40 Times People Witnessed Their Incompetent Coworkers Make Such Dumb Mistakes, They Could Never Forget Them

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.

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.

I worked on a golf course during the summer. Area with lots of poison ivy. Two of my coworkers were instructed to weedy a river edge area. If we encounter poison ivy, we either stop what we are doing or go get full suit protection with respirators. These dumba**es were weedwhacking in the thickest poison ivy I had ever seen. No protective suit or glasses or respirator. I roll up and notice what the hell they're doing and point out all the poison ivy everywhere- they were aerosolizing the oil. They both ended up in the hospital on steroid to prevent their death because of the oils they inhaled.

A guy was using the overhead crane in a machine shop I worked in. It had two hooks on it, one was raised right to the roof, the other was lowered and beside another guys machine. The guy using the crane was looking at the hook by the roof and mobilized the crane, he was wearing earmuffs and the shop is loud af so when he started almost killing everyone in the line of machines with the other hook he couldn't hear the rest of us screaming. The hook almost threw the first guy into his lathe, hit the next guy's tool board, flipped over to the side he was on almost put him into his lathe, rinse and repeat for the next three machines. When it bounced over the last one it grabbed the A-Frame that held all the bar stock and started lifting 30-40T of steel off the ground someone finally made it to him and slapped the controls out of his hands. That was his last day at that job.

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.

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

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

I knew a guy who was a foreign exchange dealer in London. He made a trade but apparently forgot to press go (or whatever) When he got back from lunch the company had lost £10m. The whole department had to work together all afternoon/evening to make enough to cover his losses so he wouldn't be sacked. A hell of a team building exercise. ;)

I worked in a place notorious for having bad recruiters and hiring bad temps. They had this one guy, on a 3-month lease, and we couldn't get rid of him fast enough, in the summer of 2001.

First, he claimed all these Microsoft certifications, and after a few days, we realized he didn't even know how to use a mouse or how scrollbars worked. So we put him on the worst detail: all he had to do was go to one of 20 popular websites, and use a stopwatch to time how fast he clicked "enter" and how fast it took the web page to load. We were testing some web caching software. Then he had to go on another machine with the software, and do the same thing. He had never used a browser. So we had to teach him how THAT worked. The concept blew his mind, and we wonder how an adult had lived in 2001 who didn't know how a browser worked. We knew he lied about the certifications at this point, but he had 90 days we were stuck with him.

Very quickly, however, he discovered how to find p*rn. And started browsing that instead of testing websites. This was in the days of MSIE 5 or 6, so of course, they became infected with popups and viruses. We'd catch him at it, and he'd deny it every time, and we'd have to complete wipe the desktop and reinstall Windows, only for him to do it again. We caught him doing it with other machines in the lab, too. The guy literally had no impulse control, claiming the whole test lab was infected and just absolute lies that a kid would tell who had no idea how computers worked. Thank god we never caught him jerkin' it, but I feared reviewing the lab security tapes should it have gotten to that.

"You were browsing p*rnography again. We have told you many times, that's against company policy."

"No, I didn't."

"I am literally looking at you browsing p*rn."

"That's not me."

"There's [p*rn site] on your task bar."

"That was always there."

"You have a popup from [lewd site name]."

"That was someone else who was here, earlier."

"Who?"

"You know, that hairy guy. With the beard."

"There is no hairy guy with a beard who works in this lab. You have been the only one here besides me."

"I know I saw him. He browses the p*rn all the time!"

Ugh. Like a mentally deficient 12 year old. I was so glad to get rid of him.

When I was in the coastguard, there was an incident when a vessel called in what they thought was another vessel in distress, but couldn't be sure and couldn't raise them on VHF.

The watch commander kept refusing to launch the rescue boat until he had 'more details'.

Like, dude, this far North the life expectancy of a person in the water without a survival suit is measured in single digits of minutes. We can get more details when the boat is en route; the exact position of a bunch of floating corpses is of limited value.

After three or four minutes I just said 'f**k it' and launched the boat.
It turned out the suspected casualty's radio was banjaxed, but they were otherwise fine; their boat just had a very low freeboard and looked a bit 'sinky'.
I fully expected to be sh*tcanned for it, but I was not; the old man had a long conversation with the guy about how nobody will ever find fault with sending an asset to a possible false alarm, but failing to send an asset to a real emergency is...well, it's Not Good.

The dude had previous before I joined for shrugging off a red flare report as a hoax. Two people died in that one.

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.

When I was in the Navy, this known dumba** and pathological liar was on armed watch with an M-14 patrolling the topside decks. Literally all you have to do is walk around for 4 hours with a rifle on your shoulder.

This dude came back to the Quarterdeck (main entrance to the ship) WITH NO GUN.

He tried to claim it fell off his shoulder and into the water while tying his shoe. How a rifle would fall off your shoulder, pass through your hands that were tying the shoe, and through all three lifelines (like guard rails) is still a mystery.

My theory is that he was doing drill team stuff - like tossing it spinning in the air - and lost it that way.

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.

Tried to cool down hot oil (in a chute, all ready to be emptied) with a nice big bucket of water…..I heard “THOMAS NO” only to turn around and see a GEYSER of hot oil shooting towards the ceiling before it hit and splashed down around him. Nobody was hurt some f*****g how

Edit: because it has come up, the chute that the oil was in was on wheels and had a wooden handle, it absolutely didn’t need to be cooled lol

I have a list a mile long of the s**t our completely incompetent project manager did, but the best was insisting that a $3000 load of fertilizer still absolutely had to be delivered as previously scheduled despite the company warning against it as we were expecting heavy rains that day. The entire pile was washed away within a couple of hours.

One of my reports missed a 9 AM meeting and when I asked him why he said “you said the meeting was at 12, not 9!” Of course I was very confused because the meeting invite said 9 and everyone else on the team knew it was at 9. So he sent me a screenshot of his outlook calendar and it turns out he just had all his s**t set to the wrong time zone.

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…

Emptying hot fryer oil into a plastic container. Guess how that went

I worked grocery for twelve years and one day I get an in house page if I could come to the receiving dock (I worked produce) to assist the grocery manager.

We had just got a grocery load in, and the driver hadn’t used a load lock (a bar that goes across the truck if it’s not a full truck) and we had NINE full pallets of product toppled over and broken.

My job was to take pictures on my cell phone of the mess and the grocery manager called up our distribution center to inform them of what happened.

We had to take the keys to the truck away from him as he was fired on the spot and he had to find his own way home. And it was a four hour drive home from our store.

The whole time he was bitching that he wasn’t his fault that they can’t force him to supply his own load lock as he was an independent contracted driver.

He did about 10k worth of damage to product, lost his job, and any future possibilities at driving a big rig for anyone in the state because he didn’t want to buy a piece of equipment that cost $50 or even worse he didn’t ASK our warehouse for one, which they would have HAPPILY loaned him one (he’d be fined if he didn’t return the lock back after his run)

I worked with a guy who “cut” the grass on the greens of an entire golf course with the mower blade off.