20+ Employees who kept their jobs after making huge mistakes: 'She should have been fired right then and there'

Author image for Remy Millisky
Remy Millisky • Writer and Editor
Jan 5, 2025 11:00 AM EST

There's always that one worker in every job who's made countless errors, yet still clocks in every day without ever taking accountability for their mistakes. At some workplaces, there's an obvious reason they're still at the job. Maybe they're the CEO's son or daughter, and no matter how badly they goof up, they'll always have a cushy office job. This tends to make them the bane of their coworkers' existence, because there's no way to hold them accountable for their mistakes. If they miss a deadline, do they care? Absolutely not. While the rest of the team frets over how late they'll have to work, the office nepo-baby is heading out the door to play a round of golf or get a pedicure. 

Interestingly enough, though, the office dolt isn't always a nepo-hire. Sometimes they're just the manager's friend who is happy to spend a retail shift goofing off with their bestie in the back room while everyone else gives 110% out on the sales floor. You can check out a bunch of wild tales of workplace foolery that didn't lead to anyone getting fired (for better or worse!). 

Next up, read about the worker who spread 100 copies of their boss's meeting notes throughout the whole company, and the result was that "Folks were... refusing to do their normal duties [and] browsing Indeed during work."

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    Cheezburger Image 10450085632
    via Alexander Grey on Unsplash+

    This image is for illustration only, and the subjects are models; the image does not depict the actual subjects of the story.

  • 02
    What's the most f ed up thing you've seen someone do at work and still not get fired?
    via u/[deleted]
  • 03
    [deleted] Had a girl steal money from other crews bags in the locker/change room. Instead of firing her they just took the door off the room and put in a camera so now we have to show up to work in uniform with a shirt over it, it's very hot here and I end up sweaty by the time I get to work.
    via u/[deleted]
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    She also called in one time saying her sister did and needs time off. She never had a sister. After all this she got rehired after she quit for another job that didn't end up working out.
    via u/[deleted]
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    dissonance79 Repeatedly sleep. Not like a 2 minute doze - I'm talking hours. Has been caught multiple times, was even filmed twice by a new hire. Union won't let him be touched - not even a suspension.
    via u/dissonance79
  • 06
    trs4ece I worked at a webhosting tech support company and a coworker accidentally deleted another customer's website. This was on a Unix system, so it wasn't possible to undo the delete. He deleted the command history to cover his mistake and then told the customer that the website was lost due to a hard drive failure.
    via u/trs4ece
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    The customer hadn't been keeping backups and said that he lost his entire livelihood. The employee told management about the situation and they ran with it to avoid getting sued. They told the customer that hardware issues sometimes
    via u/trs4ece
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    happen and because he hadn't opted into our managed backup services, the data loss was on him. They offered the customer several months of free webhosting as compensation and the problem went away. A week after seeing this play out, I put in my two-weeks notice.
    via u/trs4ece
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    t... Destroy an overpass with an excavator improperly loaded on a trailer. Edit: 450 john deere excavator on a Arnes triple axle lowbed with a jeep and booster. Boom was about 1 ft too high at 60mph. This is the biggest excavator you can haul around these parts without disassembling it.
    via u/thesneakersnake
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    B.. Forge a document (it was so obvious!), then lie about not forging it, then admit to forging it once lie was just slightly questioned. One partner at the firm wanted her fired, but another one didn't, the forger stayed.
    via u/BroodingBryanAdams
  • 11
    [deleted] Energize a circuit someone was still working on.
    via u/[deleted]
  • 12

    Just imagine the fallout from this...

    thehappyhaha Accidentally send out the entire company's (3,000+ employees) headcount to the company distro. File contained everyone's salary, birthday, government numbers, etc.
    via u/thehappyhaha

    Congrats to the person who proved to be a true workplace hero by distributing important information to everyone so they can renegotiate their salaries. That's the kind of mistake that probably should've gotten them fired… especially if a lot of people did demand better pay. 

