40 Stories Of People Taking Stupidity To New Heights At Their Job, Shared In Online Thread

Late 90’s, I was a custodian in a NYC public school to pay for college. One of my coworkers accidentally spilled about 15 gallons of gasoline in the school parking lot. He didn’t want to get in trouble for spilling that much gas so he thought the best course of action was to burn off the gasoline. Of course gasoline burns with huge billows of black smoke so he panics and tries to put out the fire BY DRIVING HIS CAR OVER THE GIANT PUDDLE OF BURNING GASOLINE. Fire department shows up within minutes and sees him doing donuts in the giant fire and they spend a whole hour screaming at my coworker about how f*****g stupid he was.

Edit: and in 1997 when this happened, gas was 97¢ a gallon. He could have replaced all the gas for less than $15.

I asked one of the new kids to stack the shoe department.

Easy if but a bit boring. I showed her, stack by brand then size, big at the bottom, small top yeah?

She decided to organise it by the color of the boxes instead because it looked prettier.

Took me hours to fix that mess.

I had a coworker that smelled of booze at 7am.

Supervisor told him he smelled like booze, and made a couple of “get lost/go hide somewhere” remarks.

Coworker was offended, and *demanded* to be given a breathalyzer.

Coworker blew hot and was terminated. The end.

He opened a Skype window (yes, this was ~10 years ago) and started messaging me to s**t-talk a person who was in the same call as us.

Except, he forgot he was sharing his screen.

Office manager pitched the idea of having a live shooter drill, and not telling anyone in advance.

Worked with a lot of hazardous chemicals. Had a coworker who was notorious for being on his phone. We had to use a pump to put a hazardous chemical into a tank. Problem was you couldn’t look at the destination and pump the pump at the same time. Someone had to pump and someone had to watch. So I specifically asked said coworker to not look at his phone this one time. Tank overflowed and spilt the chemical everywhere because he was staring at his phone. Took hours to clean up.

After checking the correct lock-out tag-out procedure was followed, I assured an employee that it was safe to change dies on a horizontal press. But he was skeptical so unbeknownst to anyone he put a piece of tooling steel about the size of a coffee can under the die base. Some of you know where this is going.
He made the tooling change, forgot his “safety measure”, and cycled the press. We all heard a $400k press eat itself in a fantastic swan-song of a noise that would take Stephen King four pages to describe.

Telling the manager on duty, “I’m not the one eating it, so why should I care?” when the manager was trying to explain to her how to correctly prepare a customer’s food.

Smoking in front of propane tanks after being told not to because one might be leaky. When I reminder her, she put her finger up to her mouth as if to shush me so the boss did not hear. She did not understand what the potential was and just thought it was a dumb rule.

She was not a smart woman.

She once asked if Virginia was between New York and New Jersey because an online man was telling her he’d pick her up on the way.

She was 51.

She also didn’t drink water because Pepsi had water in it and it made her more thirsty.

A guy I worked with sent a spreadsheet round with all the women in the office ranked in a spreadsheet and graded overall based on 1-5 scores on ‘tits’ ‘a**e’ ‘legs’ ‘F**kability’ and ‘banter’ He was somehow shocked he didn’t pass his probation

Oh I got one. So I used to work corrections and I was training this new guy, it was way before our job formalized training, idk why it took so long. Anyway my shift supervisor asked how he was doing and I straight up told him that he wasn’t going to make it. There wasn’t anything specific just a gut feeling. I guess since I couldn’t articulate the exact reason the supervisor signed off that he was trained. About 2 mos later he is working outside in the rec yard with other COs. One of those COs was a female with a large chest that she liked to poke out. Well mosquitos were out and about and so the COs got into a game of slapping mosquitos off of each other. Well homie saw a mosquito right on one of ole girls boobs and instead of maybe just waving it off he open hand slapped the mosquito and left his hand there for about a full second before taking it off. Naturally she complained and he was let go the next day.

