“That Area Is Now Sealed For The Next 100 Years”: 30 Of The Worst Mistakes Someone Has Made At A New Job
Mishaps at work can range from minor inconveniences to screw-ups of grand proportions. Major calamities often happen to the newbies, as they usually have less experience or training. Or plain luck, in some cases.
The r/AskReddit community discussed the misfortunes someone new at their job had to encounter. Part of the examples don’t even sound real but sadly (for some—more than for others), they are. Ranging from absolutely terrible to unbelievably funny and everything in between, they prove that la vie is not always en rose when it comes to work.
These examples are far from the only ones covering some unlucky people just trying to do their job. For more, make sure to browse Bored Panda’s previous edition of horrible mistakes people made at work that their coworkers never forgot.
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Certainly not the biggest mistake I've ever seen, but this sticks out in my memory...
When I was an RN working in the ICU, every July we'd have a fresh crop of residents (doctors fresh out of med school). Many were very nice, one or two were (and often would stay) flaming a******s, and most felt nurses were just waitresses. This superiority complex usually died down substantially in the first 2-3 weeks when the nurses in my ICU would prove their knowledge and earn their respect, but it would often be a rough 2-3 weeks for us nurses.
One July on the first day they began on the unit, I assisted one resident in putting in a central line (internal jugular IIRC). He inserted it and then said to the patient, "All done!" but he very much was not.
I made some excuse to talk to him outside of the room; something like, "Doctor, could you help me choose the right supplies for the next phase of the procedure?" or whatever. Out of earshot of the patient, I whispered to him that he needed to suture the line in place. He had no idea what I was talking about (sheesh, men never read instructions) so I told him how to do it. Luckily for me he was nice and didn't go off on me for correcting him - we went back in the room together and I made some transitional statement so the patient would never know the doctor omitted a pretty important part of the procedure. The resident put in the sutures as I instructed and there was absolutely no harm to the patient.
After, he took me aside and said, "My wife is an RN. She told me nurses would save my a*s. I just never guessed it would be on my first day - thank you."
I had a new guy ring me for some tech support. He didn't like the answer I gave him so he gave me a mouthful of abuse and then slammed the phone down. We worked for different departments in a global company. I don't know where he though I was located but the ten paces that took me straight to his desk must have been quite a shock.
My vet tech instructor worked at a zoo in the past, and there was a co-op vet tech student there who had just finished her program. She was very head strong and did things the way she wanted them done.. not the proper way. Well there was this rare possum (last breeding male in captivity of its species) who had a cold or something, so they had it in the icu so it would have the best care, as it was so rare, and it was very important he didnt die. It was time to give him his pain medication. For those not from the medical world, this drug is given sub cutaneously. In animals it is given anywhere under loose skin you can lift and inject underneath. This is commonly done at the base of the neck. Tent skin, inject, done. So my instructor is in charge of the co-op student, both in the icu. The student insists she can give the injection, so my instructor gives her the go ahead as it is a simple procedure, and she's been trained. You really cant mess up... easily. So this girl goes to inject at the base of the neck but isn't lifting the skin out of the way. Instructor says how to do it correctly and the students refuses and insists she was taught at school that she didnt have to tent the skin. After a mild dispute the instructor says whatever, he will be fine. And the student proceeds with the injection. Well doesnt the possum start siezing. She had given him the injection into his spine. You couldnt do that so easy if you tried. At worst she could theoretically given the injection into muscle... not the spine. Anyways.. he died soon after. The LAST BREEDING MALE IN CAPTIVITY DIED because of this students ignorance..
Im pretty sure my instructor wrote her name down so she would never accidentally hire her in the future.
A couple years back, a guy started at my work and on his first day was reading through all the SOP's and various other job specific stuff, when he fell asleep. Now granted this isn't good, but the new boss made him come in at 4:30am to match her insane schedule for some reason. His new boss walked in, and the following conversation took place:
* New Boss: "Hey, wake up!"
* Guy: "Sorry about that, this stuff is just so boring."
* New Boss: "Really? Because I wrote those SOP's..."
* Guy: "...."
* New Boss: "Well, I don't want this job to get in the way of your sleeping schedule, perhaps you should go find something more suitable"
So yeah, dude was fired within the first 30 minutes. But, PLOT TWIST, that new guy wasn't the one who made the mistake!