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    aki_6 A few years ago I was working in a big company in my hometown, they hired. me to create a website because they wanted to get bigger. A graphic/fashion designer in the same company thought I was hired for her department because our offices were close and because I was doing both
    via u/aki_6
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    the programming and the design of the website. I had an appointment with another company that would help us set up secure online payments and manage inventories across our stores and the main factory.
    via u/aki_6
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    Graphic designer welcomed the representatives of this company (not even her task at all) and cancelled the appointment and the contract because she didn't believe I was good enough. with computers.
    via u/aki_6
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    Needs MoreTuba He liked throwing ice cubes into the deep fryer. He'd stand far enough away that he wouldn't get splashed, which made it a complete surprise to the person working the fryer. If you've never done this, it kind of causes a mini explosion of bubbles in molten grease, which splashes everywhere and, at the very least, makes a mess.
    via u/Needs MoreTuba
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    When this got too boring, he started stealing kids meal toys and chucking them into the fryer. It took longer for them to start melting, and if he couldn't get them out, we had to turn the thing off for the rest of the day because it takes hours for it to cool off long enough to retrieve something, and then at least another hour to heat back
    via u/Needs MoreTuba
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    up. I can't remember what it was that he threw, but it caught on fire and he ended up pulling it out with a pair of metal tongs and threw it in the sink. Then he turned on the water and made (to his surprise!) a BIGGER FIRE. Did he get burned? Yes. Did he get fired? No. Did he do it again? Sort of. I think he went back to ice cubes after that.
    via u/Needs MoreTuba
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    TLDR; Technically he got fired, but it was with ACTUAL FIRE. The boss just kind of shook her head and let him keep working there.
    via u/Needs MoreTuba
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    119
    via Ahmed For Unsplash+

    This image is for illustration only, and the subjects are models; the image does not depict the actual subjects of the story.

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    PedanticPuppy I worked with a guy who literally had no job. He was the "studio supervisor" but there was no activity in the studio to supervise because the studio had effectively become non-operational. He coasted for a full 8 years at this job. He would come in the morning, open his email, get coffee, gossip and complain about the industry for an hour, leave for an
    via u/PedanticPuppy
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    hour, come back for lunch, leave for another 3 hours, come back, send a few emails and then officially leave for the day. It was infuriating and majestic.
    via u/PedanticPuppy
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    ThatKarmaW My boss forged my name on a number of documents, because she didn't have the required certifications to sign the documents herself and I had refused to sign them. I know this, because after things went horribly south they tried to claim I
    via u/ThatKarmaW****
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    had been the one to screw up, and showed me my/her signature. She got promoted again instead of fired, that way I didn't have to quit. You will never guess whose mother owned the company.
    via u/ThatKarmaW****
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    scottevil110 I wouldn't say f ed up, but I work closely with the federal government, and the number of people just hanging around until retirement, doing jobs that have been obsolete for 20 years, is remarkable.
    via u/scottevil110
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    There's a dude I know whose ONLY job is to scan things. Like scan paper into PDFs. He's a federal employee being paid $50,000/yr.
    via u/scottevil110
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    Cheezburger Image 10450112512
    via Agustin Farias For Unsplash+

    This image is for illustration only, and the subjects are models; the image does not depict the actual subjects of the story.

  • 28

    It seems surprisingly common to snooze on the clock at corporate jobs...

    PM_Skunk Sleep for three hours. I was brand new on the job (corporate thing), and my new coworker came up to me on a weekend shift and said, "I was up really late last night, I'm gonna go lay down for a few minutes." Three hours later, he woke up and came out to work again, without any measure of apology. In the interim,
    via u/PM_Skunk

    Just make sure the boss doesn't spy you resting your eyes! 

