Everyone has regrets, but sometimes it takes a while to realize that a decision was a mistake. You may find out years later that a certain relationship wasn’t actually a good idea or that your investments aren’t ever going to pay off. Other times, however, it takes only a few seconds to realize that you’ve made a terrible mistake.

Netizens have been recalling the most expensive mistakes they’ve ever seen someone make in the span of less than ten seconds, so we’ve gathered their most painful stories below. Good luck getting through these tales without cringing extremely hard, and be sure to upvote the experiences that would certainly make you wish that you could go back in time too!

#1

My first day on the job, a manager asked me to help move a piece of equipment worth about $40k on a cart. I took a corner too fast in the parking lot and it fell off. We both just stared while it shattered into a million pieces. Remarkably I'm still at that company ~20 years later.

© Photo: CanRova

#2

My friend works at SIAC, the tech company behind the NY Stock Exchange. He pressed 'deploy to prod' instead of 'deploy to test' and made the news that night.

© Photo: sudomatrix

#3

Forklift tipped over a crated multimillion dollar metrology tool, guy was pretty near instantly fired, tool was damaged and had to get shipped back to Germany to see if repairs were possible. We never got the tool back.

© Photo: AaronFFBE

#4

My friend was sleep deprived and hit the wrong button at his pipeline job and ruined $200k worth of product.

Edit, context: Im no expert just relayed what he told me. He was moving petroleum products to and from large tanks through pipes. It may have been a series of mistakes but the end result was having to throw away everything in a tank and have it cleaned. Not sure if it was a physical button or mouseclick on a computer. He was fired and essentially blacklisted from the industry. Probably wasn't very good at his job before that either.

© Photo: NukeDC

#5

Receiving a delivery of $10M worth of IV medications. Some genius double stacked it on a pallet instead of sending it on 2. The poor delivery guy brought it with the motorized pallet jack to the lift to bring it down off the truck. It was teetering as the lift started bringing it down. We all backed up. It fell. The sound of hundreds of expensive vials of medications shattering is really quite something.

Nobody wanted to answer any phone calls about it. Had to have managers calling managers to get it picked up and taken back.

Instead of resending a new shipment on 2 separate pallets. They sent like 80 cases of medicine via fedex.

© Photo: Ronho

#6

When you’re a valet driver, it’s very important to put the parking brake on in supercars because they do not have a standard shifter with a P selection.

McLarens (some of them) for instance have their parking brake next to your left knee. The car will roll away if you get out of it and don’t hit that button.

My old valet manager on a very busy evening forgot to put a Ferrari Spyder in park, got out, ran to park another car, and everyone on the front drive watched a very expensive car roll and hit the lip of the very expensive courtyard fountain.

Cherry on top was him trying to blame another valet for not informing him that it wouldn’t automatically come on if he opened the door.

© Photo: holdmybeerflu

#7

I used to work as a cleaner at an exhibition centre. Back when the Motor show used to be regularly every 2 years.

One year they were moving a very expensive sports car onto a platform (during setup), but it wasn't getting up the ramp.

He reversed a small amount and failed again.

More people watching telling him he was in wrong gear but he kept reving and trying. The smell was that delicious clutch smell. Anyway about 30 seconds later something breaks and the car wont even move.

Turned out he was in 5th gear not 1st gear. Destroyed the friction plate in under 1 minute.

© Photo: obsidianih

#8

When I was a kid, in middle school, my class went on a field trip to the local paper to watch them print it one morning at like 3am. I don't know who thought that was a good idea. Anyways, we were all walking along the length of the printing press watching paper shoot through it when a girl ahead of me reaches over and presses a random bottom on a panel.

We all heard a very loud BANG and some whirring noises, and that was the end of the field trip. I don't know what broke or how expensive it was, but they had it up and running by the next morning.

© Photo: airfryerfuntime

#9

I was in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan. It was the fault of the pilot who happened to be the CO of the squadron. Was a class A mishap. Millions in damages. They covered it up for him too.

© Photo: UnpaidObserver00

#10

I watched a guy doing donuts on the flight line at Minot Air Force Base slam the truck into the side of a B-52.

© Photo: Judoka229

#11

A coworker once accidentally deleted the entire production database during a routine update. No backups. The company lost years of customer data and had to rebuild everything from scratch. Cost them well over a million dollars in lost business and recovery efforts.

© Photo: Total-Pay7839

#12

New guy we hired was about two weeks into his employment as an entry engineer. One day, he presumably finds himself needing a volumetric flask (sometimes we work with chemical solutions). He ends up finding two flasks filled with clear solution.

