Blunders are a part of being human. Whether it’s walking into a glass door or sending an email to the wrong person, we usually have multiple ones every day. But every now and then, we manage to mess up so badly, we surprise even ourselves and everyone around us.
A few days ago, Reddit user xk543x made a post on the platform, asking other people, “What’s the dumbest mistake you’ve seen an incompetent co-worker make?” And the replies have flooded its comment section. So we decided to compile the best (or worst?) ones and, honestly, I don’t know if I’m impressed or disappointed by these folks.
#1
At a Petco all the Guinea pigs were in a big plexi-glass enclosure with a center divider. Boys on one side and girls on the other. An employee decided that all the long haired Guinea pigs should be on one side and short haired on the other. It took forever to sort them out and all the females were pregnant.
Image credits: PumpkinsDad
#2
I was working in an open plan office that had a small kitchen area at one end, microwave, kettle, sink, toaster and water cooler.
We saw one of the managers fiddling with the toaster for a while, looked like she was trying to clean it. It never occurred to her to remove the crumb tray, she was poking around inside it with a knife while it was still plugged into the wall. People just sat back and watched, wondering how long before she got zapped.
Then she turns on the tap and lifts the toaster towards the sink. Someone stepped in then to stop her.
You might just write this off as someone being a bit dim but she was the Health & Safety Officer for the building.
Image credits: tallbutshy
#3
Annual sales meeting.
Brand new guy is seated next to the CEO. He proceeds to put his head down and fall asleep on the table. During the meeting.
They woke him up at lunch to fire him.
Image credits: barto5
#4
Took the wrong coffin to a funeral. Someone else had to drive to the cemetery with the correct deceased on board, and thankfully they made it before the viewing.
Image credits: Shubabi
#5
I used to work for a landscaping company and over the course of a summer I witnessed one of my co-workers accidentally set 3 different things on fire (a hedge trimmer, a truck, and himself)
Image credits: RosenBrtt
#6
Tried to retrieve his lighter from a deep fat fryer with his hands. boy was that fun to clean up.
Image credits: Mr_Frible
#7
I worked as a Radiation Protection Tech at a power plant that was re-fueling. My job was to sit outside of a contaminated area and if anyone wanted to take something out of the area (tools, etc.) I had to make sure it didn’t have any radioactive particles on it. To do this you wipe the tool with something like a tissue and then hold the tissue up to a machine called a frisker. If the needle on the frisker goes above a threshold then the tool has to be cleaned or left in the area. One day I come back to relieve a guy who had been sitting outside the area for 2 hour. He tells me there’s been no issues and everything has cleared. I look at the frisker, lean over and turn the machine on.
Image credits: LtDirtyBear
#8
Not a mistake necessarily, but I once witnessed our chief accounting officer (and our only accountant; it was a small company) type in values into two Excel cells, pull out a calculator, add the two numbers together in the calculator, and then type the answer in a third cell. She had apparently been doing this for years, with sheets consisting of thousands of rows. I explained how to use formulas and copy them but she apparently forgot because I saw her doing the same thing again months later.
Image credits: zachm26
#9
New temp-to-hire admin, she was supposed to order lunch for a big meeting. They told her where to order from and how many omnivores, vegetarians, and vegans. She showed me the order she was going to place, and I corrected her, pointing out she didn’t have any vegan food or enough vegetarian. She told me I was wrong and ordered anyway, even with me screeching at her not to do it and explaining what was wrong.
Omnivores got beef.
Vegetarians got chicken. (“It’s not meat.”)
Vegans got salads with egg and cheese. (“But it has vegetables.”)
…she was not hired on full time
#10
My wife worked at a gas station and found out her coworker, who had been there for years, had been refilling the napkin dispenser by cramming them one at a time through the front slot. She walked up and unfastened the back and apparently his jaw hit the floor. He had never considered that there might be a better way to do this.
Image credits: eljosho1986
#11
I hired a new employee on Friday and gave him directions to the job site for Monday morning. He got there early and helped thieves load all of the building material on their truck and take off. The webcam showed him stopping traffic so they could leave.
Image credits: Clear_Suspect2987
#12
A grabbed the arm of an intern once, right as he was about to grab a 00 gage (the big wires that feed electricity the whole building) bare handed to move it out of the way to show us a problem behind. It was hot.
He claimed it was fine cause he was only gonna touch one wire at a time. The lead electrician “respectfully” requested said intern be removed from his sight before turning himself into carbon and paperwork. I agreed with this sentiment and had intern watching OSHA videos for almost 3 days straight as punishment.
#13
I worked at a company with a shared inbox. One guy sent all of his emails with a distinct font and color. He was super untrustworthy and sucked at the job.
One day he sent an email to a customer from the shared inbox but put my signature on it, to make it seem like it came from me instead of him. He left the font and color the same as all of his other emails.
He didn’t last long there after that.
Image credits: Visible_Love_1955
#14
The designer, creative director and head of production all missed that there was an eight day week on a calendar. We sent 10 000 copies of a useless calendar to a client. Rightly so, they refused to pay for it.
