etc we didn't get it. And instead theres a message near the minimap that said due to global warming winter is delayed. I heard rumors that an intern deleted all the winter assets.
James G. Currie 3 years ago (edited)
Co-worker of a late friend - they were working Contract for CNR in their Customer Support, 15+ years ago. -- Co-worker didn't like the posted schedule, so came in after hours one day to change his schedule, which was on the CN mainframe. Somehow, despite having limited access to their network, he managed to change the consists of half the trains in the Country. The ONLY reason they caught it is they run the trains virtually 24+ hours ahead of time. The company didn't loose the contract, but I'm pretty sure he was removed from the contract.
#38
Emptying hot fryer oil into a plastic container. Guess how that went
Cactus McCoy 3 years ago
That's a slick idea. With careful execution he might slip right by you noticing.
Ralph Watkins 2 years ago
My neighbor almost caught our apartment building on fire. She was using a charcoal grill on her back desk. She decided to dump the hot coals over the side of her upstairs place down into the plastic trash bin below. It already had trash in it yet. It caught fire. Good thing is most of the building is brick & concrete. The woman is in her mid 50s & she did nothing wrong. Somebody should have told her that you aren't supposed to do that. One of the other neighbors put out the fire. She only cared about being blamed.
#39
I worked grocery for twelve years and one day I get an in house page if I could come to the receiving dock (I worked produce) to assist the grocery manager. We had just got a grocery load in, and the driver hadn’t used a load lock (a bar that goes across the truck if it’s not a full truck) and we had NINE full pallets of product toppled over and broken. My job was to take pictures on my cell phone of the mess and the grocery manager called up our distribution center to inform them of what happened. We had to take the keys to the truck away from him as he was fired on the spot and he had to find his own way home. And it was a four hour drive home from our store. The whole time he was bitching that he wasn’t his fault that they can’t force him to supply his own load lock as he was an independent contracted driver. He did about 10k worth of damage to product, lost his job, and any future possibilities at driving a big rig for anyone in the state because he didn’t want to buy a piece of equipment that cost $50 or even worse he didn’t ASK our warehouse for one, which they would have HAPPILY loaned him one (he’d be fined if he didn’t return the lock back after his run)
MAtthew Holt 3 years ago
If he's an independent contractor how did the store take the keys to his truck? This sounds like a c**p company that hires people 1099 and pretends they are independent
CultOfBambi 3 years ago
I'd agree! And I have a lot of sympathy, generally, for truckers and the conditions they work under. Last Week Tonight, With John Oliver did a segment on how things are in the US and it's frankly appalling. A good watch if you have 25min spare: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phieTCxQRLA
Load More Replies... Roxy Eastland 3 years ago
Not sure why the load lock didn't come with the lorry? Can someone explain?
Random Anon 3 years ago
Cheap f*cker is what he is. I still remember this numbskull "software developer" contractor I work with briefly years ago. The idiot feels really strongly that large conglomerates are evil, like Microsoft, Oracle et cetera. That's fine but then he only used open source stuff. So if you're going to collaborate with people and they can't open the sh!t you send them, how the heck is that going to work? Dude insisted this is how it should be and everyone, including the client should adapt. That was the handful of times, I actually agreed with the bloodsucking consultant to boot his a**e out.
Kayla Schmitz 3 years ago
I had the same job in a regional warehouse for a grocery company that served 75 stores. This happens ALL THE TIME. I feel for the guy needing to get his own ride home; I mean, the truck is empty at that point and now someone has to come get it...
Kat 3 years ago
@Sven Grammersdorf : sometimes drivers do the loading / unloading as well. But always they are responsible for the correct loading and securing of the cargo
Load More Replies... #40
I worked with a guy who “cut” the grass on the greens of an entire golf course with the mower blade off.
Christof Irran 3 years ago
Wish I had the opportunity to do something dumb like that - can't get the (dull and bent) blade off; the nut holding it on is rusted onto the shaft.
Sven Grammersdorf 3 years ago
Wouldn't running a mower with no blade cause the engine to over-rev?
#41
Worked in construction. New guy from the recruiters comes in. He was asked by the forman if he'd ever used a circular saw (the concrete cutter type) and he said yes. Gets a hold of the saw. Waits for the forman to leave, looks at me and asks me (just started the day earlier) how to use it! I just tell him I don't know but will get someone to show both of us. As I walk away I hear it rev, some cutting then a loud bang. Turns out he thought he'd try it out by cutting something thinner. Like a thin black power line looking thing. He was asked immediately to leave the site in very colourful language.
#42
She threw an urn - with ashes inside - into the dumpster. I work at a vet clinic. We have a contract with a local pet cemetery to do cremation services for our patients that pass away/get euthanized. The cremains are shipped back to us with a packing list that we have to sign and mail back stating that we got all the urns and that they were in good condition. She unpacked and put away the other urns and signed the form, then proceeded to throw the box in the dumpster with the last urn still in it. What made the situation really infuriating was that the urn contained the ashes of *my pet*. The package came in on my day off and when I came in the next day, I saw the clinic's copy of the packing list with my pet's name on it, but no urn to be found. Fortunately another coworker had the idea to check the dumpster and the urn was still there and not damaged. I didn't like her before that, but I hated her guts after.
Roxy Eastland 3 years ago
Yeah, Im so glad the story ended with you getting the ashes because I didn't think it was going to.
