'He crashed a $120,000 car': 20+ Workers who made expensive mistakes at work

Author image for Remy Millisky
Remy Millisky • Writer and Editor
Apr 22, 2025 3:00 PM EDT

Today, lets ponder how much money we've cost our employers throughout the years. I'm not talking about just taking long bathroom breaks, raiding the office kitchen's snack closet, or taking way more PTO than you're supposed to. I'm talking about the big mistakes. Those mishaps that send a cold shiver down your spine because uh oh… you're definitely going to get in huge trouble for what you just did! 

You totally know that feeling if you've ever dropped an expensive piece of equipment or gotten into a fender bender in a company vehicle. People can easily be fired for these kinds of things! 

A bunch of people below shared their amazing stories of the times they cost their workplaces a ton of money. Some people made mistakes that cost 6 or 7 figures, and yes, a lot of those people certainly did lose their jobs. Other people managed to sweet-talk their bosses into staying at their current jobs, or they figured out how to blame the problem on someone else. 

Next up, take a peek into the secrets that people are hiding from their coworkers, like one person who "googles everything my boss tells me to do… He thinks I'm a genius when actually I just learned how to do it." 

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  • 01
    Reddit, what is the biggest at-work f -up you have witnessed? I'll start. A colleague of mine at a marketing agency received an email from an attractive female client. The CC list for the email included all of the senior team at the agency and senior marketing execs at the client. Thinking he
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  • 02
    was forwarding it onto me, he instead replied all with the simple but brilliant content: "This is the bird with the amazing I was telling you about" - he didn't work there much longer.
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  • 03
    Kitt3n I worked at a nice Chevy Dealer a couple years back. It was right when The Corvette ZR1 was just getting released. We got one in that was a pre-order from one of our wealthier clients. It was one of the first off the line. (Jay Leno actually has the first)
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  • 04
    Anyways one of the salesman though it would be a great idea to take it for a quick spin. I don't know what he was thinking! How he would account for the miles on the car. This by the way is unheard of and never really happens. Well you guessed it, he crashed it. A $120,000.00 car (at the time), super charged v8, ordered a year in advance for a customer...
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  • 05
    kukukele Coworker of mine was on a big project. The client sent us an email with some request which resulted in some re-work for us. She mistakenly replied- all and said "Client is such a a -retentive al hole. He needs to just make up his mind from Day 1". You guessed it, client was on the reply-all.
    via u/kukukele
  • 06
    This was a multi-million. dollar account too. Luckily the client thought it was hilarious and replied to all of us with -- "My wife calls me an a hole all the time!" We kept the account (by some miracle).
    via u/kukukele
  • 07
    [deleted] I worked at a fast food restaurant for about 4 hours, because I knew practically everyone working there. The thing is, while I was getting trained, there was another new guy who came in an hour later. They told me to teach him what I knew so far. They didn't tell him that I was new. I acted like I had worked there for years, and everyone went along with it.
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  • 08
    He and I are mopping, taking out trash, washing dishes, cleaning the ice maker, and he suddenly sees the red button at the top right of the ice maker. He asks, "What's that red button?" I simply said, like I was told by the guy who trained me, "That's what you push to clean this." But... Before I could tell him I was joking, the kid was overzealous and slammed the button. It's important to
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  • 09
    note that the red button does not clean the ice maker, it, in fact, releases a catch and empties ALL the ice/water in the machine out the bottom. Which wasn't over the drain at the time.
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  • 10
    Apparently they do not like it when two new guys training each other flood the kitchen and half the dining area forcing the place to close 6 hours ahead of schedule. The guy who was supposed to train me, the guy that was supposed to train the other kid, the kid, and I were all fired.
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  • 11
    [deleted] I worked for a light rental company where we had PALLETS of small Honda generators that we would sell to various crews. I was getting one for a customer with Elmer Fudd's assistance. I told Elmer to go ahead and re-wrap the pallet with cellophane while I brought the generator to the customer.
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  • 12
    "Aw...it don't need it!" he said. As I walked through the door, a very loud collection of thuds told a different story. It was easily 40k worth of generators dropped from about 16 feet. I also had another time when a large order came through. I think it was Pirates of the Caribbean. One of the
