Let’s face it: we all I make mistakes at work from time to time. The worst one was when I smashed a chandelier in the clothing store I worked at. It was seriously the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever done. So when Redditor u/Midtown-Fur asked the r/AskReddit community to share their own workplace mistakes, plenty of employees weighed in. Here are their worst, most embarrassing mistakes.
1.
“I drove a semi-trailer truck full of mail from Providence to Boston with the trailer door open.”
2.
“I was giving a presentation to over 300 people and I put my arm on the podium, where there was a button that shut down the whole system. It took me about 10 minutes to reboot and get my presentation going. Two minutes after I started speaking, I did it again.”
—u/redmooncat15
3.
“I was 16 years old, pushing shopping carts outside at a grocery store. My title was ‘parking lot attendant,’ and my job was to make sure that chaos didn’t break out in the parking lot. But I also had other duties, like taking out the trash, emptying ashtrays, and doing a few other odd jobs around the store. One day, a woman taps me on the shoulder in the store and says, ‘I’m sorry, but my son just threw up all over that counter. ‘ She points to a display of Entenmann’s Snack Cakes that were standing independently in some aisles. And I can see that the kid had clearly projectile vomited everywhere.”
4.
“I was working for an investment manager. He gave me an order to sell $80,000 worth of Microsoft stock in a client account. I didn’t think twice and sent in a sell order for 80,000 shares. MSFT was trading at over $100 a share at the time. I was pissed as I got on the phone with the brokerage firm’s trading department and waited on hold to find out if they could close the trade. They did. Phew.”
—u/MissSnuggelsxz
5.
“I mowed my lawn with a zero-turn mower for about an hour before I realized I forgot to turn on the blades.”
6.
“I needed to cut a two-inch rubber hose. There wasn’t a table nearby, so I put the hose on my knee and pushed the cutter through the hose straight into my knee. Sometimes the brain just doesn’t work.”
—u/IcedT_NoLemon
7.
“I’m an assistant. During my second week on the job, I took my boss’s $2000 personal computer in for repairs. When I was taking it home, I dropped it and the screen cracked. Thank goodness it was just a small crack, and my boss is the calmest person on the planet. I honestly thought I was going to be fired, but instead he just started using it again and said it was no big deal because it still worked.”
8.
“I accidentally deleted my company’s entire projects directory, thinking I was deleting a folder called ‘proposals.’ We lost about two-thirds of the directory before I could undelete. The data was gone because the folder was too big to fit in the trash, so it permanently deleted files as it went.”
—u/Twinchad
9.
“I forgot to put the sign in the ‘open’ position. My coworker found out on the way out, asked why the place was empty, and saw five people come to the door, stop, turn around, and walk out. I was hungover and stood at the counter like a zombie for an hour and a half, having seen multiple people come and go. After that, my coworkers waved at me until I quit and asked, ‘Are we open? ‘”
10.
“I injected an adrenaline needle into my thumb. I was basically messing with returned stock at a pharmacy while destroying old medications. Our pharmacist/owner, who was old-fashioned, always primed adrenaline injectors and nailed them to the wall to get rid of the liquid before throwing them away. One day, out of sheer stupidity, I tried to do it myself, but I pressed the wrong end in when trying to prime it and it ended up going through my thumb and out the other side, through my nail. I felt like an idiot. The needle hadn’t actually been used; it was just expired stock that a patient had returned. I still think quite often about what could have happened, almost 15 years later.”
—u/ruobrah
eleven.
“It wasn’t me, but someone from another department who was muting her microphone while taking a dump and loudly answering a personal call on her cell phone. All 265 people on the call could hear her answer the phone and start talking about anything while hearing the distinct sound of pee, followed by farts and plops. The CEO and group managers all calmly (at first) told her to please mute her microphone before panic started. She thought she was muted the whole time. She couldn’t hear people yelling at her because she had the volume turned down so she could be on her own call. Almost five minutes into the call, we heard the toilet paper roll rolling in the dispenser. She went silent and left the meeting a second later. It wasn’t a work from home position either.”