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#43
I work in the OR and a coworker left a donor kidney uncovered and unsupervised in a room. Thank god the kidney was deemed ok for transplant but this is a very serious and fireable offense. The coworker has high seniority so she was just written up and my job tends to favor their older staff. (That’s why my vacation requests are denied but they can take off whenever they want). But newer nurses would’ve been severely punished. God forbid the kidney fell off the table or something else. I would be livid if I was expecting a kidney only to wait longer for another one because of someone’s lapse in judgment because of their perceived immunity to punishment due to tenure.
Sven Grammersdorf 3 years ago
What would happen if it fell on the floor? Can't you just rinse it off?
#44
This was in school but it’s so incompetent I want to put it here. It’s a fairly recognizable story from my school I hope someone finds it. This kid tried to use the teachers computer to find the answers to our next test. He did it while she was teaching. Science class, so there was a separate room attached where she stored materials and her laptop. So he’s in the room and she’s lecturing to the class. Turns out the computer was connected to the projector display. We’re all watching on the projector, along with the teacher what this genius is doing. Man was in her directory folder typing in “test”
Sven Grammersdorf 3 years ago
I would have just zipped up her whole folder and uploaded it to my Google Drive
Random Anon 3 years ago
Now in full view of every pair of eyes looking at the projecter, I hope your google account is something random and not your Firstname.Lastname@whatever.com... Otherwise, if that ain't a smoking gun, I don't know what is.
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#45
A coworker of mine turned off the refrigerator unit on the trailer because, "Roses don't need to be chilled." Firstly: Roses are chilled. Secondly, and much more importantly: He wasn't hauling roses, he was hauling CADAVERS. It took 2 days across the west for him to notice the smell and liquids leaking from the trailer. Yeah...Checkmate reddit.
IDK_Something 3 years ago
From OP: "He didn't read his Bills and his previous pickup was roses. It was a secure facility that was labeled "high value" and he never ran anything high value OTHER than flowers. Also, he was a f*****g dunce."
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Sven Grammersdorf 3 years ago
How could the driver possibly have been unaware that he was hauling hazardous materials?
#46
I worked in a veterinary hospital for a good number of years. One day, unknown to me, some little girl had found a dead/dying seagull with her family and brought it in to see if we could help it, but it has passed by the time they arrived. Our veterinary technician took said bird for disposal but was too busy to deal with it then (like... Put it in the freezer. One minute tops with labeling!), so instead he just packed to box with the dead bird into our storage area with dozens of similar boxes and just leaves it there. Days go by ( while he is still working, I should add) and I come back on shift and something is seriously rank in the office. Customers are complaining! No one knows what would cause it, but I eventually find the box buried beneath other supplies. I walk up to my head receptionist and say "So... Seagull?" and watch the absolute fury grow in her eyes. The tech did not last long after that.
#47
I had a coworker who was a guidance counselor at five schools in district. She was supposed to work one day at each school, unless she was called to a school for an urgent case. She would frequently call the school she was supposed to be at, stating she had an urgent case at another school. One day at lunch she was talking about what was happening in her favorite soap opera. This was before VCRs, and the show aired long before the school day ended. The principal was sitting at our lunch table. He got up, smiled, and told her, "see me when you are done with your lunch." After checking, she hadn't seen more than a few kids per week, for many months. Funny thing is, complaints about her work had gone down in that time. She was a crappy guidance counselor.
Lady Goldberry 3 years ago
Well yeah, she hadn't been doing anything to actually get a complaint. Other than not being there.
Roxy Eastland 3 years ago
I suppose even a great counsellor is going to get less complaints if they're never there
Load More Replies... Robin Roper 3 years ago (edited)
Sadly, there are a lot of crappy guidance counselors - one, told my husband he was too poor to go to college. Turns our there's a college (Berea) in Kentucky that serves under-resourced students from the Appalachians and charges no tuition. The students work 10 hours a week with nominal pay with the labor covering the tuition. Books, and room & board is on a sliding scale. My husband is from the Smokey Mountains and numerous teachers at that High School were graduates from that college. In fact it was the Vo Ag teacher who helped my husband do what was necessary to attend and graduate with honors from Berea College. My husband and I live in a house worth at least $1,200,000 and own a business worth at least $9,000,000. Suck on that crappy guidance counselor.
Metalhead Turtle 🇺🇦 3 years ago
She gives guidance counselors a bad name. I've been in (and seen) several circumstances where a guidance counselor has saved a child/teen from horrendous circumstances.
#48
Not a co worker but a fellow culinary student. I am in college one day a week training in advanced patisserie. Two weeks ago we were making sugar sculptures from isomalt. We had to bring in blow torches to use to “weld” parts of our sculpture together. Our instructor was explaining step by step what to do with the isomalt and explained that when we had our pieces molded and cooled he would show us how to use the blow torch. So a lot of us were busy molding and cooling our pieces before assembling our sculptures. One of the students who shares a station with me sort of jumped the gun and thought he could just assemble his sculpture without the instructor. He turns on his blow torch, sets his sculpture on a surface COVERED IN CLING FILM and proceeds to just set fire to everything around him. At this point I am roaring at him to stop but he just brushed me off and screamed back he knew what he was doing. Before we knew it the cling film was on fire and fire blankets were grabbed quickly. The instructor managed to get the fire put out but dear Jesus did it frighten the lot of us. The instructor chewed the student out of it for being so reckless. I actually can’t believe what the this student did and how he saw no danger. I really hope he chooses another career other than cheffing.
Random Anon 3 years ago
I don't know about the choosing part. With that mentality I wouldn't trust him with a bamboo spoon.
#49
There was a guy who drove a forklift through a wall in the warehouse. We work in IT. When asked why he used the forklift (which he had never driven before or was even authorized to touch) he said "I thought it would help". He was fired immediately.