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  • 13
    freelance guys sent to ensure the equipment was up to snuff had stacked 8- 10 lithium battery belts on top of each other (before lithium was as stable as it is today). I told him to spread them out because sometimes they get hot. He didn't. They caught fire.
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  • 14
    We lost 250k dollars worth of lighting to fire and the water damage from the sprinkler system which activated throughout the entire office building and warehouse went into the millions.
    via u/[deleted]
  • 15
    TheAlmightyHel... I was working at a pizza place back in high school and was training a new guy. After showing him a few times how to take pizzas out of the oven with the paddle and move them over to the cutting board, I let him have a go at it. He was trying to get a large cheese pizza out of the oven, but it slipped
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  • 16
    off the paddle. As it was falling, he made the terrible decision to try and catch it. He succeeded, but unfortunately it landed cheese side down on his bare arms. He had to go to the hospital for some pretty severe burns.
    via u/TheAlmightyHelmet
  • 17
    Uncanevale I was a student intern working with a rather strange engineer with a few years experience. I had built a power distribution box with fuses, connectors and switches to provide power control to a piece of equipment worth about $220K. I applied neat labels, including the input power requirement for the 3-phase power.
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  • 18
    The engineer didn't know the difference between line- to-line and line-to-neutral, and hooked it up wrong. I believe about $100K worth of smoke came pouring out of the box. Our boss said "It says line-to-line right there on the box. How did you hook it up wrong?". I just stood there being glad it wasn't my fault.
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  • 19
    Abstruse I worked the helpdesk for a very large multinational investment firm. One of the VPs in the London office had an assistant who thought that her job meant that she could act like a b to everyone in IT. She did this for weeks and we logged all the calls and sent the recordings to HR. They kept putting her on report until
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  • 20
    finally, the straw broke the camel's back. Her boss's computer blue- screened while he had to go to a meeting. She demanded I send a tech immediately because it was costing the company money every second the computer wasn't on (very true). I told her to turn it off and back on again and it would fix the problem in seconds rather than the 10-15 minutes for the IT
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  • 21
    guys to get there from the other building. She kept fighting me about it until finally she turned it off and claimed she could not find the power button to turn it back on. She screamed obscenities at me and demanded I send a tech that instant (during a time in which we were swamped due to an outage).
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  • 22
    It took about 10 minutes for a technician to show up at her boss's computer to simply turn it back on again. It had been running some sort of analytical stock pricing software or something (I fixed the desktops, I didn't mess with any of the financial crop so I had no idea what it was doing exactly). That computer being down for that amount of time cost the company over £100,000.
    via u/Abstruse
  • 23
    She naturally blamed us idiots in IT. My boss, my boss's boss, the IT guy's boss, the head of IT for the entire company, the head of HR for the entire company, her, and her boss got a nice little conference call where they played the recording of her 14 calls to the helpdesk demanding a technician and threatening to get us all fired because she couldn't find the power button.
    via u/Abstruse
  • 24
    jamesisverycute In the military, I saw a man CRASH a TANK.
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  • 25
    DaStampede Scene: The Flightline The operation of hydraulics on fighter aircraft is assisted by a heavy piece of equipment affectionately called "the mule." It usually takes several people to move. Trying to show off in front of my supervisor, who was sitting in the cockpit, I attempted to position the mule close enough to the F- 16 so that we could run our
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  • 26
    flight-control check. The incline was downhill, the mule picked up speed, and I engaged the brake... which failed. The mule cracked the radome of an AIM-120 missile loaded on the wingtip. Luckily, there was no explosion. Teams of safety inspectors, colonels, chiefs, etc etc came to see why half of the flightline, to include our taxiway, had been closed off. I informed
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  • 27
    everyone of the brake system's failure. For some reason, they needed to see it for themselves. So, they backed up the mule, pushed it towards the aircraft, and attempted to engage the brake... which failed again. That poor missile. Why ACME-type explosions did not follow I may never know?
    via u/DaStampede
  • 28