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    one of the people we worked for found him asleep, and told my boss. He got a warning. Close second being a coworker that hacked the company's network (using the term somewhat loosely) to get an internet access
    via u/PM_Skunk
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    password we weren't allowed to have. Would have gotten away with it if he hadn't ALSO changed their file structure to have folder names like, "F you, I want internet access." He also got a warning.
    via u/PM_Skunk
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    P... Not mine, but something an old buddy of mine did 15+ years ago. He worked for a really big gaming company that was just about to ship a major title. Like, MAJOR. Because of beta testing, there was code in the game that would disable the beta copies the day after the game officially dropped. His job was to
    via u/PaperClipsAreEvil
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    make sure that code was removed before they burned all of the official CDs for the game's release. Guess who forgot to remove the code? The company had already burned tens of thousands. (maybe more) of game discs and boxed them up for shipment before my buddy realized his mistake and came clean to his boss.
    via u/PaperClipsAreEvil
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    They had to re-burn, replace, and re-box every copy of the game and do it in time to meet the launch date. Cost a lot of people a lot of extra time and grief but, ultimately, my buddy got to keep his job.
    via u/PaperClipsAreEvil
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    stop_whispering We hired this woman to my team. Her job was to do exactly what I did. We work from home, but we have constant conference calls and a TON of work to do. It's simply not possible to slack off without being noticed. I trained her and she shadowed me for a couple of months. She should have been ready to go off on her
    via u/stop_whispering
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    own, but she kept asking the same questions again and again. It's like she wasn't even sort of listening to anything we said. Which was super annoying...but then... About 3 months in, she disappeared. Like stopped logging into calls, stopped logging into Skype, stopped everything. We emailed, texted, and called for awhile, until she finally responded that she had been in the
    via u/stop_whispering
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    hospital with a hernia. Now my mother had hernia surgery in her 70's and was home within a few hours. So...red flag. We were also stunned and deeply offended that she never, ever bothered to call, text, email, ANYTHING to say she'd be out. Never in my 20 year career have I seen anything like it. In my personal opinion, I thought she should have been fired right then and there.
    via u/stop_whispering
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    BUT, our boss didn't want to make a big deal out of it - she didn't want to tell the big boss...for some reason. I'm still baffled by that, but that meant neither the powers that be nor HR had any idea it had even happened. So eventually, after having fallen off the planet for about 10 days, new hire finally came back.
    via u/stop_whispering
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    Both our boss and I counseled her A LOT about communication. Things happen, we get it. Just TALK to us. Let us know what's going on. Benefit of the doubt, right?
    via u/stop_whispering
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    Yeah, a little over a month later, she did it again. At first I noticed she wasn't joining calls or logging into Skype. and she kept saying she was having connection issues. Fine. Once again, TELL US. And for god's sake, call tech support. But then she was offline for an entire week, so we tried hunting her down. again. Nothing. No. response, no communication, nothing.
    via u/stop_whispering
  • 40
    This time, the issue was escalated and HR got involved. After a total of two weeks, she apparently told HR she was having medical issues. She was counseled that she had to log on and fill out her time sheets to reflect she was out of office for ALL the time she was gone. She was given a deadline of a week to do this. This never happened, and she was STILL
    via u/stop_whispering
  • 41
    employed. Please note, at this point she had still not spoken a word to either myself or our boss. So now we're at three weeks of radio silence and HR contacts our boss to say new hire had reached out to say she's filing short-term disability. Fine, whatever. We
    via u/stop_whispering
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    wait. And wait. And obviously, she never filed. So FINALLY, a month after disappearing for the SECOND time with zero communication, she was terminated. The amount of work I had to pick up thanks to her disappearing act was madness. I'm talking upwards of 80 hours a week for more than a month. I am still bitter about it.
    via u/stop_whispering
  • 43
    rachjo1024 I worked from home at my last job and my coworker would sometimes just not log in until like 11 am and would just completely skip meetings that she was supposed to run. One time she missed a meeting with our boss and my boss just goes "well I bet she was up late working so is coming in late"
    via u/rachjo1024

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