#50
My coworker at the bowling alley had to walk down a lane where a group of very young children (maybe 4-8 years old) were bowling to retrieve a ball that had stopped in the gutter about halfway down to the pins. When he had picked up the ball my other coworker told him to go walk it back down to the children. However this guy had it in his mind that it would be best to *bowl it back down at the group of small children instead.* Luckily one of the adults with the children was a big muscular guy who was able to stop the ball and pick it up without anybody getting hurt.
Random Anon 3 years ago
The same train of thought associated with getting smashed by a large vehicle. Since my little hybrid can brake almost instantly, that large 28-wheeler trailer can too, I'll just cut it right here.
#51
Worked at Starbucks about 6 years ago. Had a newish coworker come up to me and ask why the water was going straight through the coffee and not changing color. He was trying to brew coffee without grinding the coffee beans. I still have a good laugh about this every once in awhile. Edit: he was a newer employee but definitely knew better. I had seen him brew coffee regularly before.
Roxy Eastland 3 years ago
Sometimes we have to learn first hand there's a reason for a process that everyone else follows. Not that it should be on an employer's ticket, though
Joe Reaves 3 years ago
This is what happens when you have to make coffee before you've drunk coffee!
#52
A new nurse was going to inject lice shampoo into an IV line. Thank God she came and asked me what is was first. Don't be afraid to ask questions about your medical care
Justme 3 years ago
In nursing we “eat our young” but for good reason. We can’t afford mistakes.
Isaac Nemo 3 years ago
I've never heard it put that way, but it makes good sense!
Load More Replies... Paul Davis 3 years ago
How the hell is it even possible to mistake a lice shampoo container for a medicine vial? And what happened to right drug, right dose, right route, etc??? That nurse must have come from a completely shitty school.
Roxy Eastland 3 years ago
Dr PMT. It took me a moment to remember, LOL. Dose, Route, Person, Medication, Time.
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#53
Someone I know who worked for a big bank looked up the personal accounts of various high-level executives to "see what they had". She is no longer employed by said bank.
Catte West 3 years ago
Many years ago a friend would often write checks two days before his payday, knowing his check would be deposited the morning of the same day the checks he wrote would get to his bank. He gets notices of several overdrafts. Calls the bank for an explanation. Yes, the teller says your paycheck was deposited. Yes, before the checks you wrote were presented for payment. Then how are there overdrafts? Oh, I always deduct any checks you write before I credit your account. When he complained, she said she was just trying to make money for the bank.
Paul Davis 3 years ago
She was. This is a common and unethical practice by banks to increase income from overdraft fees.
Load More Replies... #54
Not a coworker but a lab partner in school. We were making bacteria cultures and the teacher was explaining that the petri dishes were sterile. "So don’t, like, open it and smell it, don't touch it with anything but the swab...."
Moron immediately picks it up and smells it. We failed.
He sells cars now
Cactus McCoy 3 years ago
Which is appropriate, because opening and smelling it is a an important part in new cars.
#55
Had a guy leaving Afghanistan from deployment make it through the MP customs with two forgotten grenades in his backpack, only to have them found while trying to clear Qatari customs after landing for his connector to the US. Didn't go too well.
Memere 3 years ago (edited)
Have you seen a military backpack? They are NOT a school-kid back pack, they're big enough to hold up to 70 lbs. of gear.
Load More Replies... Random Anon 3 years ago
How on earth did this dude get out of base without some kind of ordinance check?
Dav Carro-Ripalda 3 years ago
So that means MP customs do not give a flying s**t about his work? Wel done, USA army, well done...
Roxy Eastland 3 years ago
It's amazing how many of these stories point up failings higher up the chain
Load More Replies... #56
Putting all the patients false teeth in a bowl together to soak on a dementia ward. Took us weeks to try and match patient to teeth, no, they weren't marked up with the patients names . Doubt the right teeth ended up with the right patient, it was guess work.
AspieGirl88 3 years ago
Omg, that’s disgusting. If I were that person’s relative, I’m sorry, but they’d be paying for a new set of dentures, to make up for their negligence! 🤨
John L 3 years ago (edited)
You want someone to treat them like family, have family take care of them. While I am sure some do indeed care, for most it's a job. The amount of neglect and abuse in these places is atrocious. One of those, not so secret, secrets.... I know it sounds insensitive, but lets talk reality....
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Roxy Eastland 3 years ago
I'm sorry to have to say this, but once upon a time this was standard and the teeth were handed out each morning in no particular order. I've also heard of shared wardrobes of clothes. Decades ago, but there are still workers around that remember practices like this.
#57
I was doing a tile repair in the lobby of a taco bell. Had to build it up on a heavy layer of thinset. Had my son's buddy helping me.... super nice kid but not the brightest. So we get the whole thing laid down and level (about 10 tiles, 12x12 inches, two rows wide). I say to him, ok whatever you do, don't step on it. He says "OK boss", stands up and steps directly on it. Had to pull it all up and redo it.
#58
I didn't see it directly, but my coworker told me: during covid we were not allowed to check in regular, private guests in our hotel. On one night a couple came in begging to get a room, because they had a huge water damage in their flat, which made it unlivable at the time. My coworker turned them down. Next day a sketchy dude came in and asked for a room claiming he was there for business (without proof). He payed half of the room with cash and my colleague didn't take a credit card from him. In the morning the dude was gone, the hotel room was completely trashed and the TV was gone. Turns out my colleague didn't take an ID or passport and the name and address didn't exist. Also the hotel had to pay fine since she checked in a private person who had no proof of doing business in the city.
#59
A coworker I had put a 250k horse on the walker and forgot to turn the electricity on.
