Most days at work are pretty mundane. You know exactly what to expect, and you can probably complete the bulk of your tasks without having to think too hard. This may sound boring, but sometimes the days filled with excitement are actually the worst days. Because anything out of the ordinary might mean that somebody has made a terrible mistake.
Recently, Reddit users have been spilling about the worst mistakes they’ve ever witnessed someone make at work, and I'll warn you right now, pandas, these stories are painful. From losing huge amounts of money to losing limbs, strap in and put on your safety helmets because this list is full of it all. Keep reading to also find a conversation we were lucky enough to have with Anjan Pathak, CTO and Co-Founder of Vantage Circle, to hear his thoughts on the importance of safety in the workplace.
Be sure to upvote the stories that you cannot believe occurred in the workplace, and feel free to share about any horrible mistakes you’ve ever witnessed while on the job in the comments section. Then, if you’re interested in reading even more cringe-worthy stories that happened while on the clock, check out this Bored Panda article next!
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A local dealership was promoting a contest where they would give away a truck. I was driving around with my parents who were visiting from out of state when we hear the commercial for the give away on the radio. The drawing was in about 15 minutes, and we were right there, so we stopped in and put our names in the collection bin.
I watched them take the bin upstairs out of sight of the crowd. They had clearly selected the winner in the back room and announced that if the winner was not present, they will contact them for the winnings.
So they chose a winner ….that was clearly from out of state. But what they didn’t realize, was that it was my mom visiting for the weekend.
She walks right up to the announcer, showed her license, and said, I’m so happy I won the truck! The look on their faces was priceless!
For the next couple of weeks, the dealership tried everything to not give us the truck, It was clear that they had no idea how to even give away the truck.
But we prevailed. And I’m happy to say it we loved the truck!
To gain some more insight on the topic of workplace safety, we reached out to Anjan Pathak. Anjan is a technology leader with over two decades of experience building and deploying cross-channel web applications. He is the CTO and Co-Founder of Vantage Circle, which is dedicated to helping companies build winning work cultures, and is responsible for the technological progress and evolution of Vantage Circle. As an expert on work culture, we wanted to hear Anjan's thoughts on safety in the workplace and why it's so vital.
"When we think of a workplace, we spend most of our time there, five days a week. It has become like our second home. But that is only possible when we feel safe around our workplace setting," Anjan told Bored Panda. "Workplace safety is a crucial influencing factor that enables a workplace to become more employee-centric. It involves creating a safe working environment with the help of safe equipment, policies, and procedures to ensure employees’ health and safety, physically and mentally."
I used to work as a maid in a motel and our usual supervisor was out sick. The person who took her place that day mixed ammonia and bleach in a window cleaner bottle and poisoned me with ammonia chloride gas fumes when I sprayed the bathroom mirror. If the maintenance man hadn’t come by and found me unconscious,it could have killed me. For several months after I had respiratory problems,vision issues and a lingering burn in my nose and throat.
I had a coworker tell me she used this concoction at home. I told her it was really dangerous and she was making poison gas. Her response was she opened the windows and it really cleaned good. People are idiots.
Years ago, about 8 or 9yeara ago. A nurse give an adult dose injection of a med to a 4 month old in the Emergency room. I even called him out on it and said, "...check that medicine before you administer, I think that's the wrong one."
He killed the kid.
Destroyed the family. Obviously lost his license. Devastated the hospital system with huge lawsuit payout. Made us all look incompetent.
F*****g cocky idiot. I hope it ruined his life and haunts him forever to the point he can't function or ever have a normal life.
"A safe workplace ensures that everything is intact, which assists in employees becoming more productive and engaged in their work," Anjan explained. "Well-implemented safety measures keep employees safe and also protect industrial equipment. Another critical factor to remember is that workplace safety creates a sense of job satisfaction that eventually leads to higher retention rates in the long run."
Working at a car dealership. Last deal of the night, after closing time. Our check verification system was down and the customer has a personal check for $50,000 USD. Manager said to take the check because he wanted to go home. Finance guy took the check. Customer left with a new car.
Check bounced. Customer didn't return calls. Dealership went to his listed address, it was an abandoned house. They called his listed employer, they claimed to have never heard of him.
"Just take it so we can go home" cost them $50k
In the ER, Doctor wrote down an order for 15mg IM of Toradol (anti-inflammatory pain killer) and the nurse I was training misread and started to draw up 15mg of Haldol (anti-psychotic). That's triple the standard dose for Haldol. This was for a patient with abdominal pain. The nurse I was training didn't question it at all. This wasn't a newly graduated nurse mind, just new to my department.
Yes, I stopped her before she gave the med. No, she did not continue to work in the ER.
I hate to think what that stuff might have done to the poor patient.
Anjan also noted that employers and managers have the authority to make decisions that will make the workplace safer to work, so there are plenty of actions they can take to ensure that their employees' safety is of utmost priority. A few recommendations that Anjan provided that can make a huge difference in the workplace are: identifying workplace safety hazards, revising the safety policies and making changes with the evolving workplace, developing a safety communication plan, allowing the employees to share their voices, designating health and safety representatives, forming a committee to look after the initiative, providing safety training programs to the employees, and ensuring easy access to emergency exits.
"Things should be actionable and well-planned to ensure everything works fine without hiccups," Anjan told Bored Panda. "And even if there are any shortcomings, always have a contingency plan to keep things running smoothly."
Taught preschool for 8 years before the pandemic. It's protocol to count the children before moving from one room to another to make sure no one gets left behind. Had a coworker on her phone, didn't count kids, and had left behind a child in the toy closet. Kid was 2 years old and trapped, screaming and crying in a dark toy closet for 20 minutes before a teacher passing by the empty classroom heard her.
My coworker didn't even get a slap on the wrist and management never told parents.
This same coworker forced her class of 2 year olds to "get dressed themselves" for outside play in the winter so one time a little girl ended up playing outside in the Minnesota snow without boots on for ten minutes before my coworker noticed.