A couple years later (pretty recently), that dude shows back up at our place as an auditor (I'm in the biotech industry, and we have audits from our customers on a regular basis). He was now going to spend a day auditing the New Boss who had fired him for something that we all (the rank and file scientists) saw as pretty petty. Anyway he performed the audit and got way up her a*s on even the most minute details, and the audit went so bad that his company eventually started buying product from a different company.
So, her callousness at something minor (at least in our eyes) a few years back ended up costing the company hundreds of thousands of dollars a few years down the road.
I support that guy. Being honest toward an abusive boss then getting avenged. Good
I'm only in my second year of being a teacher, but last year I witnessed a big mistake by someone who has been teaching for a really long time.
This person had been teaching for nearly 30 years, but most of that time was spent as a music teacher. I don't know why they felt the need to make a jump into being an instructional teacher, but they did. One day we are taking our students out to P.E. and they were asking me how everything is going. I said that it's going fine, but I am just having a tough time trying to fit in all the subjects and all the standards.
The teacher says "Do you know how I've saved a lot of time? I've stopped teaching reading." I laughed initially because I thought they were joking, but they were not. At one point they decided that teaching reading wasn't "worth it" so they had replaced that time with music time.
I believe their students had the worst reading scores in our school and their class was temporarily taken over by our school's reading coach. They are still employed
A month into my new job, I gave the GM's personal number to a customer. His cell phone number. Right after I did it, I had a panic attack. The customer had bullied me for it, leaning over my desk and threatening me while his wife distracted other customers so they wouldn't see this 40-something man intimidating a 20-something receptionist. He did call the GM's phone; I got lucky because he bragged about how he had gotten the number from me. The GM flipped his s**t and told the guy never to come back. He sat down with me for my side of the story later that week and told me what to do if something similar occurred. I'm still here 4-5 years later, but that will always stick with me. Thank god for my coworkers. One of the financial planners actually found the customer's number and reamed him out for his behavior, she was amazing.
But yeah, don't give out the GM's cell phone number.
Didn't check the aircraft type before assigning a speed. Told an F-16 to "maintain best forward speed" which caused a sonic boom over a major metropolitan area.
Little late for the party but whatever...
I work at a zoo and we have some pretty dangerous animals--lions, a tiger, grizzlies (oh my). So every single employee has to carry on them a can of super strength bear mace (like the kind you can't just go buy at a self-defense store). This stuff is made to stop a raging [insert any animal here] in its tracks, and can cause skin irritation and even nausea without even touching you.
Anyway this one seasonal girl saw a can sitting by her computer at the main lobby; it says across the front "COUNTER SPRAY", as in like "counter *attack* spray", but she thought it was counter as in "indoor counter-top/computer desk spray". So long story short we had to evacuate one of the largest buildings in the zoo (also the only building where we could sell tickets). It was so bad, people on the third floor of the building were having trouble breathing before they even got word of what happened.
Bonus story: one employee was out in the booth at the main gate with all the windows and doors closed, they were curious what color the spray was.. didn't end very well for them.
I must stay, 'counter spray' isn't a great name for grumpy animal mace. How about 'Bear Be Gone!' or 'Spray in The Eye of The Tiger'?
Few untrained people would think "Counter Spray" was anything but a spray for the counter tops. This seems to be one of those instances where a piece of specialized knowledge is so well known to the experienced guy that he can't conceive of the notion that normal people wouldn't get it. It's like when my wife talks insurance jargon to me and my eyes glaze over.
This reminds me of something I did in my childhood, around 7/8 years old. For some unknown to me reason, my father kept his favorite perfume in this little "window" that was opposite the bathroom and toilet. One fine afternoon, after using the toilet I decided to make it smell better with air freshener, and the one in the "small window" had the words "Eau de Toilette" and it smelt divine. With my supposed extensive but actually limited knowledge of French I interpreted that as "For the toilet" and sprayed a generous amount in the toilet. Needless to say, my mother was not happy and our house smelt purely like my father for about a week :-)
i worked at a zoo and while i had trust and respect for most of my colleagues there were some that i never trusted because of their lackadaisical ways. when i knew they were the last ones to have left an enclosure of a dangerous animal i took extra precautions because i had discovered that they didn't all secure and then check it was secure the barrier between the humans and the animals.
Similar but with normal bear spray. Buddy was working with a new guy doing field work. New guy hops in the truck while bud stows the gear. Bud opens the drivers door and sees new guy holding one arm out and aiming a can of bear spray at it, obviously thinking for some reason it is bug spray. Slammed the door shut a split second before the whole cab went "FLOOOSH!"