What does he decide to do with said solutions? Pours them straight down the drain. What were those solutions you might ask? A special polymer coating used in our detection instruments. Our executive manager, upon seeing him wasting $300-400k worth of solution, immediately grabbed the solution out of his hands and shoos him off.

Guy was unemployed within a few days of that event.

© Photo: Biggy_DX

#13

Our captain dragged a $200K sonar head used for seabed mapping across an underwater rock. I looked at the data afterwards, and we managed to collect about three feet worth of map data before it happened. Ended up staying in port for a week while waiting for a new sonar, so not just the sonar, but one week extra for the boat, captain, crew and stupid amounts of beer.

© Photo: drmannevond

#14

Freight company delivering a VAX-8800 got in a hurry with the forklift and dropped it six feet onto a concrete planter, bending it slightly. Sort of boomerang-ey, not bent double.

$960,000 in 1986, about $2.9M in current money. It did not "buff out".

© Photo: qpgmr

#15

$500k in surgical supplies due to a young construction worker drilling a hole on a wall that had a pipe behind it.

Storage room below was a cardiac supply room full of heart valves.

© Photo: Albanian86

#16

Personally, I was in the last week of tomato hauling season so I had a $3000 safety bonus coming.
In five seconds I flipped my back trailer spreading 20,000 lbs of tomatoes across the road.
Goodbye safety bonus.

© Photo: MEWilliams

#17

Aramco is the Saudi Arabian oil company. They run terminals with tanks that hold 1 million barrels of oil each and have 4 ft diameter pipes between them. In the 1970's they had a European company build then a pump that cost several million dollars. The pump was built in place (it was 2 stories high) and went through extensive testing before being handed over to Aramco in a formal ceremony with all the big-wigs watching.

The hand-over document was signed and the pump was now Aramco's responsibility. The Aramco operator started up the pump but pushed the buttons in the wrong sequence and the over pressure created destroyed the pump. It had been in service for about 2 minutes.

The pump couldn't be fixed and was just abandoned in place.

© Photo: Numerous_Release9273

#18

I was working on a particle physics experiment in South Africa. I watched a colleague troubleshooting a piece of custom hardware accidentally short the power to some other pins on a custom FPGA. It released the magic smoke. The board itself was several 10's of thousand in hardware. But more importantly there was only one. Like, in existence. There was a whole team of us there to do an experiment using it so all the flights, accomodation etc wasted. Along with the hire of the facility we were using. We got drunk and went swimming.

© Photo: therealhairykrishna

#19

Promotions person at a casino I worked at was sending $50.00 slot play to our high limit players. Forgot the decimal. $5000 free slot play went out.

Every slot machine in high limit had a player on it and jackpots were hitting everywhere. I heard they lost over a million because of the mistake.

© Photo: t3h_r0nz

#20

My dad worked at a warehouse and a guy drove a forklift straight into a shelf full of flat screen tvs. whole row came down like dominoes. like 15 grand gone in one dumb turn.

© Photo: Regular_Guidance_456

#21

The guy ahead of me left his sunroof open on his BMW going into the carwash. It was one where you had to get out of the car and watch from another space while it went through. He was on his brick the whole time, loudly so we all knew he had a portable phone. When the guys opened the door to do the interior, water poured out. They ended up pushing the car out of the way to keep the line moving.

© Photo: dvdmaven

#22

I saw the aftermath of a $2M IMAX projector after it was dropped during lifting operations for installation. They sent it back to the factory (where I worked) to see if it could be repaired. It could not.

© Photo: Interesting_Study998

#23

I don't think this counts but I was there when my buddy found out his 401k was in a cash account and not invested in anything. Technically a 7 year mistake, but it took about 10 seconds for him to see it.

© Photo: jaytea86

#24

A warehouse coworker thought it’d be funny to stick his foot out at the last second into the path of an incoming forklift. You could hear the crunch over his screams.

© Photo: 2SticksAndStoned

#25

On a very big lake in north Idaho, a random guy decided to let his eye candy bring in his Scout boat* to the docks – I assume to tie it off so he could trailer it out of the water.

She got confused ¯_(ツ)_/¯ and rammed the Scout boat into two other vessels (one of them an expensive-looking cigarette boat), a few jet skis tied to the docks, a kayaker who was paddling for his life to get the hell away from her, and finally not one but both docks themselves.

When she was done doing that – because I guess that wasn't enough damage – she then made the executive decision to open it up full throttle and run the boat up onto the concrete boat ramp. The squealing, grinding, and popping sounds made everyone on the busy boat ramp/beach suck in their breath and go ooOOOooo in unison.