That's it, I'm crusading this woman! I've got a flowerpot and a thirst for vengeance, who's with me?!
Update: The biggest question is "Where/what company is this?" This was over 22 years ago in Asia. I apologize for not remembering the name, but they went under shortly after.
Plant manager let the safety guy go because they didn't believe safety was a full time job and wanted to cut back on company spending and decided the supervisors could do all the safety audits, training, keep the building up to code.
Not even a week later 2 guys got their arms cut off working on a machine that they weren't trained/certified on and the back building caught fire due to pallets and cardboard boxes being stacked in the wrong area near the furnace.
We also asked Anjan if he has ever witnessed or heard about any particularly unfortunate workplace accidents. "Now, this is a question that I think I will be really happy to answer," he shared. "Since our inception, we have never had the misfortune of any workplace hazard, and the employees are well aware of their own safety."
"We, at Vantage Circle, also conduct a safety monitoring of the entire office premise on a regular basis to ensure utmost safety and security of our employees," he added. "We have also organized safety awareness days in our organization to spread awareness of how crucial workplace safety is and will always be. Our little efforts have worked to date, and I hope it continues in the future." Looks like we reached out to the perfect person to hear about maintaining a safe work environment!
Oh, another one.
Worked at a large casino in a large tourist city.
The penthouse garden was being redone, and the gardener has put tarpaulins down to protect the tiles. A storm rolled through, and the tarps were blocking the drains, so the garden flooded, back into the penthouse, down the lift shaft, and into the restaurant I worked. Chaos.
2 years later, I'm working in a different hotel, same city. The restaurant had a fountain in it. I come in to open up one morning, and the restaurant is flooded. Gardener has turned on the fountain tap to refill and forgot to turn it off.
It was the same gardener.
A lady in our sales department sent a racial message bashing foreigners and how cheap they all are to another coworker using our company email...which tagged the entire company. The CEO is also foreign.
Anjan also shared some tips with us for employees who are ever feeling unsafe in their work spaces. "The first thing that they should do is notify their managers or supervisors about it. But the system should be transparent," he told Bored Panda. "The employees should be able to raise their concerns directly with the HR teams or the CEOs themselves. This will give the higher-ups a clear picture of what they are missing out on and what the shortcomings are in the workplace in terms of safety."
"In addition, the management should be swift enough to address the concerns and work on resolving them as soon as possible," Anjan noted. "Afterall, your employees are your prized assets, and their safety should be your top priority. One should have proper planning in case such situations arise, so that there is a good action plan that makes the workplace safe."
Forget they had cocaine in their pocket while crossing a border. This led the Austrian border and customs police to open up about 100 cans of exposed film stock that was in the van the guy was driving… film stock from a very expensive film shoot the week before.
The result was second unit had to go back and reshoot an entire action set piece for the film. Line Producer told me the mistake cost about 5 million euros.
I'm a healthy human subject for medical research studies. I did a study with special dietary restriction groups of zero carbs, no carbs, and a regular diet. I was in the zero-carb group and our breakfast consisted of a large stack of Canadian bacon and a drink. I read on the side of the can that it had 18 grams of carbs. I mentioned this to the doctor in charge and he said, "Well, umm, it's hard to get zero carbs." I thought to myself, "In a drink? No, it's not!"
Three days later they realized that I was right and they had to stop our study and send us home. The doctor had been in charge of the clinic but I noticed he was no longer in charge when I was invited back to the next cohort of the same study. So instead of earning $7,000, I earned $4000 initially and $7,000 for a total of $11,000. So his mistake earned me more money.
Finally, Anjan told Bored Panda, "I think as organizations grow, working on safety measures becomes difficult, but it is something that should be done beforehand. Keep checking the newer developments and adapt to them well so that you can prioritize workplace safety no matter how difficult the circumstances."
If you'd like to learn more about Anjan's company Vantage Circle, be sure to visit their website right here.
I'm a tattoo artist and I have two stories.
So these two things weren't like f**k ups that had a massive impact on a lot of people, but something that required immediate removals and getting fired from their jobs.
We had a new apprentice, maybe on the job less than two weeks. We already took the time and showed him everything related to his daily/weekly work, so he was familiar with the job duties.
First time he attempted to clean the metal tubes and piercing equipment that we kept in the 'clean room' before going in the autoclave, he didn't wear gloves. He got like two tubes cleaned of excess ink before I caught him and I explained that whenever he deals with any equipment, he needs to wear gloves because there is a fuckton of s**t that can go south (AIDS, Hep, Staph). Instead of just admitting his mistake, he grabs the metal brush he was using, starts rubbing it on his hand hard as f**k and says "Dude that s**t is so rare, I dont know why you'd even worry about it" i stared at him blankly for about 10 seconds and told him to grab all his s**t and get the f**k out and don't bother coming back.
Second one; Had a 'street tattoo artist' coming in to do an apprenticeship. We were gonna let him still work with his clients he already had under our supervision, but not work on people coming into the shop ('walk ins' as they are called) and he would still be incharge of cleaning and normal apprenticeship s**t even though he was gonna still work a couple tattoos a month. Within the first month I should him how to make his own shading ink and keep it stored properly so he didnt have to keep mixing his color for every cap of shading ink he needed to pour.
Yeah, well I walked into the shop early the next day for an appointment and found him standing over the sink we cleaned the metal tubes in (the one from the above post) using the metal tube scrubber to clean out excess ink from an old plastic bottle of red ink. I said "what the f**k are you doing, thats unsanitary, you need to throw that plastic bottle now." And once again instead of just admitting the mistake, literally turned to me straight faced and said "What the customer don't know won't hurt em" to which I responded "No, thats the exact type of s**t that will not only hurt them but potentially kill them." And promptly told him to grab his s**t, get out and don't come back.
I want to get a tattoo, but the ways it could go south… from having something you hate on you permanently or literally dying. Woo
One time a member of my dev team was given a task to cancel a few credit cards (less than 10) directly in the database.