I'm so lost... aiming the what?? What does "FLOOSH" imply? Did it go up in flames? Why? I need more information, please. Or a nap...
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HahahahHHaha. So you can get the bear spray at outdoor outfitters. It's the same as pepper spray but more potent and can shoot 30 yards rather than three. I always recommend it for personal protection, not in the woods, but if you are going to carry pepper spray, might as well go hi hog. How wld I happen to know....whelp through work. a guy broke into his next door neighbors apartment and started attacking him. Apartment owner unloads a whole can of bear spray on him. Guy runs away. Before apartment own can call 911, the intruder has already called 911 for emergency medical. Ambulance and cops show up. He is on his hands and knees throwing up and producing more mucus out of his nose than one wld believe possible. To add to the visual, the guy wasn't wearing a shirt, but the WAS orange from head to toe. Yes, bear spray is orange so rangers can tell which bear was the offender. This poor sucker was a snotting, spiting, puking blind human Cheeto. Once he was medically cleare.
I am not sure OSHA jurisdiction applies here in zoo settings. If it is, this clearly violates OSHA guidelines. (labeling and accessibility).
Once when I was like 8 I wanted to see what bear spray looked like so I decided to spray some in the sink. Bad idea. I was hiding in the bathroom when my dad came home, I still remember him shouting “hello I’m home!” And then collapsing in a fit of coughing 😅 he had to go around the outside of the house to talk to me from the bathroom window because I couldn’t leave the room lol, good times :)
I used to have pepper spray on my keys. I let someone borrow my car to pickup food at a local diner. While waiting, he hit the button and the entire restaurant had to be cleared and then cleaned.
The girl 2rooms down in my dorm got curious about the pepper spray her mom had given her. Sprayed a bit on a price of paper then put it in the wastebasket in her room when everyone in the nearby rooms started coughing and crying. I can only imagine how bad the stuff for raging animals has to be!
You must be "THIS DUMB" to work in this office. Given the nature of the product I assume the can was well labeled / warnings etc. Did she think it was just something you crop dusted the counters with to keep passing bears from wandering into your office ? Strong enough for bears, but scares away countertop bacteria as well.
I used a "bunch" of a can of oven cleaner to kill a spider on our porch swing once. Everyone was asleep and if I woke them up to kill a spider I would lose my quiet coffee/reading time that morning. It conveniently, and surprisingly easily, removed every bit of paint in that area.
Now I know what was sprayed late at night in the hallway of an apartment building I lived in in Toronto many years ago. Woke us all up out of a dead sleep and you were kind of choking. We were all out on the balconies looking at each other quizzically. Wha happened?!?!
I hate zoos with a passion and am disgusted that there would be a spray to inflict pain and suffering on an animal -whatever the scenario. How about not f*****g locking the animals up in the first place?
to be fair.... I have been that stupid at times.... Give me any problem ill work it out or fix it, but... common sense... nah that stuff is GONE!
They dropped a radioactive source while drilling an oil well.
That area is now sealed for the next 100 years.
I think this guy may have been driving a truck in the Australian outback recently...
At my old job. This was called the Perfect Storm. I worked in a call center for an oil field. The foreman would call in oil. We'd type in the order number, create an order for the oil to be picked up by our trucks, and send if off to dispatch. The poor call center girl got the number off by 1 digit. So instead of picking up oil in the eastern part of our state, they picked it up in the western part of our state. Now usually this wouldn't be a major issue, but this particular time, the oil that was supposed to be picked up was h2s. H2s oil is extremely poisonous. The foreman, knowing he'd done his job, left for the weekend. The h2s oil kept pumping, filled up to max, and spilled over the edge and onto the ground. This is where it gets expensive. The EPA has to come out and assess. We are fined for that of course. There also happens to be a farmer who lives right next to the pump. His soil is tainted for the next 7 years. Not only do we have to pay fines, we have to pay this farmer for his crops that won't happen now. $15 million+ mistake. Because one digit was off.
A guy at work was told to go to the roof of a 4 story building, tie a rope grab to an anchor and come back down. He took this literally and used the rope to slide down the building. He had no gloves on and proceeded to burn through his skin on his hands down to his bone as he held on for dear life.
Omg if this were me I would also do this as I have difficulty understanding instructions. Poor guy. I can only imagine the pain. This happened to me too, back in grade 6.