    platy1234 I saw some painters fail to properly attach the cables. on a window washing scaffold to the top of a bridge tower. They got about 30' up before the scaffold came down. Thankfully they were tied off and dangling from their safety harnesses instead of de d in traffic.
    via u/platy1234
  • 29
    [deleted] When I was 16 I got a job hanging gutters. Seamless gutters are turned out at the job site. We have a huge roll of aluminum that runs through a press in the back of the truck and then we cut the size gutter we need. I was the "cut the gutter" kid. I ran out of aluminum and had the feed a new roll in. Somehow, I ran a cotter pin through the press. It scored
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  • 30
    every wheel in the machine and basically destroyed it. The machine was really expensive and was the bread winner for the gutter company. I got fired. I got a new job cutting down trees. Residential tree removal. My job was "throw sh in chipper guy" First day on the job I got my helmet/headphones on and some safety goggles. I'm throwing in about one
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  • 31
    branch at a time when old man tree guys says "Ya gotta throw in a whole bunch!" So I do. One of the branches whips around and hits me in the back of the head. I watch as my brand new helmet/headphones thing goes flying into the chipper and comes out as a nice yellow cloud from the other end. I got to pay for that. Later that month, I took out an old lady's mailbox with the truck we used to
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  • 32
    catch the chipped wood and I bent a chainsaw by letting a tree branch roll over it while cutting. I got fired.
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  • 33
    s3t1p when I was 15 I worked at A&W. I was talking to one of my coworkers and went to lean against something.... turns out what I chose was the bun toaster. The kitchen smelled like burnt meat for the rest of the day and I peeled off a pretty substantial chunk of myself.
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  • 34
    h... I was a sales associate at a mom and pop hardware store. it was a slow night so the cashier taught me how to run the register. It was great, because now I could cover register when needed and I figured it was something I could bring up next time they were deciding on my raise. fastforward to the end of the night, it's late and the cashier had gone
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  • 35
    home early, just me in register and a manager in the back. an older man who didn't speak English was shopping for nails. he comes to the register and lays down a handful. I told him it would be 70 cents and he raised his eyebrows and gestured at the nails. I told him again, 70 cents. he paid, I bagged his nails, then he bent down, grabbed the assorted shovels and rakes
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  • 36
    he had leaning on the counter, and walked out the front door. easily 100$ of crop that I let him walk away with. I guess I could have told him to stop, or a million other things but i was dumb and young and I was afraid the manage wouldn't let me run register any more if he knew I f ed up. worst part is, that was my biggest f up but I could write a book with all the crazy, stupid and
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  • 37
    illegal stuff that went on there. good times tl;dr gave away a bunch of free merchandise
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  • 38
    I... Pics for proof at end! While working summers at a college apartment complex helping them turn over the complex on the last days of one said job... We had completed all the duties so most of the kids were riding around trying to help lazy parents carry stuff upstairs for cash. Some basically degraded into just goofing
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  • 39
    off with the golf cart. Well me and my older buddy Joey decide we are gonna shuttle parents and people that are done around Ina giant red limo golf cart we modded it a little over the years it's got some extra juice... So we are flying around making drift stops up to the parent key pickup tent well.. On one of our passes after dropping off parents we come in hot to the tent
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  • 40
    we got 6 people on the cart 1 hanging off the back we come in for a screeching halt next to the tent. We hear clink clink... We look down there's a paint can that must have rolled behind the BRAKE when we hit a bump so now we are stuck going full speed past the tent.....into a curb...into a huge bush....into a metal fence behind it..... And then finally over a 10-15 foot sea
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  • 41
    wall drop that we comically teeter over till the kid on the back lets go and we plummet.. I was in the passenger seat in the front. Everyone is ejected but me and from the force a seat cushion flys over my head my driver Joey crashed through the windshield and ended up in the water as did everyone else. All I can think about as I climbed up the
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  • 42
    wreckage and over the sea wall that I almost had 5 car batteries launched at the back of my head from the back seat. You can still see the paint can that caused all the trouble. Also no one was blamed.
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  • 43

