People Describe The Dumbest Thing They've Seen A Coworker Do On The Job
Reddit user Adrian0091 asked: 'What‘s the dumbest thing you‘ve seen a coworker do on the job?'
When I was in college, I worked at a restaurant as a hostess. Since I previously only babysat and tutored, a restaurant was a whole knew world to me.
Two of the girls who worked the same days as me were the ones to train me. They were a couple of years older than I was and had been working there for a year already, so they had a lot of experience. They not only taught me how to do the job, but gave me a lot of tips to make some of the more tedious tasks easier.
They both seemed like responsible girls, so when I came in the week after my training was over, I was shocked to hear they were both fired. According to a server I'd become friends with, the girls had snuck in some alcohol on what was supposed to be a slow day (it was a Tuesday, which was always our slowest day) and decided to have a "party at the host stand."
They got completely wasted and basically kept tripping as they led guests to their seats, even as they told the guests to watch their step. When one of the girls accidentally poured a milkshake over one guest and had to call a manager to smooth things over, they were caught and fired on the spot. I was cringing at their stupidity!
Apparently, I'm not the only one who has had to deal with co-workers doing something utterly stupid while they were on the job. Redditors have borne witness to this and are eager to share their stories.
It all started when Redditor Adrian0091 asked:
"What‘s the dumbest thing you‘ve seen a coworker do on the job?"
Such A Pretty Display
"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."
– Lizzy_Of_Galtar
Oooh, Burn! (Quite Literally)
"In high school, working at a Chinese restaurant, was there basically to take orders and bus tables. Another dude I vaguely knew from high school got hired there. Nice, popular dude, but not much common sense. Within his first two weeks, he went to make himself some food (we were allowed to do that to a certain extent), and he dropped some wontons into the deep fryer. When he decided they were done, and as we were having a conversation, he just REACHED HIS HAND into the oil to retrieve it. I don’t think I even reacted for a moment or two, and then rushed forward. He somehow ALSO didn’t react for a moment or two before pulling his hand out and yelling out a cartoon-style “YEEOUCH!”"
"He went to the hospital, and quit the job."
– CwAbandon
Umm...Huh?
"One dude once photocopied a slice of pizza. We found cheese and stuff inside the machine for weeks. Was pretty funny though."
– LinusMeindl
"Inside? Did the idiot put the pizza into the document feeder or something?"
– MechanicalHorse
"How else would you feed the machine pizza."
– andtheIToldYouSos
Spelling
"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."
– hurrythisup
"Cry me a ladder."
– Deleted User
"Cry me a liver."
– iqtrm
"Crimea river."
– MagicSPA
Yikes!
"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."
– 2gecko1983
"Watched a coworker of mine at a Pizza Hut (1976) clean off the food prep counter with a gross floor broom. The kitchen was open, so people at the tables could see the food being made, and someone saw him and yelled out to the other customers, and people started walking out."
"Cleared it out."
"Once the manager figured out what happened, he fired the guy on the spot."
– big_d_usernametaken
Misstep After Misstep
"Admitted 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 escort her from the premises, they found her by the printer with a stack of confidential documents."
– WitShortage
No Cell Phones At Work
"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 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."
– BigTiddyOstrogothGF
"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."
"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.""
– big_d_usernametaken
Ewww!
"A guy I worked with sent a spreadsheet round with all the women in the office ranked in a spreadsheet and graded overall based on 1-5."
"He was somehow shocked he didn’t pass his probation."
– downfallndirtydeeds
Thank God He Was Fired
"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."
"He told me he was in “f**k it” mode with the job and he didn’t care. We worked at a hospital."
– MrFavorable
""Who cares if sick people get exposed to a little bit of antibiotic-resistant flesh-eating bacteria.""
– Brett42
Get Right Back Up
"There were 2 of us installing an air conditioner. He had a bit of work outside that required him going up a ladder about 3 or 4 feet, not high. I was inside doing wiring."