Horse broke out and went hell for leather across the property and jumped a fence ONTO the pavement.
Thank the gods I had 2 other competent workers with me to catch the animal without serious injury.
A week of ice boots and poultice later and he was perfectly fine.
But that could have gone soooooo wrong soooo fast.
Jon Steensen 3 years ago
I don't get how forgetting to put the electricity on makes any difference. Aren't most walkers fenced in anyway, so all that will happen, if you don't turn them on, is that they won't move, and all the horse can do is basically just to stand there?
Paul Davis 3 years ago
some horses would stand there, evidently this powerful race horse had other ideas, probably was used to the walker and became very angry it couldn't walk
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Memere 3 years ago (edited)
Probably either a Thoroughbred, or a purebred "exclusive" breed. Purebred Arabians can be extremely expensive & there are a few other breeds that are fairly rare & are very expensive. https://mykavallerie.com/blogs/equestrians-corner/worth-the-splurge-the-8-most-expensive-breeds-of-horses-in-the-world
Load More Replies... #60
I managed a construction security team for a beachfront project which required 24 hr on site patrol, so I ran the daytime team and my friend ran the graveyard shift. As it was a dredging operation, we had to have two guys posted near the shore to make sure civilians weren't running into the area. So think of a square on the beach with a guard on each corner. Well one night we couldn't find one of our night guards and his phone was sending calls to voicemail. Turns out, he had set up a folding chair in the sand at 2am and fell asleep at post, only to get wrecked by high tide an hour later. His phone and everything in his pockets were destroyed, and he went home soaking wet without telling anyone. I don't think he was reprimanded, as I'm sure the shame should have been enough punishment. He later got fired for driving a company ATV off a sand bank and getting it stuck.
#61
Former 911 operator. When you go on your break, or to the bathroom, you have to completely log out of your phone. Reason is, when the phone rings you don't get to just pick it up, it beeps in your ear and the call is immediately live. I would obsessively check to ensure mine was off and sometimes would come back to check. Coworker who was hired who seemed to not GAF walked away with a hot phone. Let's say a very serious call went to an empty desk.
Jon Steensen 3 years ago (edited)
That is kind of an honest mistake that I assume is way too easy to make. That such a small error can have such a great impact indicates to me that the system is kind of flawed as it is not designed to be robust towards one of the basic flawes that are built into all humans.
#62
Shut down a critical file server, then lied about it...even after he was presented with the logs that showed it was his user account that initiated the shut down. It's not so much the mistake that he made, but it was when he lied about making the mistake...that was a rookie move.
James016 3 years ago
My team has had a couple of new hires and the one thing my manager said was if you make a mistake, tell us about as we can back you up and help fix the error. If not we cant help you and you have thrown yourself under the bus.
Memere 3 years ago
One of the best bosses I ever worked for was like this. He always had our backs as long as we were up front with him. I almost cried when he announced his retirement, and looking back, I should have left that job when he did.
Load More Replies... Roxy Eastland 3 years ago
Dear God, this is something I instill in my kids all the time. Sometimes you've f****d up. The other person has a right to be angry with you and you have to take it on the chin (like an adult, I would add, to grown ups). Be honest and get it over and done with. Because if you aren't honest then when they find out not only are they going to be angry about the original eff up, they are now even angrier about being betrayed. And in the gap in between it will hang over you, haunting you (apparently not everyone, but definitely my bloodline). Apologise, explain how you will make sure it doesn't happen again (this is not the same as saying "I'll make sure it doesn't happen again"), and make good what damage you've caused, whether physical or psychological.
#63
Had a temp that was difficult to train. She didn't have a log in so had to use mine, including my email (for comms) which she used to b***h about me to a colleague sitting right next to me, coz I had to tell for 100th time how to do something. How did she not realise I would see those emails?
Justme 3 years ago
I had to train a new assistant once. She just couldn’t learn. I’d show her something and then have her try. She would screw it up and say “oh, these glasses are just driving me nuts”. She got new glasses and would then blame the new glasses. It took her 2 weeks to vaguely learn a task that most people learn in about an hour.
Pheebs 3 years ago
When I started my last job, I had to sit with another person on the team to learn the process. After about a week, they had us reverse positions so they walked me thru the whole process step by step. We ended up making a fairly sizable mistake, caught by our team QC person thankfully, but could have been costly in the long run. Not a big deal, since QC got it. It’s easy to make a mistake when you’re telling someone how to do what was basically a 50 step process over their should. Where the problem came in was the person training me immediately turned around and thru me straight under the bus for the issue to the QC person, tried to even claim I didn’t follow instructions. Joke was on them - the QC person sat 3 feet away from us and knew I’d done exactly what was told. Got lucky as two weeks later they did a company-wide layoff. My trainer was let go instead of me as my boss figured I’d be able to move up in the company, while the other person was making the same mistakes after 5 years.
#64
A coworker of mine deleted an entire database of millions of records, that contain information that would have been impossible to "fake". Imported a backup from weeks ago, then when the client started asking questions they tried everything in their power to prove the client is wrong. Including lying and manipulating records and reports. I'm in Canada and this a direct violation of CASL and it was a disaster for not only this employee but for the company.
Sven Grammersdorf 3 years ago
That's why you should do regular off-site backups (like every night, not once every couple of weeks)
#65
Radar repair. Cruise ship had 4 radar with one not working. Coworker removed suspected faulty pcb and placed it in one of the other working radar. Didn’t work. Place original one back in and now two radars were down. Took the fist pcb and inserted it into radar number 3. Now three radars were down. Turned out the original faulty pcb had a short that damaged some other components in the other radars. This all happened within 20 minutes as I was talking to the chief officer about how the repair was only going to take about 5 minutes. Imagine my surprise when I entered the electronics room to find three radars taken apart with only an hour left before the ship was to depart. Ship left port (illegally) with only one radar working.