Not done yet. My brother is a retired firefighter and a couple of years after the boob slap incident my brother was sharing all of these funny stories of a relatively new guy they have in the dept. He says the guy is nice and works hard but when it comes to initiative and critical thinking skills it’s just not there. For instance at a fully engulfed house fire everyone is running around doing their thing like unrolling hoses or staging equipment like axes/pikes and he’s just kinda standing there watching the house burn. My brother who was a captain at the time tells ole dude to grab the fan off the truck, idk the technical term but it’s a big fan they put at the front door to blow oxygen out of the house. Well it’s a big heavy fan and has rollers and a telescoping handle similar to pieces of luggage. Dude gets it down and just sets it on the ground and goes back to watching the fire. My brother then has to tell him to bring the fan to the front door. Ole dude stares at the fan and doesn’t know what to do. My brother has to walk over there and pull the handle out and homie is like “ohhhh..ok”. Ole dude sets his axe down, that he’s been holding this whole time, in a ditch with tall grass, leans the fan forward and begins to drag it on the road. This not only tears the body of the fan up but the fan is heavy enough it’s tearing up the road a bit as well. Eventually someone points out the wheels and again he’s flabbergasted by the technology. All the stories my brother shared he never said his name but once and my head snapped. I described the guy and turns out it’s boob slap guy. I then told the boob slap story and my brother was like yup, that sounds about right.

I saw a tattooist I worked with tattoo "Laugh now cry Ladder" across a guy's chest...He was let go/ and a few years later a guy came in with "Warior" across his upper back in bold letters wanting it fixed. Same tattooist lol.

A hostess at a restaurant I worked at on college. The owner taught her how to use the register. When things slowed down we found her ringing in things into the register. She was " practicing ". She rang in over $2,000 of nonexistent charges. Took the owner three hours to correct it after closing

Taking out and using a vape pen in a clean room area that had an acid hood with butanol, nitric acid, and hydrofluoric acid in it.

Suffice to say he wasn’t employed for long after that.

This guy had a good high paying job with a pension, was there about 5 years, good worker, he was finding and watching [adult content taboo beyond any set of morals] on the company computer on company time! The cops visited! His life went downhill fast.

In high school, working at a Chinese restaurant, was there basically to take orders and bus tables. Another dude I vaguely knew from high school got hired there. Nice, popular dude, but not much common sense. Within his first two weeks, he went to make himself some food (we were allowed to do that to a certain extent), and he dropped some wontons into the deep fryer. When he decided they were done, and as we were having a conversation, he just REACHED HIS HAND into the oil to retrieve it. I don’t think I even reacted for a moment or two, and then rushed forward. He somehow ALSO didn’t react for a moment or two before pulling his hand out and yelling out a cartoon-style “YEEOUCH!”

He went to the hospital, and quit the job.

My best friend, he took his mop bucket and poured it down a water fountain instead of using the closet with a sink that was literally right next to the water fountain. He got fired the next day.

Telling the senior operations person for the office that they would "take a sick day as an extra day of vacation". To be clear, neither I nor the ops person really cared, but it was the equivalent of telling HR that you were fraudulently taking time off. Really boneheaded.

Also, this person started at the same time as me and then made a huge stink when I got promoted and they didn't. Basically subtly accused our bosses of sexism..

The catch? You AUTOMATICALLY received a promotion upon completing a series of certification exams (which I had). She had not. It was the most unremarkable promotion in history and she decided it was a hill to die on. She quit a few months later.

Running a walk behind crown stacker in a stock room. Stock room was separated from warehouse and receiving dock with 10’ door ways and a big wall covered in plywood. This idiot had just put up a pallet and didn’t lower the forks enough, and completely nailed the wall with the forklift. Luckily all cosmetic damage but it was dumb af

It was me. I was the coworker.

I'm a nurse; my MedAid (certified and licensed) dispensed one pain med at a dose prescribed under a different med; giving the patient 10x the recommended dose (and didn't recognize the mistake for 6 hours) to a 90lb older lady. Luckily this woman's organs were shutting down and didn't metabolize the med; she had 12 doses of narcan. And was alive, awake, and chatty thru the entire ordeal. No lasting effect if essentially being overdosed.