They cancelled 17 million, the mistake was only caught when the company helpline started to receive millions of calls the next day from all over the country with people asking why their cards were not working.
Guy I know was looking at porn on his laptop at home, battery died and he passed out. Gets up the next day, goes to work and is in a conference room with co workers, plugs in the laptop and opens it.. immediately the room fills with loud gagging noises, he slams it shut.. and the noise goes on for like 10 more seconds. Left the job a week later.
Company director sent his travel plans for a ‘work convention’ to the communal printer in the staff room. Bet him and the other director would have had a lovely time. 5* hotel, presidential suite in Barcelona for a week sounded nice. His wife thought so to and was furious she wasn’t going also surprised that him and lady director were sharing a room … for a week … and that when she looked into it there was no convention. Things went south pretty fast and now the company is no more.
I had a girl that worked for me that one day had a guy try to pay with a $100 bill. We all knew that we did not take any bill over a $20 but she didn’t listen sometimes. This time she took the bill and when she was cashing out her draw the smart safe didn’t take the $100 bill. I asked if she checked it and she of course said yes. I looked at the bill and noticed it said “Movie Prop” on the bill. She somehow missed it.
I was working in a casino in Reno (many, many years ago) and a $1 bill was altered with $100 marked corners pasted on . It passed through 2 change people and a security guard before the head cage cashier caught it. I got to stick it to the wall with a thumbtack by the time clock so every employee could see it. It was so obvious when it was by itself, but in a stack of $100s, easy to miss.
Was a 911 operator. I quit when I realized the job wasn't for me, because it's not a job you can half-a*s.
Anyway, we had a new guy who didn't take the job seriously at all.
One time somebody called and said they were paranoid that people were listening to their phone calls and their thoughts. This guy was calling from a neighboring city, so new guy had to transfer him to an operator at the neighboring city. Once the call is connected, you have to hang up, since it's no longer your call. But new guy thought "this call's too interesting" and decided to mute himself and listen on the line. The operator is assuring the caller that nobody's listening to his calls and thoughts, and at this point new guy goes, "Ah this is boring," and hangs up, which makes a loud audible **click**. Now the caller is going into a paranoid meltdown because **somebody actually was listening to his calls**.
Didn't personally see it, but my MIL' s doctor (family doctor/general practitioner) forgot the fax with her lung scan report. Next time she was there (about 6 months after the scan) she asked: "BTW, what did that report say?" "What report???" "From my scan?!" *Searches in a huge stack of unsorted papers on an untidy desk* "Oh." Well, she had lung cancer and nearly died because her treatment started 6 months late.
Make a $30,000 art mistake. Misspelled text on a tee shirt that was produced for costco and the spelling error was only realized after 15k shirts were made. Really the opportunity cost probably bumped that up to about $60,000 since the shirts couldnt be remade in time.
It was me about 10 years ago.
Edit: about 3 months after this i got a promotion to mid management. The handling of this error probably caused this. I owned up to it and took full responsibility. A mistake of this magnitude is a humbling thing. To this day i wont hire or promote someone into a high level leadership role unless theyve made a big a*s humbling mistake at some point, and owned it.
Saw a guy get zapped pretty bad when he stuck a tool in the wrong place on a big dryer at a hotel where I worked. We had asked him if he should cut the power first, and he said naww, don't need to. For a moment after, we thought he was dead.
A nurse friend told me a colleague hadn’t been checking the PH aspirate from a baby’s Nasogastric tube (meant to do before every tube feed to make sure it’s positioned correctly etc) baby ended up passing away because the tube had actually been passed into the lungs not the stomach due to an unknown cut being made during intubation the baby had previously had.So she had been feeding the milk into the lungs and essentially drowned the baby.
Someone managed to CC the entire enterprise, consisting of 6 figures of employees.
Then the follow up idiots all hit reply all “I don’t think this is for me”
In a matter of minutes there’s were probably hundreds of millions of emails produced as a bunch of idiots piggy backed off the first idiot and hitting reply all.
Email Servers crashed and weren’t restored until the next day.
IT quickly fixed that too so people could only mass CC within their own department unless IT approved it.
The same thing happened at a previous jon. International company, someone sent an email that a package had been delivered to a factory somewhere in South America (forgot ehich country). To all employees worldwide. Then people hit reply all to ask to be removed from the mailing list. I counted 39 please remove me emails before the server crashed.
An IT worker once sent an advisory to the entire company about an email several people had received with a malware link. She did so by forwarding the actual email with the link.
Dude gave the signal that he was done working on a forge. Then he put his arm in to check something.
His robot arm is pretty cool though.
I think I understand what happened but correct me. This is an automated press for hot metal. Said all clear, someone else turns on the press. He reached back in anyway? Sounds horrible and like it could have been prevented with a laser light gate.
There was a company in rural New York in the late 1960's that took scrap metal, melted it down in big coal-fired crucibles and made home decor pieces - doorstops that looked like little dogs, bookends, that kind of thing. Not a huge profit margin but their materials were cheap and they had a steady market.
An industrial consultant convinced them to transition to electric furnaces - significant up front expense, but much lower ongoing operating costs. The consultant even designed the new electric crucibles for the company.
The company president had been thinking of expanding operations, so asked the industrial consultant to double the size of the electric crucible designs. The consultant did so, but made a mistake with the cube-square law in designing the supports for the crucibles.
The first time the double-sized (but about four times as heavy) crucibles were filled with scrap and fired up they collapsed, flooding the factory floor with molten pot metal and chunks of wrecked equipment. The company went straight to bankruptcy.
I heard there was this guy who had to clean a load of paella pans by tying them down and letting the tide of the sea do the work (was a beach restaurant in spain) apparently he forgot to tie them and almost everyone of them floated away. Sounds funnier when he tells it though.
Once, I served drinks to a little girl and her mom.
I accidentally got them mixed up. The mom ordered a mixed drink with bourbon and the daughter said her drink tasted funny.