#66
Setting up my truck to be towed by another, driver of the front truck forgot to put the handbrake on, her truck rolled back as we were about to attach the towing frame and nearly squished the both of us. Literally had to jump out of the way. She was a complete airhead
#67
Working at jack in the crack there was 2 dudes on the grill and the order said only lettuce only mustard so that’s what he got lol. That guy came back f*ckingggg angryyyy. Lolol. They both looked at the screen and said “ the screen says only lettuce and mustard” to which I replied “bro he wants the meat too”
#68
I work maintenance at a grocery store for context. My boss at the time was very inept when it came to technology. He hated technology with a passion. I understand everyone should know how to use a mop if you are in this line of work but when you have machines that make it easier, i see no issues in using one. So anyways, my boss couldn’t figure out how to use one of our machines (the taski) and hated it with a passion even though it’s one of the easiest things to use. He couldn’t figure out why water wasn’t coming out to clean up a sticky floor. All hed have to do was press the little button that has a water spout on it which means water will come out if pushed. Instead of asking me or trying to use his brain, he proceeded to kick the s**t out of it and destroyed the water tank and then couldn’t understand why water was leaking from it after and then proceeded to call it a “piece of f*****g s**t” and said “this would’ve been better if we just used a f****n mop!!” I have so many stories about him but that’s one of my favorites. Dudes f****n wild edit: the reason it’s easier to use the machine is because it not only cleans up the mess but drys the floor too to prevent people from slipping unlike a mop
#69
Many years ago a Co-worker was drilling 1/2 inch holes in a bar above his head with one of those big old metal hand drills he pushed the button for so drill would not stop. I told him that was not safe. The bit jammed and the drill whipped out of his hands as the drill fell he caught the cord. The drill continued down arching towards his private parts. The bit grabbed his pants began twisting he caught the drill at that point screaming, man that big old drill just chewing up his pants. I ran over and pulled the plug rudhef over to him as he was laying on the ground at this point still screaming. We had to cut his pants away they were so knotted around the drill bit. He didn't lose anything important but there were cuts all over a couple serious enough for an emergency trip. Guy never returned.
Nikki Sevven 3 years ago
Safety switches are annoying. Having your meat and two veg chewed up by a drill bit is more annoying, though.
#70
I worked in the parts dept of a Cadillac dealership. Our manager quit, and the other parts guy (who had over a decade managerial experience) was turned down. They hired a guy who supposedly had 20+ years managerial experience, yet somehow didn't know how to use an office phone, nor use literally the most common software that close to 50% of the industry uses. Not only that, he'd never heard of it. He also hadn't heard of the other software which close to the other half of the industry uses. It wasn't so much a single mistake, but a never ending series of mistakes that only accelerated in hilarious fashion once my coworker and I decided we were no longer going to train him to be paid significantly more than us. But absolutely the dumbest was that our GM didn't see the giant red flag when our manager couldn't figure out how to pick up a call from another extension, or to transfer a call after three months of "working" there.
Sven Grammersdorf 3 years ago
I worked at Kroger for 13 years and never learned how to use the phones
#71
Worked in a machine shop. One of the lathe operators left the bar of cold rolled steel he was turning hanging out the back. When he turned the machine on, it literally deformed and turned into a a freaking helicopter blade ripped the back of the machine apart, and eventually flew off at high speed. Luckily no one got hit by it. If so, they'd be dead.
Isaac Nemo 3 years ago
I'm sure a metalhead can deal with a word like "freaking", perhaps get a new hobby.
Load More Replies... #72
I saw a guy try to push a cart over a hose vs either moving the hose or lifting the cart. The hardware piece that he was moving on the cart fell and hit the ground. We sent it back to the manufacture for repair/inspection and they sent us a repair bill for $585k USD in 1985, so it would be much more now. We were building military aircraft.
Dav Carro-Ripalda 3 years ago
Probably the real bill was like $25k, but as everybody rips off the government, as it is not their money...
#73
I worked at a small time aircraft maintenance and supply place. They had opened a new hangar down the road and ordered new tool sets. Why not send the resident moron to pick them up? It was a holiday weekend and he was visiting family in the same city as the tool supplier. It was a win/win. They buy him a ticket to go down Wednesday, and then Monday after his vacation he rents a box truck and picks the tool sets up. From my understanding it was only slightly cheaper and not that much faster. Anyway, he rents the truck and picks up the tools the day he gets to town, then proceeds to park the unlocked truck somewhere in the city. Picks up the empty truck Monday. Doesn't call the police, the company, Tyrone. No one gets a call. He drove the empty truck back. Cost the company over 150K.
Paul Davis 3 years ago
You'd think that companies would learn that keeping morons on staff is very, very expensive, no matter what sort of work you think you're going to put them to.
Lily bloom 3 years ago
What could Tyrone have even done about it at that point? JK I know that is probably autocorrect and was supposed to say "anyone"
#74
Had a guy take a cover off the base of a radar unit which had like 40 bolts holding it on. Gave him a ratchet wrench to do it. Half hour later I go check on him.....only had about 10 off. Watched him a bit....he would take it off each time to move it for the next turn! showed him how a ratchet works....never assume people know stuff.