They don't bother to train anyone they send to wash dishes at my work. They just throw them in the pit and tell them to do the job.
Sometimes that leads to catastrophic what-the-hell-do-I-do related failure.
One thing that is never explained is that you are supposed to change the dishwater in your machine to keep the dishes actually coming out clean, because the machine reuses the same water over and over.
One line cook got sent into the pit on my day off. Never changed the water once. By 8pm the white plates were coming out butter-colored and speckled with ash.
Rather than figure out something was amiss and ask how to fix it, he instead took to wiping down each individual plate with a rag so that the slime wasn't as obvious. Then sent them out to have people eat food off of them.
Health department would have had a conniption if they heard about that. I know I did.
No training and blaming the newby, that's not how it works. S.....y workplace
From the SO:
Guy started at 8am. Went to HR to complete some paperwork and spent most of his time trying to stare down the HR manager's blouse. Two hours later he told one of the executive secretaries that "they should have a wet tshirt contest at work, because they'd win". Needless to say he was out of there by noon.
Accidentally shipped a box of iPods instead of "1" iPod, yeah the customer "lost" the rest somehow.
Teacher here. She showed a movie of Othello without previewing it. It was basically soft-core p*rn. Because she had promised the kids a movie and didn't have other plans, she kept showing it through the rest of the day. Ended up being investigated by the ethics committee. They let her finish out the year since it was only a few weeks away and then did not renew her contract.
They stacked donuts on top of one another when heating them in this conveyer belt type machine. The donuts and machine caught on fire…
Edit:You guys crack me up! I work at a cinema, so burning things happens on the reg. Poor girl was not having a good day though – she ended up covered head to toe in mango frozen yoghurt later that night thanks to a faulty machine. Never laughed so hard in my life.
I hooked up a nuclear instrument wrong when I was in the Navy. A hundred thousand dollars down the drain.
They told a boat the wrong height of the bridge. The top of the boat went away...
On a Friday (Christmas eve) probably 15 years ago, all of us employees were off because it was a holiday. New accounting lady (first time entering direct deposit payroll) entered info incorrectly. Payday comes, and everyone in the whole company had their paycheck WITHDRAWN from their account instead of deposited. Late morning and people are out Christmas shopping, and cards are being declined, and peoples accounts are all jacked up. My auto insurance bounced. Luckily my shopping was already done. The owner of the company called each employee (20 or so people) and offered to give us cash to get us through until Monday if we needed it. They ended up paying each employees NSF or any other fees. Accounting lady cried nonstop from that Friday through that Monday when she could fix everyone's account. My bank said it was actually some sort of illegal activity by the Employer, and I could make a Police report, but we were all close and I didn't want to go there.
I'm curious to how the process works to withdraw money? It is possible via a credit/debit card machine or even merchant services but general bank accounts wouldn't have the facility. (UK banking), I appreciate internationally it sounds different (not necessarily better).
Drilled through a wall into a gas meter. House evacuated.
My nephew, with years of experience building, had a post hole digger in his truck. I commented, "what you using the posthole digger for"? His brother said, "that not a posthole digger, it's a gas line finder". Had to evacuate the surrounding neighbors, and yes, it was flagged.
A guy went to training to be a bank teller. They learned how to open up family trusts. The trainer had them out Michael Jordan as an example for the beneficiary.
It wasn't until 6 months later after a customer noticed that he had entered Michael Jordan as one of the beneficiaries for every trust he opened...
I work in IT. We had a guy around September of last year who vehemently refused to look anything up. He was a stubborn older guy who thought he knew it all.
The CEO of one of our clients had an iMac in his office that wouldn't boot up at all. The new guy was sent in, and immediately declared it FUBAR. The guy trusted his judgement, and bought a whole new iMac. I don't remember the issue, but it was a 20 minute fix in safe mode when he brought the iMac back to our office. His excuse was "I didn't think Macs could do that." We lost that client, and Dave got fired.
For those who don't know FUBAR is an acronym for F*cked Up Beyond All Recognition.
I used to work for Geek Squad. A new guy got confused and reformatted the wrong computer. Customer was understandably pissed. The store ended up having to pay a couple thousand dollars to have his data retrieved by a professional data recovery service.
A nurse at my work had just graduated from nursing school less than a month before, and started brand new career. She got rooms 247 and 245 confused. One lady got a really small dose of her usual pain medication-fine, whatever. The guy in the next room for a dose 10 TIMES what he was supposed to.