A guy i worked with got fired from his 120k a year job because he was stealing juice from the stock room
A girl on the till had a guy come up and buy a $2 pack of gum with a $100 note saying sorry he didn’t have anything smaller. She gave him his $98 change and he left. He came back in a few minutes later and said “hey I found a $2 coin in my car can I have my $100 back?”. So she did it. It was a small shop so it was a tough scam to fall for. She also managed to lock herself out of her own car while it was running but parked in a way that no one could get in or out of the car park
Watched an HP repair rep delete about 50 terrabytes of company data by not listening.
Story:
HP comes out to replace a hard drive that is on the fritz. This hard drive is 1 of many. All of these hard drives are bundled together in what is called a RAID Array. This combines the drives into one massive drive for data storage. The array has redundancy so it can afford to lose a drive or two. If too many drives die, the redundancy is gone and your data is lost/corrupted.
HP guy comes in calls us.
Us: Ok pull drive 14, it should be blinking yellow and the rest should have a green light.
*HP guy pulls wrong drive
Us: Ok we saw drive 9 go offline. Put that back. We need to wait for the RAID to rebuild. If you pull the wrong one again the RAID will fail.
*HP guy does not wait, and pulls another drive
US: Uh the whole RAID went offline, did you see what happened?
*HP guys leaves both drives on the front desk and leaves.
Turns out the lights on the device were not on....easy fix, there is a setting in the device to turn them off or on. Rather than telling us he didn't know which drive was which, he just pulled at random and ruined the entire companies data. We had to restore from many many old backups.
Wasn't even on the Job but was out to dinner. It was a local new restaurant so the nar looked basicslly directly into the kitchen, and they hadn't put up decorations or all the doors yet so it was really easy to see and hear what was happening in the kitchen from my seat at the bar.
It wasn't super busy, but it looked like they hadn't fully staffed yet so people were running around doing multiple jobs. There was one guy who jsut would not move fast and you could see the kitchen manager getting more and more annoyed.
The slow dude brought back a load from a bussed table and then went about clearing one of the prep stations in the kitchen. He stacked up the knives, and some other stuff and put it all in a big sink... full of dirty, opaque water... multiple large knives, point up, in a big a*s sink, full of dirty water, i. A kitchen where everyone is moving fast.
Kitchen mamager canned him on the spot.
Not sure if this counts, but during my first internship at a chemical plant I was given the task of reading through safety violation reports and sorting them. This turned out to be WAY more interesting than I initially expected as the reports were riddled with accounts of sheer stupidity in the workplace. Here are a few of the most memorable incidents:
-A woman accidentally glued her own eye shut after trying to reattach a fake nail with industrial strength heavy duty super glue and then subsequently rubbing her eye.
-Someone somehow accidentally mixed an acidic compound from an unmarked bottle into their beverage and drank it.
-(Not as much stupid as it is fascinating) A man working atop some scaffolding forgot to attach his safety harness and fell from ~20 feet onto his back. The report stated that he stood up, somehow okay after falling from that high, and came back to work the next day good as new.
Oh man… my dad fell only about 10 feet off of our garage and shattered his skull. Traumatic brain injury, subdural hematoma… catastrophic brain injury that left him in a near-vegetative state. But I’ve heard tons of stories of people surviving worse falls and being fine/only breaking a limb. Wish my dad had been that lucky :(
I was working in a tool and die shop in my early 20’s and I was watching an old guy (who was perpetually drunk) pound in an injector pin into a plastic injection mold with a big piece of steel round stock. Well as he was pounding the pin in, he missed the pin and hit his thumb. It looked liked his thumb exploded. He was in such pain he pissed himself. They ended up amputating down to the first knuckle. Then to make matters worse, he got fired for being drunk on the job.
Last year: Guy died at his house. Daughter calls police for a well being check. Police show up, dads dead. Police called medical examiner but he's old and died of natural causes. No need to bring him in the ME. The police call the daughter and tell her to call the funeral home. Funeral home tells officer they're en route to the house.
5 days later.
Funeral comes to Medical Examiner to pick up body. I'm like "guy never came into the building he was released to the funeral home. Let me go figure out what happened."
Several phone calls later, we find out the funeral home forgot to pick up the guy and he was still at the house. Because he was now decomposed he then turned into an ME case.
I don't know what happened after that.
I work in a hospital. One of my colleagues was removing a deceased patient from a ward. We use these big trolleys with a bright blue cover. He'd had a long day and forgot to actually take the patient to the mortuary on site and ended up putting the trolley back in the cupboard. Next person in that cupboard got a bit of a surprise
"Oops, forgot about that one. Sorry!" I'm sure it's a dark humor joke that still makes the rounds in that hospital.
In the Army, I was assigned to a Field Artillery unit. During a training exercise, a gunner in our unit didn't align his tick-marks up with the collimeter correctly and his tank ended up shooting a dummy round into a formation of soldiers [taking out] 4 or 5. (If it were a live round, the whole unit would have been decimated.)
Dude got 15 years (or more) in Leavenworth...
For those unfamiliar with BP’s censoring and “gentling” of words: the dummy round killed 4 or 5 soldiers. Sometimes we use the word “unalived”.
I worked at a car dealership several years back. There was a new mechanic who was there barely a week, and tasked to go fill all the brand new, top of the line, biggest diesel trucks on the lot.
Diesel.
The guy filled all the trucks with regular gas. At the gas station down the street. Then drove them back to the lot.
He was fired pretty quickly after that.
I did this to a forklift when I was in the military. It was pretty embarrassing especially since the repair shop was right next door to our shop so I had to see the guys working to fix it every day for weeks and felt stupid every time I walked by it. Good thing I couldn't get fired.
I'm a nurse, used to work on a med surg unit. Someone connected a c-pap machine to the "air" socket in the wall, instead of the "oxygen" one. Patient was without oxygen most of the night, with a periferal saturation of 54% when I discovered it at the start of my shift.
Man did we do a lot of root cause analysis on that one.
If someone needed that much oxygen on a CPAP they should have had a pulse ox monitor on so their O2 was continuously monitored!