#75
Had this new delivery kid at a pizza shop He would take a fair bit longer than normal to deliver, saying it's easy to get to the Street/road, but difficult to find the exact house. Turns out he had no concept of odd and even house numbers being on opposite sides of the street (exceptions apply obviously) and was zig zagging across the road. It's one thing to not know that before starting, it's another to do the job for a couple of hours and not immediately recognise it
Paul Davis 3 years ago
I've known people who could work for years without ever comprehending what "odd" and "even" numbers even mean.
#76
In the chemistry lab, he forgot all safety measures, while handling a cancer causing oxidizer, endangering a lot of people near his work station.
#77
I worked at a tech repair shop, or not sure how to call it ,- but we basically repaired laptops, pcs, printers, and the like (no tvs, not that it matters). This was ran by three older dudes and one of their nephews worked there too. The dudes were pretty chill most of the time, and one of them was really cool like, ALL the time. The nephew was a moron, though. He had seniority over me, but they trusted me way more than they did him. Despite being there for more than a few years, and despite him being a close relative. So one day, the chill dude has to take a printer to a company that was like 2 hours of driving away and since it was the nephews task to test the printer properly, he asked him like 10 times if he had tested it. The nephew said he did, just 5 mins ago, and that it worked... Of course, he did not test it and it did not work when he hooked it up at the company. Needless to say, the chill dude went ballistic on him. Shortly after that, he got fired because of many similar mistakes he made. All he had to do was test a f*****g printer. It was 5 minutes of work.
#78
A patient needed tPA administered into their chest tube. Very stupid, very dangerous, very crafty nurse rigs up multiple different tubes and adapters to administer this massive dose IV. Patient dead, sentinel event, whole big thing. Never once did she question herself or ask anyone for help.
Scotira 3 years ago
Me wonders, could you even rig that to a chest tube??
Load More Replies...
Flabuless-Jaye 3 years ago
This should be higher. If a mistake or wilful malpractice occurs to the extent someone dies, then it stops being an "Oops, I shouldn't have done that " to " this person needs to be tried for murder!" Very sad for the patient and their family.
Lazy Panda 3 years ago
They try to make these things idiot-proof and the idiots just try harder.
#79
One of those giant coffee makers broke and was spewing out coffee. My manger and two coworkers were on the ball and tried to fix it. After twenty or so minutes, I went to get coffee and they were all proud sitting around high fiving. Perfectly proud of themselves. It was still leaking, albeit slower, and there was duct tape, rubber bands, and all sorts of s**t. It looked like young Frankenstein gone bad. I tore it all down and just wrapped the spicket in a bag and secured it with a rubber band. It took me two minutes. I asked for a raise after but it didn't work.
#80
The one I think about a lot isn’t necessarily ridiculously stupid, but did surprise me with how little attention colleagues actually pay. One colleague decided to update the currency exchange rates in our procurement system without really knowing what she was doing. The system uses the inverse rate, but she input the flat rate. Essentially she saw the exchange rate swing wildly from 0.811 to 1.23 in the course of a few weeks and at no point did this substantial financial fluctuation cause any alarm bells to ring, or cause her to question if she might have made a bit of an error.
Hooked 3 years ago
Yep. Had that happening at my place of work too, but not with the inverse course but with the decimal point/comma. So instead of 1,38 we used 138. Stupid thing is that once the error is made and the faulty numbers are used in bookings in the GL accounts, there is no way of correcting them. And if you create reports that show YTD, Y-1 and Y-2, the error keeps popping up for the next three (3) years !!
#81
When i was an emt, my partner (paramedic) forget the drug box at the station. We were out for several hours without any life saving medicine save for the little we had in our first in bag
#82
I work on a production line that builds aluminum trailers. I told the new guy to cut me a sheet of aluminum for the roof, 12½ feet long. When he came back I went to roll the roof out and it rolled all the way across the trailer, over the front, down to the ground, almost took out a trimmer and then continued to roll out another 15 feet or so. He was demoted to prep duty that day lol
#83
I'm a chef and we were making pulled pork. We slow cooked it in water baths so afterwards we would drain all that water, fat drippings, bone etc into a big pot. Started getting busy as I finished and asked a coworker to go ahead and dispose of the drippings. Came back about an hour later to see the sink full of about 15 gallons of pork fat jous.
Paul Davis 3 years ago
Seems like a huge waste throwing away fat drippings. Many restaurants have contracts with companies who re-use that stuff.
#84
I work in a camera store. The coworker this comment is about worked in our lab that prints pictures and processes film. We have a machine that develops film automatically, all we have to do is load it and change the chemicals around every once in a awhile. For those that might not know, film is light sensitive. If it's exposed to light before it goes through the chemicals, the film is ruined and there won't be any pictures to make from it. My coworker was working on his computer when the film machine started beeping. He went over to the machine and opened it up while film was running through it. This was bad because he was exposing film that a customer had dropped off and paid for. Our head lab guy started yelling at him saying "close it, you're exposing film!" I was nearby, I'm a sales worker, and was just in shock at what I was seeing. The machine has a screen that says what the problem is. More importantly it tells you when film is being processed. Why he felt the need to open it? I have no idea. He wasn't fired over this, in fact he quit two days ago, but my manager was going to write him up for a few other thing and they were looking to replace him. The guy barely lasted a month.
#85
My dumbass boss lied to a supplier by claiming we are selling a certain job at loss and called favours to lower the price of printable items. Proceeded to put a 150% markup and send the quotation to the same supplier instead of the client 🤦
#86
A co-worker told me she got lost trying to lead someone to the disabled exit. The route to the disabled exit is a straight corridor with no doors on either side, I just don't understand how it was possible for her to get "lost". Also, I had to teach her how to make a G&T 9 times. After the 9th time she got it wrong (either by using the wrong ingredients or using the wrong glass), I gave up.