Well, firstly they were late on the first day.
Following that, after about an hour, then they asked how to **open** the program they said they were proficient in operating, which was required for their job...
On my first day, I backed my boss's customized pickup truck into a fencepost.
Well, if it just hit the bumper, there shouldn’t have been any damage.
He couldn't find the opening of a garbage bag so he used some scissors to make his own.
What a surprise that was when I pulled out the bag and the contents stayed in the container while the bag was in my hands.
New guy left a freezer door propped open overnight and ruined thousands of dollars worth of food. The boss shrugged it off and gave the guy a lecture, told him not to do it again. Sadly, most of the rest of the staff bullied him about it until he quit a week later.
Note: this post originally had 80 images. It’s been shortened to the top 30 images based on user votes.
This was years ago, A newly minted Corporal was given a group of clerks, all female, to give basic drill instruction. One of his first commands? "When I say Attention I want to hear 30 c***s sucking air". Even in that unenlightened time and place he crossed the line and quickly found himself a private again with a lot of explaining and appologizing to to.
Lol wen i was a candidate in the firefighter my training officer ( though technically he was not an officer, he would be equivalent to a corporal ) every time we where doing formation training , he use to say " a dude can come and shove his c**k in your mouth, but you Will not move "....
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Wasn't a new guy but - had some guys in to work on the sprinkler system. They shut everything down, drained the lines, and did their work. Finished, turned the water back on, and waited for the pressure to reach normal levels. Waited. And waited. They didn't go check the 5th floor area they'd worked on - where they'd left the cover off a 4" joint. Flooded everything below that. Water running down the stairs and across the lobby.
I once fell off a tree whilst helping my mum do her rescuing pets job and promptly landed on a person underneath. Sorry Juniper for accidentally breaking your legs and breaking my own limbs in the process
USMC Corporal decided to use his wife's medical chit to get out of duty. Both named Chris, so he thought he was good to go. Well... he heads out to the ramp, finds the Gunny atop an amtrac, hands him the chit. Gunny snort laughed and asked the corporal if he was serious. YESSIR! Thats when Gunny laughed so hard he lost footing. Fell off the amtrac and broke his arm. He was still laughing when medics arrived. Seems the corporal's wife had problem with her uterus and needed surgery. Corporal didn't know what a uterus was, I guess... Poor Gunny probably still laughing.
I worked at a help desk and users would call us to inactivate and activate their frozen terminals. I inadvertently found an unlocked node and inactivated that instead of the terminal. Took down all 1800+ branches in 6 states.
Oops. At least it was an honest mistake and you were trying to help someone.
Load More Replies... The scary part is two mistakes can be equally easy to make, but the severity of the consequences can vary radically
A few months ago I did the stupidest thing ever in my entire career. In a Zoom session I meant to message one specific person. Except I accidentally sent it to everyone - which was about 50 people. In the message I mentioned that a certain person was challenged when it came to computers and I would have to personally help them. The person I was referring to also received the message. They were not happy about it. I literally wanted to crawl in a hole and never come out. So yeah, be careful who you are messaging. And maybe don't put stuff like that in writing. I still feel like a massive a$$hole about it.
The fan blades inside an F-14 engine look like tiny versions of the blades in an LP gas power plant generator. Facility that I worked at refurbushed both types of engine. A guy decided to take three F-14 blades, (owned by the department of defense), drill a hole in them and make keychains. Handed two out and kept one. DOD came in and fired him, his two buddies and everyone who had SEEN the keychains and not reported them. About 25 people IIRC.
In 1997 I changed employers after 9+ years. I'd been a forklift driver most of that time, and that was what I was hired to do at the new job. Funny thing about stand-up forklifts: the direction of steer is optional. In other words, a machine can be set up so that turning the steering wheel to the left turns the machine to the left, or it can be set up so turning the steering wheel to the left turns the machine to the right. Makes more sense when you know that most traveling on the lift is done with the forks in back. My old job had the lifts set up one way, and the new job had them set up the other way. I didn't think it would be that hard to get used to, until I steered into a steel rack and destroyed two crossbars. Eventually I got to where I could steer one way on my full-time job and the other way on my part-time job, and my accident was nothing compared to some stuff I saw there.
New guy fell for the scam where someone calls and says they are the CFO of your company and tells you there is a problem with your bank deposits. Instructs you to go buy a bunch of gift cards and call them back with the numbers. As ridiculous as it sounds this guy fell for it. Cost the store $700. That was every penny we had in the safe.