I got a couple stories.
Working at Mcdicks as a teen, I saw someone drop a piece of jewellery into the fry oil... and try to grab it as it dropped and sank thier hand and half their forearm in 450 degree oil. They ran out screaming and we never saw them again.
Working at a tire shop, I saw someone use an old bottle jack to lift a semi, and then as they began taking the tires off, the jack failed and the whole trailer sank down onto thier legs, pinning them under the tire. Its important to note how you take tires off a semi truck, you lift it a couple inches, and sit on the ground with your legs around the bottom of the tire, and use your legs to lift it while you pull it off.
Crazily enough though, the guy wasnt hurt too bad for one big reason... he was a enourmous guy. We called him Big Joe because he was 7 foot 2 inches, and wasnt just tall, but proportionally bigger in every way. It was like someone clicked the drag and expand box on him. Any normal sized person would have had thier legs crushed, but he just had some nasty bruises.
Another story from tires, one of my former managers got killed by an exploding industrial tire. There have locking rings that hold the tire on the rim, but if they arent set on just right, they will blow off when you air the tire up, often with enough force to go right through you, and then still keep going with enough force to embed itself in steel or concrete, which is what happened to him. I didnt see this, just heard of it later on.
Same exact c**p happened to my coworker, luckely it was a light truck tire ( 16,5" rim ) the rings hit him in the head, bounsed off and took a chunk out of the concrete selling, dude was rushed to the hospital, got a few stiches, and was good as new, he got nicknamed " Iron head " after that.
Working with a tree cutting service in Tampa, I was asked by the boss to ascend a nearby tree and cut some limbs. After seeing how close they were to power lines, I refused. He got really pissed off, yelled at me to clean up the area.
Then he sent up Dallas.
Dallas put on his climbing spikes, roped up the tree and started cutting. I was worried and kept watching him as I picked up limbs.
Sure enough, he leaned back and before I could yell, put his sweaty bare back right against the power lines. A bright blue flash arced across his back and his body jerked away and slammed against the tree trunk. He bounced off and back into the wires. And again. Finally his spikes got dislodged and he fell out of the tree, falling until his safety line snapped taut, leaving him dangling upside down like a broken-back doll.
I thought he was dead, but a moment later he started moaning, then screaming. "I'm on fire!" he yelled. We lowered him to the ground to the sound of sirens approaching; a neighbor had seen what happened and called EMT.
A nasty black mark curved across his back and the current had surged down his legs and through his boot heels, seeking out ground. Both his heels were blown out.
I quit at the end of the day.
Poor Dallas. Even worse that the neighbors thought to call the EMTs and they got there before the other employees even thought of it.
Newish employee deleted the root directory for the SFTP server. Took the server guys about a day and a half to fully restore it, with all files since the previous night backup lost. Same employee did the exact same thing again a few weeks later. Still had a job when I left, somehow.
I was a carpet fitter back in the day. Lad who worked for me unplugged a standard house hold electric plug, in the office we were working in. Apparently turned off half their computers in about twenty other offices around the country. Same lad, made a cup of tea, using a customers kettle, which she had left for us. Electric kettle, he put it on the gas hob! I had to buy the lady a new one.
I worked for a start-up cider manufacturer in my second year of college. Normally after a day of production we have to sanitize all the metal components in hot caustic wash. There are hundreds of pieces, so it takes a while. Anyways, our managers left us an hour before our shift ended to clean up. I had to go do some e-commerce end-of-day stuff before leaving so my coworker wrapped up the cleanup. On Monday we returned to the warehouse burned down. Apparently he left the caustic heater on all weekend and it caused a chemical fire. Everything was destroyed and it ended up bankrupting the company. He dropped out of his co-op degree after, he wouldn’t be able to get recommended for another placement.
Before retiring, I was a branch manager for my state's DMV. Suddenly, one of the other managers is off sick for a few days. Then it became a week. Two weeks. Then, the auditors completed their investigation, and she was gone. Turns out she was accepting bribes from aspiring truck drivers so they would pass the written test. She was taking in an additional $100 - $250 a week. The dumb part? The pay was decent, and the benefits were fantastic. So she gave up decent pay, fantastic benefits, and a really nice retirement for extra spending money.
Then there was the assistant manager who would pocket anywhere from $750 to $1500 a week. So a better payoff. But she was removing it from the day's cash receipts. She had only ever worked for the DMV, working her was up from clerk. She had no idea that there are accounting systems within accounting systems. The bank would send over deposit discrepancy reports which she would blithely pitch, not realizing that the same exact report was also sent to our central office. The wheels of state government turn slowly, so she was able to do this for over a year, but once those wheels start, they do not stop. She ended up going to prison, and ordered to pay over $30K in restitution. The full manager also got fired because the investigation revealed that he was rarely in the office, and left everything up to the assistant manager.
It's amazing how often people will take a short-term win and f**k over their future selves.
Work in a brewery. One morning a brewer went to run a clean in place on a 60 barrel vessel. After the vessels are empty they usually are under some significant pressure usually anywhere from 5-15 psi. Guy did not de-gas the fermenter before taking the sample port off. These vessels had two ports on them and we put a 1.5 inch cap on one port and a perlick sample faucet on the other. He starts with the stainless steel cap. All of the pressure came out like a bullet. I could hear from the other side of a rather large facility. Dude got lucky and the cap barely missed his head. He did get a bunch of yeast and hop residue in his eyes as his safety glasses were on top of his head and not covering his eyes. I drove him to the hospital and hes okay. Just got fired a couple weeks later.
Sounds like that's what needed to happen. He got incredibly lucky that the cap missed his head.
Guy in the kitchen accidentally used chili instead of veggie chili and the customer got extremely pissed and was giving the managers hell.
The guy that did it very rarely messed up orders, and he felt extremely bad about it. He wasn't going to be fired or anything but he was so guilty he ended up quitting that same day.
I definitely see the customers side too, especially since they were likely vegetarian or something. But also you shouldn't expect perfection from people making 9 bucks an hour.
