"I Still Crack Up About That One": 67 Times People Realized Their Coworkers Were Idiots

Allow me to tell you the tale of Brad, a guy who was absolutely unqualified to be managing a brewery taproom. Names have been changed for privacy.

He called me on a Sunday morning:

"Hey so the [massive 100 horsepower] air compressor is making a weird noise and there's a lot of black smoke coming out of it. What should I do?"

I said, Well dude I think you should call the fire department because it sounds like it's on fire.

I was neither a manager nor in the maintenance department. I was just one of the guys on the production staff whose number he happened to have. I have no idea why he decided to call me instead of anyone on the actual emergency phone tree.

A few weeks later, there was a loud alarm coming from a *very dangerous* packaging machine and instead of calling anyone about it, he decided to open the machine's 480V electrical cabinet, where he found and disconnected the alarm. It's a miracle he didn't electrocute himself - this thing was on a 480V/60A circuit. This caused a whole company meeting but somehow he didn't get fired.

Finally, some months after that, he decided the best way to meet his goal of reducing excess hours in the taproom was not to manage his staff better but to falsify their timesheets in our payroll system, clocking everyone out exactly at close (except himself, obviously). The HR manager very generously gave him a chance to explain his actions and he just flat out admitted that he had done exactly what they thought he'd done and further he knew that it was illegal but "we're too small for the government to worry about, right?"

He was finally fired after that. Last I heard he'd converted a Toyota sienna into a VanLife camper and was at burning man in 2022.

My favorite part was probably that when he got fired, he abandoned his old Mercedes in the parking lot of the factory because it had a flat tire. We discovered the keys were in his old desk so we fixed the tire and made it the company runabout vehicle until the financial company he had a loan from finally found it and repo'd it.

The adult daughter of the VP used to come in to work to help out with bigger projects. One time I asked her to take the cart downstairs to get more supplies for a project. 30 minutes later she hasn’t come back yet so I went in search for her. She was standing in the reception area staring at the sliding doors to the coat closet. I asked her what she was doing and she said “I think the elevator is broken” and then pressed buttons on the alarm keypad on the wall next to the closet.

The ceo of the company gave box seats for a baseball game to a coworker who then sold them. The buyer then bragged to the person sitting next to them at the game about how great of a deal they got. They were bragging to the ceo. Yeah, the coworker didn't have a job the next day after they were asked how they liked the seats and lied.

Vouchered three pounds of frozen shrimp from a Friday night shoplifting arrest. Put the frozen shrimp in the property locker, which is not opened until late Monday morning. It was August and the property room is not air conditioned.

That is just one of many dumb things he has done.

The safety guy unlocked and brought down the elevator car in the shaft I was working in. Just about squished me. He was instantly fired.

Turned off the power strip to “save electricity”… took down the entire office network.

Try to beat up a child and their parent. Also, saw a teacher call on someone to read (student can’t read and has a disability). When kid (12yo) refused and shut down, teacher picks him up and shakes him. Teacher then wrote up an office referral after the kid walked out. Both teachers were fired on the spot.

Mix bleach with isopropyl alcohol... on three separate occasions.

Not my coworker, but relayed by a friend.

So, homeboy is an admin on the systems at the employer, managing servers and whatnot. This gives him near unlimited access to pretty much anything. One day, he's working on the HR system and decides it's a good idea to see how his salary stacks up against his peers. He finds out that he's the lowest paid person in the group and proceeds to take this new-found information to HR to complain, expecting to get a raise.

Not only is he not given a raise, but he's fired and escorted out of the building.

Told a girl to go vacuum the side room at a restaurant I worked at, 20 minutes later she still wasn't back so I checked on her. She was using the vacuum like a broom. She had never used one before so I showed her how to tilt it back. She also told me chipmunks were baby squirrels.

Security camera footage of a coworker throwing a towel over the camera.

Worked in a plastics manufacturing facility. When you're mixing resins, you need to carefully monitor the temperature because if it overheats you ruin the whole batch. The higher RPMs on the mixer, the more heat. So this one guy came up with the ingenious idea that you can run the mixer at a much higher RPM and mix the batch much faster without overheating if you just remove the head from the mixer- so he was literally just sticking a rotating shaft in the resin. Then when the batch failed QA miserably, he told the owner and CEO of the company (his uncle) that the guy in the QA lab (me) was incompetent and the batch was fine (it wasn't).

Boss: We need to watch repairs and maintain our equipment better to avoid repairs.

Boss: We have a company credit card for all repairs, so your equipment should never be down because we have a high capacity card to pay for it.

Boss: That company card is not to spend on repairs!

Boss: Supervisors, you have discretion on what you can spend the company card on, use it where you need it!

Boss: Repairs? No! Why? You didn't maintain it, so now we will PUNISH YOU by not fixing it! It lowers sales? Don't care!

Boss: What happened to your Sales. It has dropped. Equipment is down? What equipment? You never told me!

Same guy for all of it.

I watched an overhead crane operator walk under the load. It's basic common sense. If something goes wrong, you don't get hurt. You get smashed. 100%. They bury you in a pizza box. I work with idiots.

Years ago a coworker peeled off one of those self-adhesive stamps from the little folder they're sold on, and licked it. She gave it a funny look and kinda smacked her tongue on her lips a couple times. Then she pressed the stamp onto the envelope, but it wouldn't stick anymore because it was wet, so BAM BAM BAM she pounded on it with her fist. I had to leave the room I was laughing so hard.

We were probationary employees in training. One of my coworkers called in sick. Company policy required two things when calling in sick: a note from a doctor dated on the date you called in with an anticipated return to work date AND your physical presence at home to receive a visit from an Admin.

The home visit was random, they didn't always do it.

But, Admin decided to check in with her. They go to her house, knock on the door and her husband answers. They ask him if he could summon her to the door to which he replied "she's on a girl's trip to Vegas, she'll be back on ____"

Anyhow, Admin asked him to have her call when she returned. In the meantime, she was fired.

A rather new employee sent a company wide calendar invite for a jam session in the auditorium. we have around 5000 employees around the world. he cancelled it and then sent it to the operations department, about 3000 employees around the world. he cancelled it and then sent it to just the main office employees, and 500 employees. 


also on his first day at lunch he took off his shoes/socks, rolled up his pants, and put his feet in the fountain of our cafeteria. he ate a sandwich while reading a book. security guard came up to him and was like "hey we are all adults here act like it."


he only lasted about 4-5 months. i assume he is fine because his dad is a multi millionaire governor of a red state. .

She was covering the front desk & decided to snoop on the receptionists computer and proceed to go through all her emails and read Teams messages and then share the contents of the Teams messages with another fellow co-worker who told management…she did not get fired. Violation of privacy am I right?

Small cheese maker. A new employee. We're cutting strings of salted cheese. Like you would cut carrots at home. He cuts himself. Starts bleeding. Put on TWO more disposable gloves. He continue bleeding in the gloves. His finger is just full of blood but you know, that's why he got TWO gloves on it 🤌.

Was at a barber shop and my barber was complaining about a recent identity theft, he then receives a phone call from a product vendor and proceeds to read his credit card numbers out loud over the phone….