12.
“Many years ago when I was early in the military, I was in charge of ordering supplies for my division. I was trying to order D batteries for Maglite flashlights. I wanted to order about 38 boxes, which was 380 batteries. I misread how they came in. I thought it was by the individual battery, so I ordered 380 batteries. That was the first mistake. The second mistake, I actually ordered 3,800. To compound the mistake, the delivery unit was by the box. I ended up with 3,800 boxes of D batteries while I was at sea on an aircraft carrier. That was a real bummer.”
—u/hurtmore
13.
“I was filling up a paint can and left to go to the bathroom, then proceeded to take a break. Halfway through my snack, I realized and ran back to paint everywhere.”
14.
“I work in payroll, so it’s not uncommon for errors to be $5,000-$10,000. I was testing a new warning/deduction code on a new account and had entered $5,000 as a test check and forgot to delete it before processing it for a terminated employee, who promptly emptied his bank account so we couldn’t recover it.”
—u/Family Cow 5501
fifteen.
“I was on vacation and my boss told me to send in a script that another employee had written before he quit. I was at Disneyland and didn’t bother to look at it; I just sent it in. Needless to say, the ex-employee crashed all of our computers, 25,000 of them. They tried to blame it on me, but in the end my boss got in trouble for making me work while on vacation and without time to prepare.”
sixteen.
“When I was a new manager intern, I had to watch OSHA videos that looked like they were from the 90s. They were things I’d seen before and they bored the hell out of me. At the end of the video, there was an unfamiliar guy in our office who I assumed was a client and I sarcastically said to him, ‘Well, that was an hour. I’m never going back. ’ He said to me, ‘Did you not enjoy it? ’ I said, ‘Yeah, I didn’t enjoy it at all, but I get it. Safety comes first, so it’s necessary, but the videos are so common sense it hurts. Anyway, can I help you quickly? I have a meeting to get to – the big guy from the corporate marketing team who’s several states away will be here in an hour or two. ’ He said, ‘I’m filling in for the big guy from the corporation – I’m the director of safety for North America. Let’s talk about your vision for safety in our workplace since you’ve got that all figured out. ’”
—u/ExCosas
17.
“I took a new medication at work that made me act like I was drunk as hell. It was so embarrassing and stupid. I should have tried the new medication at home first.”
18.
“I am personally responsible for a U.S. Navy warship losing all power and going completely dark in the middle of the night in the middle of the Pacific Ocean for nearly half an hour. I am also responsible for flipping a switch that caused a massive fish kill large enough for local media to cover the event and posit possible causes.”
—u/Silver Reserve-1482
19.
“In a Teams meeting, I thought I was muted. Somebody I don’t like shows up a couple minutes late and I’m like, ‘That idiot finally decides to show up.'”
twenty.
“It wasn’t me, but a lawyer at a major New York law firm where I worked as a paralegal who knew I was going to be traveling to Amsterdam. I sent an away email to the litigation team and he responded with ‘lazy pot smoker’. The next day he was gone. Poor guy.”
—u/sloppy-secundz
twenty-one.
“I’m in criminal law. During a DUI trial, for some reason I used the word ‘circumscribed’ during a question to a witness. However, without realizing it, what I actually said was ‘circumcised.’ Twice. During the break, the court reporter asked me why I said what I said. I didn’t believe her. She played it back to me. I had said it.”
22.
“I spilled a Bloody Mary in the lap of a very rich American who had just told me he was heading to Heathrow. He was wearing a cream linen suit. He told me his luggage had already come out and he was going to have lunch and then head to the airport. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone look at me with such anger in their eyes, before or since.”
—u/Little
23.
“I delivered funeral flowers to a hospital room where the person was very much alive. I didn’t realize it until I was about to deliver the flowers to wish the person a speedy recovery at the wake.”
What’s the worst mistake you’ve ever made at work? Tell us in the comments or fill out this anonymous form!