    Whoa! That's quite the mishap

    2
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  • 44
    [deleted] This can't compete with the "people losing limbs/being caught cheating" stories, but I have two d'oh moments at the workplace that I'm very glad were not my own. My first would be when I worked at a locally-owned Mexican restaurant. They hired another hostess/prep cook named Dani who |
    via u/[deleted]
  • 45
    couldn't stand; she was obviously extremely spoiled and had no experience at any sort of work, and was constantly making snarky comments to the rest of the staff. Well, we made all of our specialty sauces by hand, which took a ton of time and was also what made us popular. Well, the first night Dani was on closing shift, she left all of the sauces out on the counter instead of putting
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  • 46
    them back in the cooler. By the time I came in for my hostessing shift the next day, my boss (also the cook, mind you) had already discovered what had happened and was busy verbally ripping her a new one. I have to admit, I smirked a little. The second was when I was working at the museum I still am employed at. We're the only museum in my state
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  • 47
    with a planetarium, which brings in a ton of money on its own. Our Saturday morning show is especially important, because it's our show for kids. A lot of parents have bought memberships specifically for the purpose of attending this show every week.
    via u/[deleted]
  • 48
    Well, one Saturday, the planetarium wasn't open on time. Concerned, my coworkers and I reassured the waiting patrons that it would only be a few minutes, and then began frantically calling the planetarium manager and the guy who was supposed to be working that shift.
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  • 49
    Eventually, we had to cancel that showing, promising to move it to an hour later instead. People were not happy. When the guy's replacement showed up just before the second showing, he found the kid asleep in the back room of the planetarium, where he apparently had been since he came in that morning.
    via u/[deleted]
  • 50
    BoonDoXeY Currently working for a metal building company. They hired 2 nitwits off the street to run the copy shop. Now, the copy shop is responsible for such things as file management of outside detailing contracts. We get changes from the customer, the copy shop forwards those changes to the outside detailing firm so they can make the proper
    via u/BoonDoXeY
  • 51
    changes to the building. Cue our 2 nitwits. Seems they got a set of changes just like that a couple of weeks ago; only they forgot the part where they forward the changes to the detailers. Now the detailers have made, and piece marked, every piece of steel that is going to be the new building...without the changes. The details are
    via u/BoonDoXeY
  • 52
    sent to the shop, everything is fabricated, and the steel ships to the job site. Our company just PAID to have a building erected, that we don't own. Those are 2 expensive nitwits.
    via u/BoonDoXeY
  • 53
    Leepll Chief of the watch on board US submarine initiated flooding by up taking on water.
    via u/Leepll
  • 54

    The horror!

