WARNING: This post contains mentions of bodily harm and injury, such as electrocution and loss of limbs. Please proceed with caution.
Sometimes you get a little too comfortable doing your routine at work and BOOM, all of a sudden the wildest possible thing has happened on, like, a Tuesday at 11 in the morning, leaving you like:
Whether it's something small and funny or a biiiiiig mess-up, it's sure to shake up the day for everyone involved. So redditor u/Whomadethebed asked, "What's the worst mistake you've seen someone make in their job?" Here are 22 of the very best — and worst — answers people shared:
First off, some simple uh-ohs:
1. "One of my coworkers 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 while doing it."
2. "Some woman sent out a 'Happy Thanksgiving' reminder email about a potluck she was hosting to our entire company (a global bank) by accident. It was email that was clearly meant for a few of her friends at work, as it was a potluck at her home in upstate New York. Most people just deleted the email, but of course a few dozen boomers decided to reply asking to be taken off the email chain, which started the chaos of endless emails about this fucking potluck for like a whole week. Honestly, it was hilarious."
3. "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, causing several more people to click on it."
4. "I heard there was this guy at a beach restaurant in Spain who had to clean a load of paella pans by tying them down and letting the tide of the sea do the work. Apparently, he forgot to tie them and almost every one of them floated away."
5. "I had a girl who worked for me who 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 drawer, 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 it. She somehow missed it."
Next up, some bigger boo-boos:
6. "We had a test environment for our email server where we would obviously test emails prior to deployment. Now, our test environment had ZERO differences between itself and the actual CRM, so the only way you knew you were in test was by your login credentials. I sent a test to myself and to the test contacts with the subject line saying, 'Hey Buttface, 100% Off Today.' The actual email body contained the proper markup and copy, but the SL was always meant to be funny. Except I was in the live environment, not the test one."
"I sent that email to approximately 2 million contacts. Surprisingly, this dug up some old leads who later did business with us, but WHEW, LAD, does calling someone a 'buttface' while promising free stuff ruin their day. Support staff was not amused."
7. "One of my coworkers was working the register and had a guy come up and buy a $2 pack of gum with a $100 bill. He apologized, saying he didn’t have any smaller bills. 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, not realizing her mistake. It was a small shop, so it was a tough scam to fall for."
Author’s note: I’m gonna be honest — I had to read this one a couple of times before my brain registered exactly what had gone wrong, so you're not alone if this one went over your head at first! But y'all...YIKES.
8. "One time, a member of my dev team was given a task to cancel a few credit cards (fewer than 10) directly in the database. They accidentally canceled 17 million. The mistake was only caught when the company helpline started to receive millions of calls the next day from people all over the country asking why their cards were not working."
9. "A local dealership was promoting a contest where they were going to give away a truck. I was driving around with my parents, who were visiting from out of state, when we heard the commercial on the radio. The drawing was in about 15 minutes and we were nearby, 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 would contact them for the winnings. So they selected a winner who was clearly from out of state. But what they didn’t realize was that it was my mom, who was here, just visiting."
"She walked 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 they could to not give us the truck. It was clear that they had no idea how to even give away the truck. But we prevailed in the end, and I’m happy to say, we loved the truck!"
10. "I'm a car mechanic. I had a colleague once who had a pretty small job to do on an engine. It should've taken about an hour or two and only cost like $50. Well, he made a mistake — quite big, but also quite common and easy to make. It's within the 'Well, shit' category of errors — nothing to drag him through the mud for. He started fixing it and made an even bigger mistake. At this point, we even had to outsource some issues we couldn't fix in-house and were looking at about two weeks and $500, on us, of course."
"But it was still okay. We got everything back, and he started putting the engine back together. It was all done, but on the first run, whoopsie, another big problem. Took the whole engine apart. He broke something again. We outsourced again, and it was expensive. Overall, it was about a monthlong procedure, hitting $1,000. Once it was done, he got fired. He got away with a lot, but at one point, it was way too much."
11. "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."