That man was screaming himself an apoplectic purple before it was all said and done.

*don't know offhand what model *the boat was, but it was one of the ones that was easily a half million dollars or more new.

© Photo: Three3Jane

#26

The amount of crypto bros I saw during my time in college during the late 2010s when Bitcoin exploded… So many of those idiots lost thousands of their savings by trying to invest/buy a bunch of crypto currencies without knowing what it was to begin with.

© Photo: Cheetodude625

#27

Adding to the gambling posts, was in Vegas a few years ago for NYE and while waiting for a food buzzer to go off, I saw a guy whip out a stack of $100 bills at a roulette table, must've been around $500. He put it down and got the chips then put it all on 15. When it didn't hit he pulled out another $500, again on 15. When it didn't hit again, he pulled out another $500, again on 15. Then again, and again. This went on for a few minutes until my buzzer went off and I got my food. I went and sat at a high top table and saw him walking away with a frustrated look on his face. Never saw someone blow through that amount of money that quickly ever.

© Photo: tuskedandconfused

#28

Working on a boiler; new to the job. We got it depressurized and I get send to go pull the probes and check for build up and whatever, my trainer goes to pull the element, which is held in by these 8 big nasty bolts. As hes yelling through the little window deal to tell me to be careful not to strip out the probe ports or we'll be there all night I hear a snap followed by profanity. One of those bolts just disintegrated on the way out. We WERE there all night. So was the welder, and the hospitals biomed and the fire inspector and and and.

Edit; also, just to say it; those bolts were NOT properly installed(loctite, not anti sieze. Big, BIG difference.)

© Photo: muklan

#29

Wasn’t really expensive for me per se, but submitting my PR with code that entirely broke production for a major national insurance company was a pretty big mistake lol

It worked on my machine and test regions, so I just. Put the code in. Seemed fine to my lead, so it was reviewed and approved.

Turns out, the QA guy that usually took my tickets was out on vacation that week, and nobody in his team actually bothered to test my code in whatever way they wanted to test it. So it just got packed up nice and neat with the rest of that sprints code and shipped into prod.

Which promptly broke completely, and shut down all navigation on the company policy backend sales interface. Nobody could adjust, edit, or create new policies, even for online purchases of policies.

That was a fun Monday morning, getting pulled into a meeting with c suite execs and every regional manager in the company to explain what happened LMAO

We just rolled back the update, and I was informed of the fact that we have specific tags we’re supposed to implement that make it so major changes can be turned off if need be once they reach prod. Nobody had informed me of that during training sooooo… Oops? I got congratulated for becoming a “real dev” and told to fix the thing properly, which ended up being a like 4 month project on my end apparently I cost the company at least several hundred thousand dollars, if not more, in lost sales over the handful of hours it was shut down.

© Photo: PM_ME_FUN_STORIES

#30

I don’t know what the final cost was, but I worked in a factory years ago where the boiler operator on-duty decided to take an extra smoke break and didn’t want to tell his backup to keep an eye on things while he was gone so he wouldn’t get caught… and the boiler exploded while he was gone.

Nobody passed away (somehow) but several workers working in the factory at the time were injured and the boiler blew out the entire side of the building. We were shutdown for months while everything was fixed and rebuilt as well. I’d have to guess the cost of everything was well into the millions if not tens of millions of dollars, all for an extra 10 minute break.

© Photo: twothirtyintheam

#31

A high school aged part-time coworker at the farm supply store i used to work at took down an entire metal end cap shelf, because he took the turn with a palletjack too tightly and caught the corner of it. The end cap was fully stocked with car batteries that all came crashing down. We had to clean up an acid spill and all the batteries were damaged, but thankfully no one was hurt. Kid was mortified. He didn't get fired though.

#32

Early days of computers, like 1992, IBM mainframe, tech comes in to replace a coms board and forgets his grounding strap, restarts machine, nothing, shutdown, put old board back, throws new board at door and says here’s your new $10,000 door stop, and left the building!

#33

I worked in the auto industry and the construction industry so I have a few.

Favorite from my time as a technician, I was doing an oil change on a vehicle that needed to leave ASAP and I realized right before I turned it on that I didn’t tighten the oil filter all the way, I had to re-rack the car, take the skid plate off yada yada…

manager came out screaming at me about the car taking too long, told him I wasn’t going to send out a car without a oil filter cause the motor would explode and it would be a 20,000$ job on our pocket. He told me I should have sent it out as is so the guy could come back to pay to get the engine replaced.