In apprenticeship to be a nurse, second year: a fellow student was on her turn at the icu. She's the type of person that knows everything better. She had to care for a patient that slipped in and out of coma on their own. They were allowed to drink liiiiiiiittle ammounts of very thickened water if they felt thirsty, but only for watering the mouth. Well Studen D thought she was a clever hero and gave the patient a damn bread to eat. Like a normal bread with butter. Patient couldn't swallow it rightly and ended up getting it in their lungs, causing pneumonia, causing their death. I still shake my head about her, 15 years later. Especially because somehow she managed to lie to another nursing school and finished her apprenticeship just a year later. When I changed jobs to an icu care for people at home she also joined a year after me. And guess what. Mrs Nowitall gave patients medicine no doctor prescribed. She left out important medicine like freaking oxycodon or for blood pressure.
It's a miracle she didn't kill anyone there and I'm still mad about her and the bosses keeping her. Shortage of staff is the cause for that, I guess. But wtf, rather have dead patients than a missing nurse?
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I about 20 years ago I worked at a big children's crèche. A child had a rather runny toilet mishap in the quiet area leaving puddles over various parts of it. I closed off the area and began cleaning it. This was at the end of the day so my mistake wasn't discovered until the next morning, the cleaning product I'd used contained bleach. I had ruined a £10000 carpet. Lucky for me I was otherwise v good at my job so I just got a talking to from the owner
I was conducting orientation for some new employees and one lady kept making disparaging remarks about the company and the owner of said company. Needless to say, she never finished her orientation.
Had a slimy young neighbor in 2020 (queer male, deeply into child porn, wanted sex with very, very young boys. Finally raped the wrong child, got sent to prison, and I hope he's still there), worked at, and fired from, multiple jobs in the 18 months before he went to prison. Biggest stupidity was when he boasted to the entire apartment building of real adults (he was 20) that as a car dealer at his new job, he took various vehicles out on the freeway and drove "at least 100 mph." Several residents called the dealership and anonymously squealed. Lost that job only two days after starting it. Idiot! He would make racial slurs, body shame people, all kinds of stupid things, which was why he got fired from every single place he worked. He also stole products, damaged his apartment to the tune of $5,000+ (he was evicted when he went to prison, thankfully), cost our landlord fines and fees for trash he "collected to sell." Horrid, horrid person, and I hope I never have to see him again.
Raped the "wrong child"? There no right chijd obviously. But does this mean he got away with others before someone more powerful had a chikd preyed upon? That makes me feel sick.
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This was years ago, A newly minted Corporal was given a group of clerks, all female, to give basic drill instruction. One of his first commands? "When I say Attention I want to hear 30 c***s sucking air". Even in that unenlightened time and place he crossed the line and quickly found himself a private again with a lot of explaining and appologizing to to.
Lol wen i was a candidate in the firefighter my training officer ( though technically he was not an officer, he would be equivalent to a corporal ) every time we where doing formation training , he use to say " a dude can come and shove his c**k in your mouth, but you Will not move "....
Load More Replies... Wasn't a new guy but - had some guys in to work on the sprinkler system. They shut everything down, drained the lines, and did their work. Finished, turned the water back on, and waited for the pressure to reach normal levels. Waited. And waited. They didn't go check the 5th floor area they'd worked on - where they'd left the cover off a 4" joint. Flooded everything below that. Water running down the stairs and across the lobby.
I once fell off a tree whilst helping my mum do her rescuing pets job and promptly landed on a person underneath. Sorry Juniper for accidentally breaking your legs and breaking my own limbs in the process
USMC Corporal decided to use his wife's medical chit to get out of duty. Both named Chris, so he thought he was good to go. Well... he heads out to the ramp, finds the Gunny atop an amtrac, hands him the chit. Gunny snort laughed and asked the corporal if he was serious. YESSIR! Thats when Gunny laughed so hard he lost footing. Fell off the amtrac and broke his arm. He was still laughing when medics arrived. Seems the corporal's wife had problem with her uterus and needed surgery. Corporal didn't know what a uterus was, I guess... Poor Gunny probably still laughing.
I worked at a help desk and users would call us to inactivate and activate their frozen terminals. I inadvertently found an unlocked node and inactivated that instead of the terminal. Took down all 1800+ branches in 6 states.
Oops. At least it was an honest mistake and you were trying to help someone.