Image credits: atot806
#15
I worked in a paint shop and every time a new chemical was introduced to the shop, I would ask about the hazards. They would tell me that it is a green chemical; there are no hazards. “It’s baby safe” they would say. Once when I entered the shop I saw a guy using a new spray. The side of the bucket indicated that it was dangerously poisonous and highly corrosive. I told him that he should be using a mask and gloves to use that chemical. He said “Don’t worry, it’s baby safe. They even have a picture of a baby playing in it.”
After seeing the image, I yelled at the guy, “This is the baby. He is not playing, he is not swimming, HE’S DYING!”
#16
I worked for a non-profit that hired a guy in fundraising purely “for his rolodex” and they couldn’t care less about any of his job functions as long as he kept bringing more rich people to fundraiser parties. Well when the pandemic hit and we were forced to go remote, it became clear how incompetent he was with technology, and how he’d been coasting for years in the office by sticking to phone calls instead of email, etc. We had our first major online fundraiser coming up and I warned my boss that this dude had no idea how Zoom worked – never muted himself, camera up the nose, treated it like watching a YouTube video. But again, he was the guy inviting all the rich people to the event, so they didn’t want to “lecture him about a computer program” and “hurt his ego”.
Then in our massive 200+ person zoom event, he set his laptop on the bathroom counter and proceeded to take a shirtless, nasty old man dump complete with grunting, splashing, and squelching. It was so loud it drowned out the speaker. They had to end the event early because they had no way to mute him and it kept going for a full two minutes with no sign of stopping. I nearly threw my laptop out a window that night.
Image credits: remembering_things
#17
I don’t know exactly the problem, but my wife and I had a house built, 3 months after our closing the company that installed the HVAC wanted to do a routine maintenance as part of the warranty. The guy came in and looked at the system setup in the attic and just “oh this is Jerry’s work” in a very apologetic voice and scheduled someone to come out and redo 90% of the work before the warranty began.
I don’t know what Jerry did, but it was apparently well known in that company to likely need to be redone.
Image credits: ONSFishing
#18
Poured sink cleaning solution into the ice cream machine instead of the cream mixture and I had to stop them, they then said “I’m sure it’ll be fine, it was only a little.”
No that would poison people. I had to clean out the whole machine top to bottom and refill it. I ended up throwing away nearly a whole bucket full of contaminated ice cream mixture.
I would also like to add that the containers didn’t look anything alike, the sink stuff came in big plastic jugs with screw tops and the ice cream comes in carbord cartons (like orange juice) that you have to cut open. so I don’t know how she could have possibly mixed the two up.
Image credits: Yaboijustlikesgoats
#19
Was making pizza. Guy broke the pizza board(the thing with the handle you make the pizza on and then slide the pizza into the oven) I found the other one and he lost that. So I told him to make pizzas on one of the plastic cutting boards. He put the pizza into the oven on the board and just left it. The board melted No more pizza that day
Image credits: allthefishinthelake
#20
A few years ago, I was working in IT at a hospital. The following is a genuine account of what occurred:
We had received a call regarding a computer that was not turning on, so I went to one of the offices. This wasn’t strange because we got them all the time. To put it mildly, 95 percent of those calls were due to “user mistake,” so I was bracing myself for the worst… However, not to this extent.
When I arrive, I confirm that she is correct; the computer will not power on. I examine the plug first. It’s affixed to the wall, and it appears to be in good working order in the computer’s back office. “So, what were you doing when this computer stopped working?” I inquire. In response, she state
As a result,”Well, I thought it was too hot, so I used the water cooling option.”
As a piece of background, this model of computer featured a fan port on the top of the machine that looked like a funnel. She pointed to this fan port when she said “water cooled.”
“…There aren’t even any water-cooled PCs here.” When I returned to my desk with the now sloshing PC, my IT colleagues were bewildered as to why I had pulled the machine without permission… Until I emptied the water into a garbage pail
#21
The office we worked in was shut down due to covid and the company went 100% remote. A new senior engineer was hired to work directly with our product team and also manage a team of developers. During our company wide weekly zoom meeting after he was done presenting for the company he turned his camera off but forgot to put him self on mute. 100+ people heard this man playing Fortnite and talking down about the company to someone else in the background among other things. He only lasted a month.
Image credits: theysocool
#22
I didn’t see it happen, but I used to work at a factory making N95 masks, and one night the entire place ground to a halt.
Turns out that an incompetent co-worker running the machine that made the basic form of the mask decided that the best way to clear a jam in the thing was to ignore the sign that said “don’t put your hand in this part of the machine,” removed the safety cover that was clearly marked with a label that said “no, seriously…do not remove this,” and stuck his hand in there.
The machine did to him what Gollum did to Frodo on Mount Doom, and as a result a factory the size of an Ikea shut down for half the shift.
#23
Wouldn’t say incompetent, but was quite an entrance. A new person joined and on day 1 remote was somehow able to delete the production teams entire Dropbox file directory, which was about 25 TBs of video, design files, production files etc.
Was about 2 tense weeks working with Dropbox to get it back, but yeah that new person was uncomfortable…
Image credits: Flat-Cold
#24
Emptying hot fryer oil into a plastic container. Guess how that went
Image credits: jeffers2286
#25
I worked with a guy who “cut” the grass on the greens of an entire golf course with the mower blade off.
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