I asked if he was serious and told him I was there to fix cars not wreck them on purpose. He told me if I didn’t like it then I could go work at another shop, I quit on the spot and reported him to corporate. He was fired less than a week later.

This was at the biggest Toyota dealership in California about a decade ago.

#34

I was working at an airplane engine overhaul shop- P&W 4056-3’s big engines, 96 inches in diameter at the widest. We had these big overhead hoists for moving the engines and the heavy parts of the engines around as well as all the heavy tooling used in assembly/disassembly. Two hooks per hoist, one for the front and one for the back of the engine. One day we had just put the last heavy piece back on an engine, and a guy went to move the tooling used out of the way, forgetting the front was still hooked up to the, now reassembled and freshly overhauled engine. He moved the hoist north/south, when he should have moved east/west. Took the entire thing to the ground.

You ever see a multimillion dollar piece of equipment bounce on the concrete? I have.

#35

Drilling a few bolts into an asbestos floor in an IT room. $8 million in damage.

#36

I work in the film industry and the UPM (unit production manager) of our show emailed the full films budget I’m talking directors pay actors etc. etc. to the whole crew…. (This was about 12 years ago btw).

#37

Myself. When I crashed a $600 drone into a concrete wall even though I have 100s of hours operating UAVs.

#38

Refinery operator forgot to enter a decimal point on a valve set point they were adjusting. So instead of 5.0% change, they made a 50% change. It caused a huge pressure surge that knocked a compressor offline. Once that compressor went offline it became a domino effect which knocked another one offline, then another, etc. until the entire facility was no longer operating. Now the thing with refineries is that you cannot just suddenly turn things back on. It can take hours (in an absolute best case) to multiple days before everything can be fully up and running again. This particular facility was generating around $12 Million per day in revenue. So every hour it was offline represented around $500K in lost revenue and if I recall correctly it took around 12 hours before we were able to get it up and going again. Surprisingly he wasn’t fired.

#39

I was putting a Rolls-Royce Phantom in the showroom of the dealer I was working for. I asked two coworkers to hold the doors as it was windy and the doors would pivot quite a bit. One guy was on his phone when we got a heavy gust of wind that pushed the door enough to make the back part of the door just far out enough to put a nice 8-inch gash in the right passenger door, down to the actual metal. $30,000 later the door was fixed and that coworker never came back because he was going to get let go. The same coworker was pressure washing the Bentley Convertibles with the tops down and was told to put the top up before spraying the cars down by the owner of the company(NOT the GM, the actual dealer owner) His response “don’t tell me what to do” so he was already on thin ice.

#40

Not seen, but I called it.

Had a coworker who could NOT control their temper. The place we worked together let him scream and rage and after too many years I couldn’t take it anymore and I called him out on it. Said if he ever went anywhere else, that wouldn’t fly. He lasted a month before quitting. He got another job somewhere making nice money, and after a bit he got a raise and they asked him to do something and he felt it was beneath him so he let his anger get the better of him and he exploded on the person at work. He was fired instantly. His stepmother told me, and my only reply was, “I called it.” He was basically blacklisted from an entire nursing home community (and their network) bc of his poorly managed temper.

#41

So this is probably not the most expensive, but it's decently original and definitely a stupid mistake.

During our annual sprint kayak games at our local club, two of my friends wanted to test out their new K2 (two person boat) that they got from their sponsors and were supposed to use at the Olympic games in France.

Well, sadly they tipped over just about 500m from the dock. No biggie, we'll just pick them up with our motorboat, grab the K2 by hand and drag it along, happens all the time. However, the driver approached the dock too fast and on the wrong side (the K2 they dragged with them was now between the dock and the motorboat). Next thing I heard was a loud crack as the hull gave in and the K2 got bricked.

It wasn't completely unusable after that and my friends got a new one, but the damage was permanent and estimated to be a few thousand bucks at least.

#42

Just this morning, I saw two idiots make what was likely a rather expensive mistake on the commute to work. I was in the second row stopped at a light behind a sports car and a comically ugly spoilered car who decided they were going to race.

Now this would have been a bad decision regardless, but the road we were on didn’t have a shoulder and wasn’t in the best shape. Like 50 yards past the intersection there’s a pothole that took out a chunk of the outside edge of the road. Normally it’s just an annoyance you have to scoot over in the lane slightly to avoid.

Well, the two speed racers burned rubber when the light turned green, and the one in the outside lane either hit the pothole or tried to swerve around (it was dark, and with what happened next I’m not 100% which it was) and either way proceeded to fishtail back and forth across the road and managed to T-Bone the other car, landing both of them very embarrassed and in the median. They’re honestly lucky that the pothole was as early as it was before they could build up any real speed. Even still, I can’t imagine that being a cheap little hiccup on their ride to work.