Load More Replies... The scary part is two mistakes can be equally easy to make, but the severity of the consequences can vary radically
A few months ago I did the stupidest thing ever in my entire career. In a Zoom session I meant to message one specific person. Except I accidentally sent it to everyone - which was about 50 people. In the message I mentioned that a certain person was challenged when it came to computers and I would have to personally help them. The person I was referring to also received the message. They were not happy about it. I literally wanted to crawl in a hole and never come out. So yeah, be careful who you are messaging. And maybe don't put stuff like that in writing. I still feel like a massive a$$hole about it.
The fan blades inside an F-14 engine look like tiny versions of the blades in an LP gas power plant generator. Facility that I worked at refurbushed both types of engine. A guy decided to take three F-14 blades, (owned by the department of defense), drill a hole in them and make keychains. Handed two out and kept one. DOD came in and fired him, his two buddies and everyone who had SEEN the keychains and not reported them. About 25 people IIRC.
In 1997 I changed employers after 9+ years. I'd been a forklift driver most of that time, and that was what I was hired to do at the new job. Funny thing about stand-up forklifts: the direction of steer is optional. In other words, a machine can be set up so that turning the steering wheel to the left turns the machine to the left, or it can be set up so turning the steering wheel to the left turns the machine to the right. Makes more sense when you know that most traveling on the lift is done with the forks in back. My old job had the lifts set up one way, and the new job had them set up the other way. I didn't think it would be that hard to get used to, until I steered into a steel rack and destroyed two crossbars. Eventually I got to where I could steer one way on my full-time job and the other way on my part-time job, and my accident was nothing compared to some stuff I saw there.
New guy fell for the scam where someone calls and says they are the CFO of your company and tells you there is a problem with your bank deposits. Instructs you to go buy a bunch of gift cards and call them back with the numbers. As ridiculous as it sounds this guy fell for it. Cost the store $700. That was every penny we had in the safe.
In apprenticeship to be a nurse, second year: a fellow student was on her turn at the icu. She's the type of person that knows everything better. She had to care for a patient that slipped in and out of coma on their own. They were allowed to drink liiiiiiiittle ammounts of very thickened water if they felt thirsty, but only for watering the mouth. Well Studen D thought she was a clever hero and gave the patient a damn bread to eat. Like a normal bread with butter. Patient couldn't swallow it rightly and ended up getting it in their lungs, causing pneumonia, causing their death. I still shake my head about her, 15 years later. Especially because somehow she managed to lie to another nursing school and finished her apprenticeship just a year later. When I changed jobs to an icu care for people at home she also joined a year after me. And guess what. Mrs Nowitall gave patients medicine no doctor prescribed. She left out important medicine like freaking oxycodon or for blood pressure.
It's a miracle she didn't kill anyone there and I'm still mad about her and the bosses keeping her. Shortage of staff is the cause for that, I guess. But wtf, rather have dead patients than a missing nurse?
Load More Replies... I about 20 years ago I worked at a big children's crèche. A child had a rather runny toilet mishap in the quiet area leaving puddles over various parts of it. I closed off the area and began cleaning it. This was at the end of the day so my mistake wasn't discovered until the next morning, the cleaning product I'd used contained bleach. I had ruined a £10000 carpet. Lucky for me I was otherwise v good at my job so I just got a talking to from the owner
I was conducting orientation for some new employees and one lady kept making disparaging remarks about the company and the owner of said company. Needless to say, she never finished her orientation.
Had a slimy young neighbor in 2020 (queer male, deeply into child porn, wanted sex with very, very young boys. Finally raped the wrong child, got sent to prison, and I hope he's still there), worked at, and fired from, multiple jobs in the 18 months before he went to prison. Biggest stupidity was when he boasted to the entire apartment building of real adults (he was 20) that as a car dealer at his new job, he took various vehicles out on the freeway and drove "at least 100 mph." Several residents called the dealership and anonymously squealed. Lost that job only two days after starting it. Idiot! He would make racial slurs, body shame people, all kinds of stupid things, which was why he got fired from every single place he worked. He also stole products, damaged his apartment to the tune of $5,000+ (he was evicted when he went to prison, thankfully), cost our landlord fines and fees for trash he "collected to sell." Horrid, horrid person, and I hope I never have to see him again.
Raped the "wrong child"? There no right chijd obviously. But does this mean he got away with others before someone more powerful had a chikd preyed upon? That makes me feel sick.
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