'We sent 10,000 copies of a useless calendar to a client': 20+ People who are face-palming over their coworkers' mistakes

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Remy Millisky • Writer and Editor
May 3, 2023 3:00 PM EDT

Every job requires you to have coworkers, whether you want to or not. These people encountered some coworkers who made extra dumb mistakes — and some are more dangerous than others. 

The r/AskReddit community answered the question, "What's the dumbest mistake you've seen an incompetent coworker make?" And I am shocked at some of the answers. People wrote in from all walks of life, from lawyers to pet shop workers to designers.

Everyone makes mistakes, but some people don't handle that well. It seems like a lot of the stories stem from people either not caring about their job, or making careless mistakes and then lying about it. That just makes things worse in the long run — for that person, and for the coworkers that need to clean up the messes. 

Next, check out another work story: this person was interviewing a friend of a friend for a job. It was all going smoothly, until that person told them something alarming in a DM. 

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  • 01
    Cheezburger Image 9759089152
    via Compare Fibre on Unsplash
  • 02
    Font - r/AskReddit Posted by u/xk543x 136 13 What's the dumbest mistake youve seen an incompetent co worker make?
    via u/xk543x
  • 03
    Font - PumpkinsDad. S At a Petco all the Guinea pigs were in a big plexi- glass enclosure with a center divider. Boys on one side and girls on the other. An employee decided that all the long haired Guinea pigs should be on one side and short haired on the other. It took forever to sort them out and all the females were pregnant.
    via u/PumpkinsDad
  • 04
    Font - Ohiolongboard 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 fing 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
    via u/Ohiolongboard
  • 05
    Font - zachm26 Not a mistake necessarily, but I once witnessed our chief accounting officer (and our only accountant; it was a small company) type in values into two Excel cells, pull out a calculator, add the two numbers together in the calculator, and then type the answer in a third cell. She had apparently been doing this for years, with sheets consisting of thousands of rows. I explained how to use formulas and copy them but she apparently forgot because I saw her doing the same thing again
    via u/zachm26
  • 06
    Font - Psychological-East91. One of my coworkers took an order to feed 150 people and told them two platters of sandwiches would do. Each platter is 5 sandwiches cut into 3 bits. So at best, they'd have 30 pieces of sandwiches to feed 150 people. He doubled down and everything and had days to figure it out.
    via u/Psychological-East91
  • 07
    Font - atot806 The designer, creative director and head of production all missed that there was an eight day week on a calendar. We sent 10000 copies of a useless calendar to a client. Rightly so, they refused to pay for it.
    via u/atot806
  • 08
    Font - Incredible_mango. When I worked construction, there was a guy who showed up with nothing in his tool belt except a small bag of peanuts in one pocket. He didn't stay around too long.
    via u/Incredible_mango
  • 09
    Font - 10s I had a coworker who was a guidance counselor at five schools in district. She was supposed to work one day at each school, unless she was called to a school for an urgent case. She would frequently call the school she was supposed to be at, stating she had an urgent case at another school.
    via u/10s
  • 10
    Font - One day at lunch she was talking about what was happening in her favorite soap opera. This was before VCRS, and the show aired long before the school day ended. The principal was sitting at our lunch table. He got up, smiled, and told her, "see me when you are done with your lunch." After checking, she hadn't seen more than a few kids per week, for many months. Funny thing is, complaints about her work had gone down in that time. She was a c by guidance counselor.
    via u/10s
  • 11
    Rectangle - overengineered A grabbed the arm of an intern once, right as he was about to grab a 00 gage (the big wires that feed electricity the whole building) bare handed to move it out of the way to show us a problem behind. It was hot.
    via u/overengineered
  • 12
    Font - He claimed it was fine cause he was only gonna touch one wire at a time. The lead electrician "respectfully" requested said intern be removed from his sight before turning himself into carbon and paperwork. I agreed with this sentiment and had intern watching OSHA videos for almost 3 days straight as punishment.
    via u/overengineered
  • 13
    Font - muppetmat13 Shut down a critical file server, then lied about it...even after he was presented with the logs that showed it was his user account that initiated the shut down. It's not so much the mistake that he made, but it was when he lied about making the mistake...that was a rookie move.
    via u/muppetmat13
  • 14
    Font - infantinos I worked for this abhorrent woman who used to go into direct reports documents, delete lines and columns from spreadsheets, slides from presentations, rewrite copy, etc. She did this to a few of mine so I learned to always keep a backup copy away from her view. One day, we were virtually reviewing a highly detailed spreadsheet that too quite a bit of time to create. In
    via u/infantinos
  • 15
    Font - time to create. In front of our whole team, she began to harshly criticize and start deleting information and moving things around. By the end of her Tasmanian Devil tirade on the spreadsheet, she barked about how none of the data added up and openly questioned why someone would present this. I explained that the data had been tallied correctly at the start of the meeting but due to columns and lines being deleted, it no longer did. She
    via u/infantinos
  • 16
    Font - defensively questioned 'well, WHO did this?' And I said "we can easily check if we look at the document history, see here.. (with a few clicks shows history of list of changes all with HER name on each in the last 20 minutes). I clicked on the document as it stood when it was initially presented to its original state and correct tally. I was one of the very few who stood up to her. Team 1, abhorrent boss zero.
    via u/infantinos
  • 17
    Font - GrandMoffHarkonen. 2 36 New guy was dragging 2 8000lb rolls of paper through the warehouse. This is against the rules for good reason, anyway, he drove through a door designed for 1 roll, and drug the top roll through the wall Edit: No, that isn't a typo. I spoke with a rollgrab driver this morning to double check my facts; the rolls in this plant are between 6000 and 8000 pounds each. The picture really can't do justice to the scale here.
    via u/GrandMoffHarkonen
  • 18

    They included a photo --- what a disaster!

    Wheel - M
    via u/GrandMoffHarkonen
  • 19
    Font - theysocool The office we worked in was shut down due to cd 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
    via u/theysocool
  • 20
    Font - jackleggjr Nearly leaving a child behind on a field trip. We took a large group of 4 and 5 year-old children to visit a farm/petting zoo/pumpkin patch. We had three vehicles. I was in charge of my own group, but I noticed one of the other teachers was being very lax in her supervision for most of the trip.
    via u/jackleggjr
  • 21
    Font - When it was time to leave, I loaded my children on the bus (with some other adults) and did a head- count/attendance check. Before getting on my bus, I noticed that the other teacher had climbed onto her bus and sat down BEFORE the children boarded. She walked on first and had the kids follow her. I almost let it go, but gut instinct told me she wasn't counting her students. Once they were all boarded, I walked back and climbed on her bus. She seemed irritated when she realized I was chec
    via u/jackleggjr
  • 22
    Font - way. She said something like, "We're all good, let's go!" I knew how many were in each group, so without answering her, I did a quick count. Sure enough, we were missing one. I ended up leaving the bus and going to find the kid myself... he was still on the playground with children from another school.
    via u/jackleggjr
  • 23
    Font - When we got back to the bus, the other teacher blamed the kid! She said he "wandered off." Really, she is the one who gathered the group and left the play area, meaning she is the one who "wandered off." She was ped when I went to the administration about the incident.
    via u/jackleggjr

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