Just a very unfortunate situation, no one had any ill intent.
We have to learn that people make mistakes, most times without malice intended but just out of sheer tiredness or plain exhaustion. The least we can do is try to be reasonable customers and DO NOT give them or management hell...
Had a buddy whose wife and he would play marathon WoW sessions into the early a.m.
First mistake was when he was caught by the network admins playing WoW, from work, on the company laptop. After that happened he uninstalled the game and didn't play from the office, but would be on voice chat to guide his clannies in raids while on the clock.
Last straw was when after one of those marathon sessions he *fell asleep* at his desk, and unfortunately for him our department head was strolling by and noticed him out like a light at his desk. He got canned that day. Really dumb because they had a young teen daughter to support, and while they lived paycheck-to-paycheck, it was a decent one, like upwards of $60K (database developer).
I don't feel sorry for this guy. If WoW was so big on his lifestyle choices then why not get a job that fitted around it? Developers can generally work when they want because it tends to be solitary project work. If that wasn't possible then it was down to him to make better choices.
Management. They knew more than six months in advance that the workload on the whole department would triple. We already were kinda pushing the limits, we barely had enough people for even the current workload.
They failed to hire any new staff to handle that vastly ramped up workload. And didn’t warn us. At all.
Suddenly, work was hell. Customer upon customer flooded in with work, and these were internal, meaning part of the same company, customers. So when they got mad, they could look us up in the company email system and find out our managers and scream at them to get us fired. Which they did fairly often. They also screamed at us, it wasn’t unusual to be screamed at 2-3 times a day, or more. Some days, every customer we spoke to screamed at us. The work pace was ridiculously intense. There were no breaks and managers were recording bathroom break times and handing out write ups for going to them “too much” and if we insisted it was needed they’d demand we sign a full HIPAA release so they could access our medical record and judge for themselves if we needed the bathroom that much, and yes, this specific action was directly OK’d by HR.
People quit left and right. I quit and moved. The department manager got fired, and eventually all but the most crony-like idiots who were s**t at the job were left. I can’t imagine what happened after that, because everyone I knew who worked there quit, or I stopped talking to.
I’ve no idea how that epic f**k up ended. But I can say that there were huge consequences for the company if they did crash and burn hard. I dunno if it was the executive management denying money to hire more staff, or if our director just thought he could look good by making people work three times as hard for the same pay. But there was no way that department wasn’t gonna eventually implode spectacularly. And it was entirely management’s fault.
I mean if you ride that out and everybody else is either fired or quits you are in a good position to get promoted. Crony idiots or savvy, cold reptiles?
Saw a guy load a bar in a band saw in an unsafe way and the band saw blade spun the bar and shot it off across the shop like a rail gun
I've seen someone mount a large milling tool so that as soon as the machine was run it loosened instead of tightening. It obviously came loose and then shot across the workshop at light speed, eventually embedding itself about 6 inches deep into a very solid wall. This thing was heavy enough that it would have killed you instantly if it hit your head or body.
So a friend of mine works in telecoms. When he was a young engineer, he accidentally knocked out fm radio in several London boroughs.
To be clear, this is quite a feat. There are like, four layers of redundancy before it bumps to mp3 songs, which it did. Only for five minutes or so but, hooo boy…
Worked in dog rescue. Vet prescribed an injection for a pup. Coworker gave it orally for no known reason. She shouldn't have even been touching the meds, and certainly not administering them without checking the notes.
Luckily there were no ill effects other than needing a new injection. Still makes my blood run cold at what could have happened.
Told a newbie to clean the steel panels on the deep fryers, expecting them to wipe them down with a cloth.
They instead grabbed a jug of water and decided to rinse it, with water going into the still hot oil. Yanked them back so fast I nearly gave them whiplash.
And an answer from dad: a colleague dismantled a machine to fix it without first checking the pipes were cleared. The pipes were full of melted sugar (VERY hot). He got horrific burns that made the skin slough off his hands…
Had a coworker send a multi million dollar transfer at the wrong time (forex diferencial). Ended up costing half a million dollars more. He was fired within a week. The worst thing is that he had just graduated college and shouldnt have been in such high position. Higher up/executive was his friend and promoted him 4 times within a year. Ruined his entire career. He works as a salesman last i heard.
I worked in a cannabis lab and I watched someone drop a jar of cannabis oil worth 30,000 dollars on the floor, she just walked out and didn’t come back after
my pharmacy manager accidentally stabbed himself with a USED needle after vaccinating someone. he had to leave immediately to get a blood test lmao
This happens to medical professionals administering injections i think more than they fess up to. Obviously they are very careful but since they do this hundreds of times over their career a mistake is often inevitable.
I was getting my blood drawn when I was in the hospital. When the nurse finishes she then proceeds to throw away my blood tube in the sharps disposal. I was absolutely furious. She had to take my blood again immediately after that even though both arms were bruised up.
That happened to my Mom. Understandably frustrating, but goes to show how over worked medical professionals are.
When I was a shift manager at a restaurant one of the waitresses forgot to put a decimal point on the POS system so someone was charged $3,000 for a $30 takeout order. The guy didn’t notice at first either and paid with a credit card. Luckily he thought it was hilarious
Printed 500 copies of her gas bill on the company printer. The printer only has enough tray capacity for 250 copies so she had to have reloaded the paper at least once.
When I was in high school, our school had job training classes where we would go and gain work experience (kinda intern). One of my friends went to a cabinet makers shop.
About a week into the 8 weeks stay he ran his hand through a band saw, lost three fingers and whole left side of his left hand.
Used to work on a furniture factory. One guy, working on a sanding spindle (vertical rod spinning at 3000rpm) wasn't sure if it was on or not, so touched it to check. It dragged his whole hand in and tore off everything except the outside half of his little finger. I believe they grafted a toe on for him to have a rudimentary thumb.
My professor - A Cardiologist
There's always risk in cardiac surgeries i understand but not learning from your mistakes?