#87
Chain pizza store Saturday night, it was busy, as Saturdays usually are. This employee took it upon himself to unplug the router, disabling the stores internet, and thus online orders without telling anyone. When I arrived Sunday morning the internet was out and I spent all morning trying to fix it. Finally we called the ISP and they sent out a tech on Tuesday morning. So Saturday night, and all Sunday and Monday we were without online ordering. We probably lost about $3k in business. Once the internet was back up I was able to check the networked security cameras and watched him unplug it, and later plug it back in incorrectly. When questioned about it, he lied stating the cables got knocked out on accident. He was fired on Tuesday.
Roxy Eastland 3 years ago
I do wonder how these people think they are going to get away with stunts like that. It shows a woeful lack of imagination.
Sven Grammersdorf 3 years ago
Wouldn't you have lost the ability to process credit cards without an internet connection as well?
#88
When I worked construction, there was a guy who showed up with nothing in his tool belt except a small bag of peanuts in one pocket. He didn't stay around too long.
Dav Carro-Ripalda 3 years ago
I do not know if my first day at a new job I would bring the correct tools, either. First day at firs job is always difficult
What do you think ?
Justme 3 years ago
I was training a new employee on software that sends medical records with referrals. We walk them through and at the end don’t hit send or it will really send a referral on a training case (patient with “Spontaneous Crustacean Fingers”). She hit send. 150 nursing homes across the state got fake records complete with “wound photos” of a hand with shrimp heads on them.
Horatio Jay 3 years ago (edited)
I worked at a pretty popular local dive bar and grill / music venue in a university town when I was in college. We had some really talented cooks, but the manager hired this guy that I had previously known through friends, who we all considered to be a pompous a*s. On his first shift in the kitchen, my coworker asked him to melt some cheese onto a burger, which we do by putting the burger on a metal spatula after it's cooked, putting a slice of cheese on top, and sticking it in an open-front, super-hot oven called a salamander for a few seconds. Instead, this guy puts a piece of cheese on the spatula, and sticks it directly in the salamander. The dishwasher had to chisel at that thing for about twenty minutes later that night to get all of the blackened cheese off. The guy who did this didn't show up for any more of his shifts. The mistake itself was pretty innocuous, but, because he always talked about how smart he was, we relished the fail.
Seanette Blaylock 3 years ago
Did the rest of the kitchen learn any good new profanity from that poor dishwasher? :)
Load More Replies...
Lisa Intally 3 years ago (edited)
At a TV news station where I worked, we had a neverending stream of 20 year old men who were clueless. One needed a memo written because he insisted on wearing heavy metal T-shirts to shoots where we often had to interview politicians on the local, state and federal levels. Then, he would do things like not white balance the camera so his interviewees' skin looked as blue as if they had stepped out of Avatar. He then had every opportunity to color correct it with our editing system, but apparently chose not to, so his pieces went out that way on every show that day. Did he get into trouble? Not really. But, if I (a girl) had done that, I'd be canned in an instant as the "incompetent woman" that they thought all women were. As the final insult, he had a big fit over me taking out the new HD camera and said I was "emasculating" him by doing my job. That was the last straw in all the gender-based harrassment and I complained, then guess who got forced out of their job? Not him.
Ellen Ranks 3 years ago
What is it with those frail men that are "emasculated" as soon as a woman does something they feel is a "man thing"?
Load More Replies...
LakeMonster 3 years ago
Back in the day I worked for the corporate technical communications department for Blockbuster, back when they had 3,000+ stores (yes I'm old). We handled all communication to stores - things like operating manuals, HR forms, standard contracts, etc. The manager of our department was a total tool, and she thought she walked on water. Our most important document was the customer agreement form - a legally binding contract that we used with every new customer, which at that time was thousands of people a day nationwide. When we made revisions we ordered batch printing of 10,000 copies or more at at time. This cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. So we have a new contract come out, and our brilliant boss has it sent to print BEFORE getting final review from Legal. And of course it's wrong, so the whole batch has to be trashed. And then she does it AGAIN. And a THIRD time. I think she cost the company over $400,000, in 1992 dollars. How she was not fired is beyond me.
De Burke 3 years ago
Worked in a pool. Occasionally the chlorine pump would get air locked and SOP was to call maintenance. Idiot lifeguard decided to do it himself and unplugged the hose without turning off the pump which immediately started spewing concentrated chlorine solution all around the plant room and he couldn't get close enough to put the hose back on. He had his access to the plant room revoked.
Mistiekim 3 years ago
Not a co-worker, but a professor in biochemistry. We were in the lab working with ether. My lab partner and I were the only ones in a hood in one of the rows of them. We started to feel sick and get a headache, etc. We told our professor and he found he had forgotten to turn on the airflow in that row of hoods. We were huffing ether that entire time.
Benita Valdez 3 years ago
"Alex, on business trips do not use the company laptop for anything other than business related things like our site and the software we use and don't open emails from people you don't know; use your company phone for internet searches and personal stuff if you need". Guess what Alex, age 55-60 who worked for the company for over 20 years did? Infected our entire system with a lovely virus that shut down work a few days and required our parent company to send their IT guys for over a week to fix and reinstall everything on every computer and install more safety measures. How he managed to infect our software and email so badly is beyond my comprehension. And how he still hasn't gotten fired is beyond me (not a relative or friend of anyone). After that, noone with a company laptop was allowed to remotely access our software and very few were allowed to remotely access email.
