'One dude once photocopied a slice of pizza': 20+ Cases of workplace foolishness

Author image for Remy Millisky
Remy Millisky • Writer and Editor
Feb 7, 2024 3:00 PM EST

No workplace is safe from that one dude who can't get anything right. There really is at least one person in every company who seems wildly underqualified for the job. This is the kind of guy who makes you wonder how they ever got a driver's license or paid their taxes, because they're seemingly too dim-witted to function. 

Sometimes, it's not even the person's fault, necessarily---you can just tell they're in the wrong career. For example, one shoe store worker was asked to organize some shoes by their brand, then by size. That way a customer can find a shoe they like, and know exactly where all the sizes are to find the perfect fit. Instead, this worker decided to organize the shoes by the color of the boxes they came in! Why? "Because it looked prettier," obviously. This woman is not destined for common sense, but perhaps she'd be the perfect fit for a job in fashion or home decorating. This was also a young person at her first job, hopefully she's making better mistakes by this point in her career. 

Check out these funny and shocking accounts of the goofiest ways workers made mistakes. Then, check out these times when workers narrowly avoided getting fired, even after making huge mistakes, like one dude who "scrapped $360,000 in airplane parts."

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  • 01
    FOUN 'I saw a tattooist I worked with tattoo "Laugh now cry Ladder" across a guy's chest'
    via Annie Spratt on Unsplash
  • 02
    What's the dumbest thing you've seen a coworker do on the job?
    via u/Adrian0091
  • 03
    Lizzy_Of_Galtar 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.
    via u/Lizzy_Of_Galtar
  • 04
    O ARKA O J LinusMeindl One dude once photocopied a slice of pizza. We found cheese and stuff inside the machine for weeks. Was pretty funny though.
    via u/LinusMeindl
  • 05
    hurrythisup 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.
    via u/hurrythisup
  • 06
    2gecko1983 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.
    via u/2gecko1983
  • 07
    WitShortage Admit to not having spoken to any of the business stakeholders, but instead "made up their own story." This was at the end of what was supposed to have been a four-week information- gathering phase of the project. That afternoon, when one of the managers went to her from the premises, they found her by the printer with a stack of confidential documents.
    via u/WitShortage
  • 08
    + [deleted] 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
    via u/ [deleted]
  • 09
    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.
    via u/ [deleted]
  • 10
    A coworker of mine was fired for using his cellphone in an electrically classified area, cell phone wasn't explosion proof, not to mention the fact no cell phones on the floor, they gave him a warning, second time they walked him out.
    via r/AskReddit
  • 11
    Bad part for him was that his wife found out he was talking to his girlfriend. Twenty years down the tubes. As we liked to say, "He fired himself."
    via r/AskReddit
  • 12
    MrFavorable 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.
    via u/MrFavorable
  • 13
    zyygh He opened a Skype window (yes, this was ~10 years ago) and started messaging me to -talk a person who was in the same call as us. Except, he forgot he was sharing his screen.
    via u/zyygh
  • 14
    Express Let8362 Cutting his hair at the bar, he was the bartender...
    via u/Express Let8362
  • 15
    Idontfeelold-much 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
    via u/Idontfeelold-much
  • 16
    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.
    via u/Idontfeelold-much
  • 17
    hubertcumberdale420 Worked at Chick-fil-A and the kid in the cow costume decided to walk over to the Walmart nearby and ride bikes around still in the costume. The manager called and was like "hey do you know your cow is riding bicycles around in our store?"
    via u/hubertcumberdale420
  • 18
    -Words-Words-Words- 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
    via u/-Words-Words-Words-
  • 19
    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 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.
    via u/-Words-Words-Words-
  • 20
    Full Management_1603. Refuse to authorize overtime for our severely understaffed department, but somehow find enough money in the budget to buy new office furniture for one office. The price tag of which could cover the annual salary for two new staffers plus some.
    via u/Full Management_1603
  • 21
    mysticalfruit Co-worker is tasked with pushing an EMC disk array to the dock to be picked up by EMC to be exchanged for a new array. The movers show up and in an attempt to be helpful the guy tried to operate the ramp thing that bridges the dock to the moving truck and managed to dump the array off the dock onto the ground.
    via u/mysticalfruit
  • 22
    I watched it fall in slow-mo and hit the ground and the whole rack distorted, disks spilled out and plastic panels shattered everywhere. My boss standing next to me without missing a beat goes, "Welp, that fell at thousands of dollars per inch." Someone somewhere wrote it off or whatever, but easily a $100k array obliterated instantly.
    via u/mysticalfruit
  • 23
    hex_1101 Worked at a fast food restaurant, and one of the managers locked herself out of the office. One of the employees had the bright idea of trying to get over the partition and through the ceiling. He crashed through the office ceiling in a flame of glory dragging cables and bent metal supports with him.
    via u/hex_1101
  • 24
    junerlegion My coworker blasted the volume of his music not realizing the 3.5mm jack isn't connected to his phone. He thought he was hearing it from his earphones lol. Our CFO whose office is near our department came marching outside to the employee floor and shouted "Who the playing that?" (in our native language). Someone had to call his attention, we couldn't laugh at the time but it was hella funny later that day Imao. is
    via u/junerlegion
  • 25