I have now lost count on the amount of patients he "accidentally " dissected the aorta while performing cardiac surgeries.
Aorta is a hugeee artery, i don't understand how many times you don't realize dissecting it.
That shows again that some people should stay away from the working floor. One of my former bosses [professor chemistry] caused a huge ether fire, after being warned for setting it up unsafe. It was ignored with a silly smile & remark. Me, being the tech guy and safety officer, had to safe the lab, extinguish the fire and evacuate collegues. Point of the story: You may be a theoretical master in your profession but if you cant apply it properly..................stay away from the working floor!
I live in Ireland, I used to work in a store that accepted Sterling (British pounds) to be more convenient for tourists. So everyone was trained on Sterling and Euro (our currency) extensively... even though most of us were familiar with it from going up North or to the UK.
A girl working on the till accepted a completely different European currency.... thinking it was Sterling.... it had the image of a King on it.. a different language and colour than Sterling.... I still can't understand how she did it, it was in no way similar. Nice girl but f**k me... she had lived in the UK at one point.
I live in the US, a place more than 12 hours driving from either Mexico or Canada, and I can't tell you how many Canadian dollars or Mexican Pesos end up in local registers - sometimes even Honduran or Colombian pesos. I currently have a little more than $30 Canadian at home, and have never been within 100 miles of Canada.
Spent a summer during college driving a truck for a soda company. One of the guys who also got hired not long after proceeded to run one side of the trailer against the corner of a building and then as he tried to back up, he ran the other side against a telephone pole. He drove back to the base, got the key to the safe and took whatever money was in it and left. Have no idea what happened to him but the trailer was destroyed.
A few years ago I was working at a tech sales company and this guy started at my company for only a couple of weeks. His dumb a*s (we are in Austin), had a **pound of weed** delivered from Colorado to our office, lol. We were all sitting there working and all the sudden all these cop cars come racing into the company parking lot, we were all "*What the f**k did someone do?!*". Minutes later he was being led out in handcuffs while we all watched and laughed. Like I said, he had only been there 2 weeks so we really didn't know him so we didn't give a s**t. We told his story to every new person that started from that day on. *"Hey, don't have weed delivered to the office, ok?*".
I don't think this is as foolish as it seems. Lots of people very very successfully order weed and have it delivered. Even in places you aren't supposed to have marijuana. Pretty dumb thing to do, having it sent to work, but who knows how much trouble he got in to? All the while his new co-workers are laughing at him cause they don't give a s**t.....
Tried to disassemble a large CNC lathe while it was still powered up, came very close to copping an oil injection injury cause the hydraulics were live.
Another time put the key into a manual chuck on the same old (think 80’s punch card CNC old) lathe thinking it was the end of the program. It wasn’t. Luckily the next step in the program required the lathe to spin up to 2500RPM in reverse so when the key invariably came flying out of the chuck it smashed into the guard on the back of the machine rather than through his chest.
Both cases it was me. I am really lucky to be alive.
On my last day of my high school Walmart job I was showing the new guy how to move pallets of milk into the cooler. There were maybe 6 in total. I went to grab the last one and when I got back into the cooler the new guy had somehow bumped the pallets with the one he was bringing in and knocked all of them over. Milk all over the floor, all that product gone. I immediately left and never looked back
I'm a home appliance installer and was out working a pretty big job at some 20,000 square foot mansion. They had another installation team working on a second kitchen in the basement. One of these guys was drilling the mounting holes for the dishwasher into their granite countertop (don't do this, ok?) and drilled them too small, so when we went to secure it a massive 4ft chunk of granite split off and smashed into the floor, breaking a couple tiles in the process. Dude sounded like Yosemite Sam with his cussing and the customer was pissed.
When my in-laws house was being built, we went to take a tour of the construction. The crew had installed an entire wall of moldy drywall. I pointed it out to the foreman and he tore them a new one and had them replace it. Had we not toured it that day, it would've been left there. My MIL has severe allergies.
Used to be a supervisor for a security company.
One of my guards was working a truck gate. They let a truck leave with an "empty" trailer that was actually loaded. The load on that trailer was valued at almost $1m.
She was damned lucky I was able to figure out how to get in touch with the driver and get that load back.
I used to work in a daycare, we had a 3 step cleaning routine #1 spray was a soap and water mix, #2 was just water, and #3 was a disinfectant spray. I worked with a girl in the 1 year old room and some people in there would spray the babies with the water because they liked it and it would distract them during transition times when we were getting them ready for a stroller ride and we had permission from our director to do so. Well this girl ended up spraying them all with #3, the disinfectant spray instead of the water.
A colleague of mine made a small error of window properties for a construction project. It was just a single letter that was from, resulting in the windows having the wrong classification for sound-protection.
We found out when they where already installed. Since this is Germany, they had to be replaced. 50K € out of the window. The manufacturer was fine, he just did was he was asked to and we had to carry the damage (thats about what he would have earned that year).
I'm a car mechanic. Had a colleague once, who had a pretty small job on an engine, about an hour or two and costs like $50. Made a mistake, quite big, but also quite common and easy to make, it's the "well s**t" category, not something to drag him through the mud for. Started fixing it, made an even bigger mistake. At this point we even had to outsource some issues we couldn't fix in house, we were looking for about 2 weeks and $500, on us of course, not the customer, but it was still okay. We got everything back, he started putting the engine back together. All done, first run, whoopsie another big problem, whole engine apart. Broke something again, outsourced, expensive. Overall it was about a month long procedure, hitting $1000. Once it was done, he got fired. He got away with a lot, but at one point it was way too much.
I know 2 people who have made over 40k payment to scammers. They never got the money back.
That is sad. I've seen it via a third person and it's so easy to explain things that don't quite make sense in our heads. The only reason it would never happen to me is I don't have 40k
Had a cook set part of the kitchen on fire because he decided to clean the fryer with the wrong chemical.
Uh I once leaned a long wooden plank against the back window of the company pickup, my boss then proceeded to back up into a dumpster (to get as close as possible) pushing the plank up through the window. Whoopsies!
