25 Stupid Critical Mistakes People Made In The Workplace

We all tend to make mistakes at work. Hence the understanding that any job role comes with a learning curve. However, some mistakes can be more ridiculous than others. While all mistakes are a learning opportunity, one has to wonder about the thought process that led to these particular screw-ups. Shared by folks under an ‘Ask Reddit’ subreddit when user ‘Midtown-Fur’ asked folks to share the stupidest blunder they have made at work, these anecdotes are hilariously cringey as you can see below. 

#1 I asked the Prince of Monaco to step out of the way because we were expecting a VIP to arrive any second. He was the VIP.

Image source: thehandsomegoat, Andrea Piacquadio / pexels (not the actual photo)

#2 My boss charged me with carefully depositing our cash earnings from the week at the bank down the road. I walked out to my car, set the bag on top of the car, and happily drove off ?.

Image source: BeowulfShatner, Pixabay / pexels (not the actual photo)

#3 Drove a semi truck full of mail from Providence to Boston with the trailer door open.

Image source: shawnwarnerwrites, Tom Jackson / pexels (not the actual photo)

#4 Forgot to turn the sign to open. Coworker found out after he came out, asked why the place was empty and watched five people come to the door, stop, turn and walk away. I was hungover and stood at the counter like a zombie for an hour and a half having watched many people walk up and away. Coworkers greeted me until I resigned with “Are we open?”.

Image source: skummelgutt, Tim Mossholder / pexels (not the actual photo)

#5 I am personally responsible for a US Navy warship losing all power and going completely dark in the middle of the night, in the middle of the pacific ocean, for almost a half hour. I also am responsible for flipping a switch that resulted in a mass murder of fish large enough that the local media covered the event and postulated on the possible causes.

Image source: Silver-Reserve-1482, Rafael Rodrigues/ pexels (not the actual photo)

#6 I needed to cut a 2 inch rubber hose. There wasn’t a table nearby so I put the hose on my knee and pushed the box cutter through the hose, directly into my knee. Sometimes the brain just doesn’t work.

Image source: IcedT_NoLemon, Antoni Shkraba/ pexels (not the actual photo)

#7 Teams meeting, thought I was on mute. Person I dislike shows up a couple mins late and I blurt out… “Stupid a*s finally decides to show up.”.

Image source: theBerj, Anna Shvets / pexels (not the actual photo)

#8 We were in an all-hands meeting over Zoom. Small company, ~90 employees. Had just hired 6 new people, mostly remote. CEO ended the meeting by opening it up to questions. I wanted to sound welcoming to the new employees but I didn’t want to turn on my mic, so I typed in the chat, “where are all the new employees located?”, immediately hit send. Except I didn’t type “new”. I accidentally hit J on the keyboard instead of N. And I didn’t proofread before sending. So I asked the entire company where the Jew employees are located. IMMEDIATELY followed up with “new* omg I’m so sorry” and my CEO played it in stride like a pro. Best part – one of the Jewish employees Slacked me after the meeting to tell me where he was located.

Image source: WrathofTomJoad

#9 Was on vacation and my boss told me to push a script another employee wrote before he quit. I was at Disneyland and didn’t bother looking at it and just pushed it. Needless to say the former employee locked all our computers, 25000 of them. They tried to pin it on me but in the end my boss got in trouble for forcing me to work while I was on vacation and without anytime to prepare.

Image source: Kimchi_Cowboy, Lukas / pexels (not the actual photo)

#10 Worked in a mental hospital as a janitor. Been there for about a week when someone said I needed to clean a part I’ve never cleaned. It was a wing that had a security desk, and locked door. Halfway though mopping the floor the entire place locks down because one of the violent patients got out since I didn’t know I had to lock the door, and the security guy was out to lunch. That ward was an isolation Ward for violent people who were there on court order or sentenced there. Thankfully the guy who got out just went to the day room, and turned on the TV. When the nurses said he had to go back he did.

The janitor that did that ward was off sick, and I’ve never even been to that side of the hospital before. Wasn’t told of any special rules or anything.

Image source: waylon4590

#11 This one makes me laugh when I think about it:

Image source: DryTown, erlyrizrjr / flickr (not the actual photo)

I was sixteen pushing grocery carts outside a grocery store. “Lot attendant” was my title, and my job was to make sure chaos didn’t break out in the parking lot. But I also had some other duties, like taking out trash, emptying ashtrays, and doing a few other little odd jobs around the store. One day a woman taps me on the shoulder in the store and says “I’m sorry, but my kid just threw up over that display.” She points at this display of Entenmann’s snack cake that was freestanding in between some aisles. And I can see that this toddler had clearly projectile vomited all over it. There was some on most of the boxes. And I think “I’ll handle this.”

So I scoop up all the boxes, take them out to the dumpster, and throw them all away. And as I’m dusting my hands off and congratulating myself on being so helpful, a manager was like “what did you just do?” And I said “I cleaned up a big mess, a kid threw up on everything.” And he said “yea but you can’t just throw a whole display away. There’s a process. Inventory. We have to report these losses.” I said “I push shopping carts man. I don’t know anything about any of that.” And he let out a long sigh and said, “this isn’t going to be fun for either of us.”