Kelly Lee 3 years ago
Walked in to the copy room to see the new young secretary (back when we were called secretaries) laying hands on the copier and praying over it. A couple of minutes later, I was explaining to her that praying doesn't help when the paper tray is empty. This was at a She didn't last long. This was a charismatic church and she was sweet as pie, she just didn't have what it took to run a large church office.
Rhon Young 3 years ago
How about a software salesman telling the techies to Not tell him about the product so he could sell the customer whatever he wanted? How about TQM's escalating a job to "global" because the customer "added" something to the product and then it wouldn't work! Oh yeah, it worked fine when they removed what they added but the wanted to keep their add on so we have to fix our "faulty" product the suit!
Justme 3 years ago
I was training a new employee on software that sends medical records with referrals. We walk them through and at the end don’t hit send or it will really send a referral on a training case (patient with “Spontaneous Crustacean Fingers”). She hit send. 150 nursing homes across the state got fake records complete with “wound photos” of a hand with shrimp heads on them.
Horatio Jay 3 years ago (edited)
I worked at a pretty popular local dive bar and grill / music venue in a university town when I was in college. We had some really talented cooks, but the manager hired this guy that I had previously known through friends, who we all considered to be a pompous a*s. On his first shift in the kitchen, my coworker asked him to melt some cheese onto a burger, which we do by putting the burger on a metal spatula after it's cooked, putting a slice of cheese on top, and sticking it in an open-front, super-hot oven called a salamander for a few seconds. Instead, this guy puts a piece of cheese on the spatula, and sticks it directly in the salamander. The dishwasher had to chisel at that thing for about twenty minutes later that night to get all of the blackened cheese off. The guy who did this didn't show up for any more of his shifts. The mistake itself was pretty innocuous, but, because he always talked about how smart he was, we relished the fail.
Seanette Blaylock 3 years ago
Did the rest of the kitchen learn any good new profanity from that poor dishwasher? :)
Load More Replies... Lisa Intally 3 years ago (edited)
At a TV news station where I worked, we had a neverending stream of 20 year old men who were clueless. One needed a memo written because he insisted on wearing heavy metal T-shirts to shoots where we often had to interview politicians on the local, state and federal levels. Then, he would do things like not white balance the camera so his interviewees' skin looked as blue as if they had stepped out of Avatar. He then had every opportunity to color correct it with our editing system, but apparently chose not to, so his pieces went out that way on every show that day. Did he get into trouble? Not really. But, if I (a girl) had done that, I'd be canned in an instant as the "incompetent woman" that they thought all women were. As the final insult, he had a big fit over me taking out the new HD camera and said I was "emasculating" him by doing my job. That was the last straw in all the gender-based harrassment and I complained, then guess who got forced out of their job? Not him.
Ellen Ranks 3 years ago
What is it with those frail men that are "emasculated" as soon as a woman does something they feel is a "man thing"?
Load More Replies... LakeMonster 3 years ago
Back in the day I worked for the corporate technical communications department for Blockbuster, back when they had 3,000+ stores (yes I'm old). We handled all communication to stores - things like operating manuals, HR forms, standard contracts, etc. The manager of our department was a total tool, and she thought she walked on water. Our most important document was the customer agreement form - a legally binding contract that we used with every new customer, which at that time was thousands of people a day nationwide. When we made revisions we ordered batch printing of 10,000 copies or more at at time. This cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. So we have a new contract come out, and our brilliant boss has it sent to print BEFORE getting final review from Legal. And of course it's wrong, so the whole batch has to be trashed. And then she does it AGAIN. And a THIRD time. I think she cost the company over $400,000, in 1992 dollars. How she was not fired is beyond me.
De Burke 3 years ago
Worked in a pool. Occasionally the chlorine pump would get air locked and SOP was to call maintenance. Idiot lifeguard decided to do it himself and unplugged the hose without turning off the pump which immediately started spewing concentrated chlorine solution all around the plant room and he couldn't get close enough to put the hose back on. He had his access to the plant room revoked.
Mistiekim 3 years ago
Not a co-worker, but a professor in biochemistry. We were in the lab working with ether. My lab partner and I were the only ones in a hood in one of the rows of them. We started to feel sick and get a headache, etc. We told our professor and he found he had forgotten to turn on the airflow in that row of hoods. We were huffing ether that entire time.
Benita Valdez 3 years ago
"Alex, on business trips do not use the company laptop for anything other than business related things like our site and the software we use and don't open emails from people you don't know; use your company phone for internet searches and personal stuff if you need". Guess what Alex, age 55-60 who worked for the company for over 20 years did? Infected our entire system with a lovely virus that shut down work a few days and required our parent company to send their IT guys for over a week to fix and reinstall everything on every computer and install more safety measures. How he managed to infect our software and email so badly is beyond my comprehension. And how he still hasn't gotten fired is beyond me (not a relative or friend of anyone). After that, noone with a company laptop was allowed to remotely access our software and very few were allowed to remotely access email.
Kelly Lee 3 years ago
Walked in to the copy room to see the new young secretary (back when we were called secretaries) laying hands on the copier and praying over it. A couple of minutes later, I was explaining to her that praying doesn't help when the paper tray is empty. This was at a She didn't last long. This was a charismatic church and she was sweet as pie, she just didn't have what it took to run a large church office.
Rhon Young 3 years ago
How about a software salesman telling the techies to Not tell him about the product so he could sell the customer whatever he wanted? How about TQM's escalating a job to "global" because the customer "added" something to the product and then it wouldn't work! Oh yeah, it worked fine when they removed what they added but the wanted to keep their add on so we have to fix our "faulty" product the suit!
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