My first day on my own in my job of Identity and Access Management. We got a ticket to remove access for someone. I was excited and got the whole thing done without someone watching over me...
I accidentally removed all the access for the requestor. Of course it was near the end of the day. I was scrambling to make phone calls and such to get her access back.
a tourism boat bought nearly 1800 worth of groceries and wine for their guests, one of the new hires charged it to the wrong account. there were hundreds of dollars of weighed items on the order so it had to be entirely redone and it took all day, because it wasn’t noticed until the end of the day and the tour boat had already left the docks. he had to fiddle with different items on the scales to match the weights on the invoice. it was awful.
One of my coworkers in a marina was relatively new. He didn't ask if the guys boat took gas or diesel and he just handed him the diesel hose. I noticed around 250 gallons in that it was a boat I knew took gas. The boat owner was cool about it he paid for the diesel, the fuel pump out, the gas, and even tipped the guy. Could've been a big disaster, though.
I work for an IT company and my client is one of the biggest consumer goods providers on the planet. One time a project manager tried to deploy a 60-manday project in a single week without any quality control whatsoever and ended up implementing discounts on products which weren't supposed to have them. So as you can imagine things got super ugly super fast. Client lost about a billion dollars in revenue (seriously) and our leadership got involved firefought for several months. It happened in our contract year with them too and we almost lost them over this incident. The PM who delivered the project was first placed on leave then eventually moved to another account.
A coworker falsified the validity certificate of some safety gear twice
We had an old electrical engineer in my department, really knew his stuff except he was nearly useless on a computer. He didn't want everyone to know so he skated by and had other people pick up the slack for him. Though a series of blunders and lack of documentation on his part he caused an electrical control box to be removed from the list of parts that we were supplying to the customer for that program. That was worth 12.5 million dollars for revenue in the first 6 years once the product went into production.
Here I am thinking what I did last week was bad, and people out here telling stories significantly worse. Makes me feel less like an idiot but still.
I forgot to submit a 200 case + order for an account plus a holiday display, got a Vendor Violation for it. Came in Monday to write my order for today and surprisingly we didn't run out of product and we decided to push the display back to next week as they were waxing the floors this week. :/
They're right, it's not nearly as bad as most of these. It could also use more context, though, I could be wrong.
Not a co-worker at the time, but an ER nurse practitioner blew off my mom's issue as asthma. She was having a heart attack. I yelled down the ER and got a cardiologist in, and then in Covid had to work alongside that same f*ckhead ER NP saying things were allergies and asthma. Never been so glad to see someone quit their job.
Doctors and nurses are wonderful and deserve an enormous amount of respect and recognition but like everyone else it’s important that they remember that they aren’t infallible and that they can still make mistakes.
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Accidentally tipped the truck ramp instead of lowering it. Dumped a whole pallet of white paint into customer's driveway. Went to sit in the truck and cry before trying to clean that s**t up.
On the set of a show I was working on, one of the wardrobe gals was working on their truck and was running wardrobe racks onto the liftgate to take to set. Someone had tipped the liftgate while she was standing on it with the racks and she fell off onto the asphalt breaking her arm.
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Everyone makes stupid mistakes. The scary part is that some simple mistakes can have disastrous consequences. People don’t go to work everyday thinking their lives are going to change for the worst because of an accident on the job whether it’s a life altering injury, or costing your company a significant amount of money. Your career and sometimes your life as you know it just end. I bet it’s a brain autopilot thing much of the time. Many car accidents happen because the driver is so used to driving they let themselves go on autopilot and are not as attentive as a new anxious driver. I’ll bet a lot of these are like that, especially the ones operating machines or handling the same computer systems everyday. It’s frightening because it really could happen to anyone even though we all think we are too smart or careful. I bet everyone here thought that too.
I've been taking an inhalent for years for COPD. Tonight instead of putting it into its little machine and popping the capsule to breathe in the chemical, I swallowed it instead. Called the pharmacy who said it's not toxic just take another one. Oops. In my defense I'm chronically exhausted caring for my spouse but I'm very annoyed at my idiocy too.
Load More Replies... Not a co-worker at the time, but an ER nurse practitioner blew off my mom's issue as asthma. She was having a heart attack. I yelled down the ER and got a cardiologist in, and then in Covid had to work alongside that same f*ckhead ER NP saying things were allergies and asthma. Never been so glad to see someone quit their job.
Doctors and nurses are wonderful and deserve an enormous amount of respect and recognition but like everyone else it’s important that they remember that they aren’t infallible and that they can still make mistakes.
Load More Replies... Accidentally tipped the truck ramp instead of lowering it. Dumped a whole pallet of white paint into customer's driveway. Went to sit in the truck and cry before trying to clean that s**t up.
On the set of a show I was working on, one of the wardrobe gals was working on their truck and was running wardrobe racks onto the liftgate to take to set. Someone had tipped the liftgate while she was standing on it with the racks and she fell off onto the asphalt breaking her arm.
Load More Replies... Everyone makes stupid mistakes. The scary part is that some simple mistakes can have disastrous consequences. People don’t go to work everyday thinking their lives are going to change for the worst because of an accident on the job whether it’s a life altering injury, or costing your company a significant amount of money. Your career and sometimes your life as you know it just end. I bet it’s a brain autopilot thing much of the time. Many car accidents happen because the driver is so used to driving they let themselves go on autopilot and are not as attentive as a new anxious driver. I’ll bet a lot of these are like that, especially the ones operating machines or handling the same computer systems everyday. It’s frightening because it really could happen to anyone even though we all think we are too smart or careful. I bet everyone here thought that too.
I've been taking an inhalent for years for COPD. Tonight instead of putting it into its little machine and popping the capsule to breathe in the chemical, I swallowed it instead. Called the pharmacy who said it's not toxic just take another one. Oops. In my defense I'm chronically exhausted caring for my spouse but I'm very annoyed at my idiocy too.
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