Then he lowered me by my ankles back into the dumpster and I had to fish out all the snack cake boxes covered in child vomit and then learn how to scan them through some kind of computer. And in case you’re wondering, I haven’t eaten an Entenmanns snack cake since.

#12 At 17, mistaking HR for a reasonable ear for my Manager being a total a**hat and bully. HR is not there to protect you it’s there to protect the company.

Image source: Fragmented-Rooster, Edmond Dantès/ pexels (not the actual photo)

#13 Turned off the stadium lights to a professional baseball game, mid-windup by the pitcher.

Image source: FallenRadish, Pixabay / pexels (not the actual photo)

#14 Brand new manager trainee. Had to sit through death by 90’s OSHA videos. All stuff I had seen before and I was incredibly bored of it. At the end of the video there was a random guy in our office I assumed was a customer and I sarcastically said “well that was an hour I’ll never get back”. He goes “did you not enjoy it?” I said “yeah I didn’t at all but like, I get it, safety comes first so it’s necessary but the videos are so common sense it hurts. Anyway can I help you real quick? I have a meeting to get to, big guy from corporate merchandising team several states away is gonna be here in an hour or two”.

He goes “I’m filling in for big guy from corporate, I’m the North American safety director. Let’s have a chat about your vision of safety at our workplace since you have that all figured out”.

Image source: FormerStuff

#15 A 3d sensor we make slipped from my hands… dropped on the floor. i felt so f*****g bad …we sell those for 100k :| (nothing broke ! we just had to fix the laser and camera alignements)

We have a tradition now, if you drop a sensor, your name will be written on the floor where the hole left in the floor is (they make a nice mark in the flooring material).

Image source: fatdjsin

#16 I delivered funeral flowers to a hospital room where the person was very much alive. Didn’t realize it until I was about to deliver the get well soon flowers to the wake.

Image source: neighborhooddisgrace, Ksenia Chernaya / pexels (not the actual photo)

#17 Cut grass on a z-turn for like an hour before I realized I forgot to turn the blades on.

Image source: Cvillain626, Luis Negron / pexels (not the actual photo)

#18 One of my first jobs in 1989, I was doing typesetting and artwork and did a menu for a restaurant round the corner. I did the Wine List on the back page and accidentally typed ‘Whine List’, the spell checker didn’t pick it up and no one else picked up on it until two weeks later when the owner brought them back saying: “Oi, look what you did!”.

Image source: Common-Hotel-9875, Anna Shvets / pexels (not the actual photo)

#19 Sent the wrong door sizes to the framing company, every since door was 1 inch too short. It was on a 212 unit apartment building. I think each unit had between 7-10 doors. It’s amazing how expensive 1 inch can be.

Image source: DirtyDan24137, Los Muertos Crew / pexels (not the actual photo)

#20 I accidentally deleted the entire project directory for my company thinking i was deleting a folder called proposals. We lost about 2/3 of the directory before i was able to cancel the deletion. The data was gone as the folder was too big to fit in the trashcan so it was permanently deleting files as it went along.

Image source: Twinchad, LinkedIn Sales Solutions / unsplash (not the actual photo)

#21 Not me but a middle aged female in another department was unmuted while taking a massive dump and loudly taking a personal call on her cell. All 265 people on the call could hear her answer the phone and start talking about whatever while hearing the distinct sound of pee followed by farts and plops. Despite the CEO and the group directors all calmly (at first) telling her to please mute before the panic started to set in. She thought she was muted the entire time and had the volume set so low she couldn’t hear people yelling at her so she could instead be on her own call. It was almost 5 minutes into the call when we could hear the toilet paper rolling in the dispenser that she went dead quiet and left the meeting a second later. This was also not a work from home position either.

Image source: Sierra419, Miriam Alonso / pexels (not the actual photo)

#22 I’m an assistant. My second week on the job I took my boss’s $2000 personal computer to get repaired. When I was bringing it back to his house, I dropped it and cracked the screen. Thank God it was a small crack and my boss is the chillest person on the planet, I genuinely thought I was going to get fired but instead he just happily started using it again and said it was no big deal since it still worked.

Image source: CaptainFartHole, IT services EU/ pexels (not the actual photo)

#23 Was giving a presentation to 300+ people and rested my arm on top of the podium in a spot where there was a button that turned the entire system off, taking ~10 minutes to reboot and get my presentation back up. 2 minutes into talking again, I did it again.

Image source: redmooncat15, Teemu Paananen / pexels (not the actual photo)

#24 Was filling a paint drum and left to use the bathroom then proceeded to go on break and midway through a snack realized and ran all the way back to paint everywhere.

Image source: ResponsibilityNo4442, Ksenia Chernaya / pexels (not the actual photo)

#25 I renamed all customers last names to the same last name. I don’t remember why I was doing an update, but forgot to include the where clause. Thankfully i had a way to restore them, but that sucked.

Image source: not_a_moogle, Andrea Piacquadio / pexels (not the actual photo)