12. "In the ER, a doctor wrote down an order for 15 milligrams of Toradol (an anti-inflammatory painkiller), and the nurse I was training misread it and started to draw up 15 milligrams of Haldol (an antipsychotic). 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, either; she was just new to my department. Yes, I stopped her before she gave the medication. No, she did not continue to work in the ER."
13. "Before retiring, I was a branch manager for my state's DMV. There was an assistant manager who would pocket anywhere from $750 to $1,500 a week. But she was removing it from the day's cash receipts. She had only ever worked for the DMV, working her way up from being a 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 was ordered to pay over $30,000 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."
14. "I'm a home appliance installer and was out working a pretty big job at a 20,000-square-foot mansion. They had another installation team working on a second kitchen in the basement. One of their guys was drilling the mounting holes for the dishwasher into the owner's granite countertop (don't do this, OK?) and drilled them too small. So when we went to secure it, a massive 4-foot chunk of granite split off and smashed into the floor, breaking a couple of tiles in the process. Dude sounded like Yosemite Sam with his cussing, and the customer was pissed."
Finally, some truly horrific mistakes:
15. "The company director sent his travel plans for a ‘work convention’ to the communal printer in the staff room. I bet that he and the other director would have had a lovely time in their presidential suite at a 5-star hotel in Barcelona for a week. His wife thought so too, and was furious she wasn’t going."
"Well, she was also surprised to learn that he and the female director were sharing a room the whole time. And as it turns out, after some research, she discovered that there was actually no convention. Things went south pretty fast, and now the company is no more."
16. "I taught preschool for eight 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. Well, I had a coworker who was too busy on her phone, so she didn’t count kids. She'd accidentally left a child behind in the toy closet."
"The kid was 2 years old and trapped, screaming and crying, in a dark 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 the parents."
17. "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. The most memorable incidents include a) a woman who accidentally glued her own eye shut after trying to reattach a fake nail with industrial-strength, heavy-duty superglue and then subsequently rubbing her eye, and b) the person who somehow accidentally mixed an acidic compound from an unmarked bottle into their beverage and drank it."
18. "Our 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. Instead, they decided that the supervisors could do all the safety audits and training and keep the building up to code. Big mistake."
"Not even a week later, two guys got their arms cut off working on a machine that they weren't trained/certified on. Then the back building caught fire because pallets and cardboard boxes were being stacked in the wrong area near the furnace."
19. "When I worked at a hotel, I saw a guy get zapped pretty badly when he stuck a tool in the wrong place on a big dryer he was working on. We asked him if he should cut the power first, but he said no, he didn't need to. For a moment after, we thought he was dead."
20. "I worked for a startup cider manufacturer in my second year of college. Normally, after a day of production, we had 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 find the warehouse had burned to the ground."
"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. The guy dropped out of his co-op degree afterward, as he wouldn’t be able to get recommended for another placement after that."
21. "I was working with a tree-cutting service in Tampa, Florida. The boss asked me 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 and 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 arched across his back, and his body jerked away, slamming against the tree trunk. He bounced off the tree and back into the wires multiple times. Finally, his spikes got dislodged and he fell out of the tree, 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 he screamed, 'I'm on fire!' We lowered him to the ground to the sound of sirens approaching; a neighbor had seen what happened and called the 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."
22. "There was a company in rural New York in the late 1960s that took scrap metal, melted it down in big, coal-fired crucibles, and made home decor pieces. Think doorstops that looked like little dogs, bookends, that kind of thing. There wasn't a huge profit margin, but their materials were cheap and they had a steady market. An industrial consultant convinced them to transition to manufacturing electric furnaces instead. There was a significantly higher up-front expense, but much lower ongoing operating costs after that. The consultant even designed the new electric crucibles for the company."
"The company president had been thinking of expanding operations, so they 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-size (about four times as heavy) crucibles were filled with scrap and fired up, they collapsed, thus flooding the factory floor with molten pot metal and chunks of wrecked equipment. The company went straight to bankruptcy."
Have you ever witnessed a workplace mistake like these? If so, in the comments below or via this anonymous form, tell us about the worst workplace mess-up you've ever seen — whether if was by someone else or you.
Note: Some submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.