    S... I used to work installing and servicing in-ground pools. We had just finished installing a new, kick-a $60,000 pool for a customer, and were putting in the stamped concrete decking around the sides. The concrete guys we were using as contractors, for whatever reason, decided not to use a concrete pump
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  • 55
    and opted to use a bobcat/skid-steer to dump the wet mix around the edge of the pool. One of these guys was inattentive and/or not great at his job, and drove a bobcat JUST at the edge of the pool - when the pool wall gave out from the weight, dropping a 2,000 pound machine filled with wet concrete and hydraulic fluid 10 feet underwater. I wish I could say that
    via u/SnugNinja
  • 56
    everything turned out okay, but I would be lying. That mistake cost FAR more than the original price of the pool.
    via u/SnugNinja
  • 57
    SkeevyPete I was intern for the Department of the Navy last summer. My program office. was in a conference call with a shipyard about a boat that was being either repaired or built, I forget, but the data on one of the hull tests was off anf nobody could figure out why. Later we found out that apparantly nobody in the entire Navy knew how
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  • 58
    that tester really worked or how to use it, so I spent days calling shipyards and reading the manufacturer's manuals on this thing trying to figure outhow this thing worked. And that is how I became the local expert on Spark Testers.
    via u/SkeevyPete
  • 59
    r_HOWTONOTGI... Was working the close shift at Target (my first job). Was the cart attendant. Decided to take the shortcut and use the main doors instead of the designated carts door. The cart pusher machine caught the hinge and took
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  • 60
    off the door completely at around 11pm. Couldnt be fixed till the next morning. I wasn't employed by that time so I don't know what happened.
    via u/r_HOWTONOTGIVEAFUCK
  • 61
    strangebrewfello... Witnessed it because I did it myself. About ten years ago I was working as the lead web developer for a publishing company. This company's flagship magazine (and thus website) was very well known and respected for a big annual report they did (which I won't get into the details of). My job was to make sure that report would
    via u/strangebrewfellows
  • 62
    be available online with no technical hiccups. As part of testing out the rollout, I inadvertently left the actual, live data on the live site overnight, 12 hours before it
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  • 63
    was really supposed to go live. It was clear the next morning that some of our competitors had gotten it, as well as new outlets who had leaked sensitive portions of it ahead of our main announcement. I was fired a few weeks later.
    via u/strangebrewfellows
  • 64
    [deleted] Watched a neurosurgeon remove almost an entire incorrect hemisphere of the cerebellum.
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  • 65
    Atredeus I was working for a VERY large US company that had a massive IT infrastructure. The corporate IT structure basically housed and managed the servers for each different business within the company. Anyway, this was a very large and critical datacenter, with an entire floor devoted purely to a server room. One
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  • 66
    foreign contractor was in there Friday afternoon and had been escorted in by a coworker. This contractor apparently didn't have access to the server room, since swiping his badge wouldn't unlock the door and let him out. So, seeing a big red button, he must have assumed it would open the door for him (despite the case he had to move off the button that clearly said "DO NOT PUSH")
    via u/Atredeus
  • 67
    Long story short, he ended up taking down the entire server room for a couple hours by cutting the power, losing the company MILLIONS of dollars, keeping other people there until 8AM Saturday morning fixing the fallout, and earned himself a lifetime ban from employment with one of America's largest employers.
    via u/Atredeus
  • 68
    imjustsayin2 In high school I had a job in a little pizza parlor. One night I was trying to get a head start on cleaning up and there were two bleach bottles, both only partially full -- so I combined them to save space. Except someone had emptied and rinsed one of the bottles and put ammonia in it without relabeling the bottle
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  • 69
    So I combined chlorine and ammonia while customers were still in the restaurant. A beautiful purplish vapor followed by the most evil attack on sinuses I have ever experienced. The restaurant got evacuated (they didn't have to pay for their meals), the fire department got called (pre-911 systems) and got
    via u/imjustsayin2
  • 70
    to practice their rescue techniques and the owners. got fined for failure to relabel the bottle. The bosses were very cool, so I did get to keep my job (I was their best pizza maker).
    via u/imjustsayin2
  • 71
    MysticWrongFish Okay, this one is very recent. I work in a fast food store in england, and we have a softserve ice cream machine there. Every so often it needs to be filled with 'sundae base', which is just incredibly thick, sweet milk. One of the guys was asked to get a bucket of sundae base and put it in the top of the machine. When we get it we get it in big metal pails.
    via u/MysticWrongFish
  • 72
    and carry it there. He came back with a LOADED bucket (25+ litres) and lifted it up to the top of the machine. Unfortunately, he must have lifted it up wrong, because instead of the bucket going onto the machine, it went all over his head. He became literally soaked, head to toe, in a viscous white liquid. It was hilarious, to say the least. The manager didn't
    via u/MysticWrongFish
  • 73
    find it funny when we had to clean up a whole side of the kitchen and shut down several fry vats, though. Here is a picture: The aftermath
    via u/MysticWrongFish
  • 74

    Seems to be handling it with a sense of humor!

    LOONIU
    via u/MysticWrongFish

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