#43

I worked in a food manufacturing plant while I was in college.

Salt and auger were stored in huge silos.

A guy erred by unloading a rail car of salt onto the sugar silo.

It wasn’t discovered right away.

The plant had to recall 3 shifts worth of production, Much of it was already in transport via trucks and rail cars to distribution centers and customers.

#44

Imagine metal parts inside your car but for an airplane. Large metallic components can run for +100k dollars, theses parts have a service life, and past there service life these components can be reworked. In a machine shop flipping a lever the wrong way or improperly hoisting can turn a 100k part to just a few hundred dollars worth of scrap metal easily. Happens regularly to new guys, false confident workers, and the distracred workers.

#45

Filling up a new petrol vehicle with Diesel.

#46

I didn't SEE him but I was in Hawai'i in 2018 and got woken up by a text saying "BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL."

Apparently some guy was running a drill that involved him saying "this is not a drill" so another guy sent out the warning thinking it was real.

#47

Circa 2001.

Senior manager Lost a 200,000+ a year salary by walking up behind a brand new temporary employee with very large breasts, wrapping his arms around her and cupping them in his hands. when asked why he did it, he said, ‘I had to feel their weight’.

He was 58 years old and she was maybe 21.

#48

Watched my nearly drunk buddy change the oil on his new-to-him ‘86 bronco with a 351 and built with a lift by the previous owner and even wearing good ole Buck Shot mud tires. This thing was clean. We were all getting ready for a Saturday night camping trip excursion on the lake. The location was only accessible by 4×4 and had miles of mud hole trails. This poor guy was having fun working on his truck and busting balls with us around the shop that somewhere along the way he forgot to tighten his partially installed oil drain plug. He refilled that old ford and we took off! About two miles down the road we came to a stop to cross the highway and heard a knock coming from his truck. Behind his bronco was a trail of oil. My guy was devastated. He knew immediately what he did. That weekend I watched him completely destroy that bronco because he didn’t want to fix the bearings in the motor. Kind of sad, but also an epic show. In the end, I guess we all had fun.

#49

Some time during the pandemic my friend was so passionate about DOGE coin. When it spiked, it got up to around 70k and I begged him to sell and take the profit. He spent pennies on the dollar for all that, so literally anything would have been a solid win. He decided to wait until it hit a dollar a coin so he could essentially take the 100k, but before that could even happen, they froze transactions and he couldn’t sell. Then it crashed. He kept thinking it would go back up so he didn’t sell. 60k, 50k, 40k, all the way back to near-nothing. Now it’s basically worthless.

#50

Saw someone back an F-18 off the edge of an aircraft carrier.

#51

I watched a drunk driver side swipe a row of 8 parked cars.

#52

Told a branch manager not to release property loss funds of $195,000 to an unauthorized 3rd party (deceased mortgage holder’s son)via a cashier’s check. Found out later that the branch manager did it anyway. Never heard from the son again. The house had burned to the ground. The note still had $125,000 left on it and was deeply in arrears.

#53

I saw a guy in Alaska not tilt back the forks on a forklift and reverse with what I can only imagine was hundreds of thousand dollars worth of roe. It was several pallets high and almost all of the packages broke when they hit the ground. Not only the cost of the roe, but the cleanup was insane. The Japanese inspectors were right there when it happened and they stayed to make sure the processing area was up to their standards before they signed off on buying anymore fish. It halted processing for at least a day. The packing co took a hit that day.

#54

Watched a car stereo installer drill through the firewall into the fuel injection wiring harness on a brand new Porsche once.

#55

I was once working in a transformer factory and me and 2 other guys landed this big steel plate on top of a fiber glass cable that gave information about the coil temperature and what not. with the Transformers costing up to millions of euros/dollars the client gets a discount of something around 25 000 euros if one coil does not have this sensor working.

#56

A nurse at my hospital threw away a 45k piece of equipment without asking. Then a week later, our EVS crew in surgical accidentally hit a fire sprinkler on the ceiling, causing a multi million dollar operating room to be completely destroyed. Thankfully for the workers, they weren’t found at fault since the sprinkler system should’ve had covers since daily ceiling cleanings were mandatory. It was an accident waiting to happen.

#57

A shady tow company dragged my car off from in front of my dad’s house at 2:00am. Except when they backed into it they cracked the oil pan. All told I paid them $250 to get my car back and they paid $3,000 to repair it.

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