    Edit: for anyone curious the song was Low by Flo Rida. It was popular at the time I believe it's in early 2010s when that happened.
    via u/junerlegion
  • 26
    angelaelle Co-worker held a block of dry ice in her bare hands and asked, "what is this?" The box it came out of had a hazard sticker that said Dry Ice and then a bunch of cautions, like use gloves or tongs to pick up.
    via u/angelaelle
  • 27
    Dogstar23 Colour the background of a word dock blue so she could get a blue piece of paper. The blue paper was right next to the printer and had been there for months. She printed daily. (edit) - This was the same girl (18) which thought that pasta was harvested from the ocean floor like some sort of salt water grass.. (Edit) (edit) - She was smoking hot tho...
    via u/Dogstar23
  • 28
    BiO_B1lly Didn't see, but read up on the report; This guy had a crush on another staff member at a site and mistook her kindness as playful flirting... She came into her office one day to find it absolutely covered with pictures of her and her husband the guy had printed out on Facebook and added captions to to make her husband sound/look like an idiot.
    via u/BiO_B1lly
  • 29
    He actually believed that Facebook stalking a woman and downloading photos of them and then plastering her workspace with said photos with quips aimed at insulting their partner would be taken well. Dude said it was a prank, but the restraining order says otherwise.
    via u/BiO_B1lly
  • 30
    AllReflection I had a sales guy who used to like hitting the mute button on the Polycom in order to say smart things on calls. One time he hit mute after a customer made an obvious observation and loudly said "no , Sherlock!" only to find that the mute didn't engage.
    via u/AllReflection
  • 31
    mwcraft 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.
    via u/mwcraft
  • 32
    TrepidatiousInitiate I'm fairly certain we could all agree that a backup of anything is a physical replica of an item or data file, preferably placed in a location foreign to that of the original so that the unavailability of one does not affect the availability of the other.
    via u/TrepidatiousInitiate
  • 33
    With this in mind, I once asked a guy to backup the contents of an entire server on to another server. He was meant to spend a few hours completing this activity and verifying it had all been copied in full without any data corruption. I come back the next day to find a shortcut in server 2 that was pointing to the folder in server 1.
    via u/TrepidatiousInitiate
  • 34
    This same guy knocked the Production servers over the weekend and didn't tell anyone. Our company was fined $250,000 USD. This same guy once logged into another server to complete some maintenance work and got hit with a Windows update notification. He accepted the update, got locked out and had to wait over an hour for the update and reboot to complete. This guy wasn't fired, he is now the Tech Lead in another team.
    via u/TrepidatiousInitiate
  • 35
    toddfredd 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
    via u/toddfredd
  • 36
    diegoplus Copying the Desktop icons of apps on a floppy disk thinking she copied the full programs, to install them on her home computer.
    via u/diegoplus
  • 37
    tugboatnavy New guy was told to wear oven mits to carry a very hot hotel pan. Guy said "Don't worry, I'm strong." Proceeded to burn his hands and forearms and drop $300 worth of product. Got fired for doing the exact same thing on his first day back from medical leave.
    via u/tugboatnavy
  • 38
    Substantial-Ball3916 We had a temp employee who was very cute. An idiot co- worker asked her name, clearly interested, and was told "Susan Uncommonname". Co-worker replies, "Uncommonname. hey my manager has the same last name. Boy is my manager a she hates me, etc etc". I "Yes. She's my mother"
    via u/Substantial-Ball3916
  • 39
    orange_cuse I had a coworker who interviewed for a job whilst working her current job. She did not have an office so she was talking to Human Resources on the phone...in her cubicle. Everyone could hear her. She was let go shortly afterwards and she was shocked. Not a bright one.
    via u/orange_cuse
  • 40
    kayriss Grocery store. Dude was supposed to stock and merchandize a display of canned beans. He came back after a long while really confused, because some of the boxes we gave him had beans, but most were filled with haricots. He decided to stock them side by side as best he could. We're in Canada. Haricots are beans in French.
    via u/kayriss
  • 41
    ♥ [deleted] After a few times of warning him, i let him cut through the 2x4 that his ladder was leaning on. You can imagine what happened. It was hilarious.
    via u/ [deleted]
  • 42
    JCarr110 In 2002 I ran a shoe store. I had a habit of paying attention to everyone's shoes in interviews and making small talk about them. Hired a new guy. One day I found a box of shoes with the shoes missing and this dude's shoes in the box. I knew they were his, but obviously couldn't prove it. Until he showed up at work in the missing shoes.
    via u/JCarr110
  • 43
    Routine_Pizza_7292 When I was in high school I worked at McDonalds. I worked with a guy named Dan who told everyone he really wanted to buy a truck. He has the exact truck picked out, and as I worked there that summer, he kept telling me how close he was to getting the truck. When I went in to pick up my last paycheck after
    via u/Routine_Pizza_7292
  • 44
    I quit, he came in with a huge smile on his face, saying this was the check he could finally afford to get the truck. So he picked up his check and then promptly quit the job. The manager asked how he was going to afford the insurance and gas and his face dropped. I sometimes wonder where Dan is now.
    via u/Routine_Pizza_7292
  • 45
    Freeheel1971 Line up wood stakes on the tailgate of a 2 day old work truck and spray paint the stake tops orange. And get overspray all over the new tailgate. Idiot.
    via u/Freeheel1971
  • 46
    NotMoose5407 This guy I work with is like 0 for 60 on the tablet username and password. It's user and password.
    via u/NotMoose5407

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