"I heard a loud thud and scream, so I ran out to see what happened. He fell off the ladder. I've seen gruesome injuries from stupid thing like this before, so I ran outside to help him out. No injuries, he picked himself up and got back at it, I went back inside."
"Five minutes later, same thing. I walked out to check on him again after a small fall. He was ok again, but I told him to chill out and watch what he's doing. I went back inside."
"Heard another thud from outside. He fell again. I just looked out the window the third time and went about my business."
– DrVanNostrand6
*Cringing*
"He opened a Skype window (yes, this was ~10 years ago) and started messaging me to sh*t-talk a person who was in the same call as us."
"Except, he forgot he was sharing his screen."
– zyygh
R.I.P. Press
"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 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."
– Idontfeelold-much
The Stupidity Of The Human Race
"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 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 f**king 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."
– -Words-Words-Words-
"I'm a veteran of the Internet, and enjoy reading accounts like this. I must have read thousands."
"This is, hats off, quite literally one of the most stupid decisions I ever heard anyone make."
– MagicSPA
I really don't want to believe that last one really happened!
Do you have any great stories? Let us know in the comments below.
You would not believe the amount of people that poop inappropriately at work.
These stories come from the belly of the beast, where reports of truly bizarre behavior at work are voiced and documented, to become oral tradition on a Reddit thread.
Insane Human Resources issues like these give the sense that because work is the very last place to act inappropriately, people go to great lengths to do so on the sly. And those attempts at subtly make things even stranger.
Strange living arrangements, ceiling tile secrets, and misplaced sexual energy are apparently not uncommon complaints to the HR Department.
Dankuser2020 asked, "People who work in Human Resources, what is the weirdest sh*t you have seen?"
Finger Pointing (No. 2 Version)
"Call center employee calls HR to complain about their supervisor: 'He's abusive... he won't even let me leave my desk.' Supervisor calls HR to complain about employee: 'Can you please tell ____ that she's allowed to leave her desk. Oh my god... she's shi**ing in her trashcan!' "
-- JayArlington
'Unravel"
"Caught a site manager with like 50+ pairs of panties hidden all over his office in Ziploc bags, a multitude of sex toys, and over 100k in cash stuffed in ceiling tiles. Took awhile to unravel all of that." -- kimurasftw
"So what did you do with the $75K?" -- Stunt_the_Runt
"Who would leave their Ziploc bags? Those things are expensive as f*ck." -- Hammer_Jackson
The Perfect Crime
"Guy came in to the interview in sweatpants and a hoodie, and said he didn't need the job because of how much money he was making illegally, but he wanted to have a job so the IRS didn't get suspicious."
"Weirdest part is I don't live in America, I very much doubt the IRS cares about Canadian tax returns."
-- Canuckleball
A Legal Nightmare
"The family of the guy who passed away came to speak to us (it was in a factory environment). To get pension docs etc. We sent them away with a to do list."
"1 hour later reception pinged us saying Mr Xs family was here. Strange. The documents take a few days to get."
"Nope. New family."
"Yup. The guy had 2 different families, who were about to have a fun surprise."
-- meg_w1111
Nick of Time
"My dad works in HR. He just told me about a day when they had to layoff about half of the company. It was crazy and there were a whole lot of moving parts that day."
"Unfortunately, in all the craziness, no one remembered to tell this one new hire that sadly the position he was hired for was no longer affordable."
"So he came in to the office only to see everyone clearing out their desks and leaving. And then...he got laid off. An hour into his first day."
-- Stopman
Glorious Lunch Breaks
"Two people had cut a hole in the wall between their offices. They pushed their filing cabinets to hide the hole on both sides. Cleaning staff was asked to deep clean the offices one day and they found the hole."
"Both parties involved were married, not to each other. They were having sex through the wall."
Just Trying to Get Ahead
"The maintenance guy had been living up above the ceiling of the building. He had built a little cubby living area with electricity and a small fridge and everything." -- StaceysDad
"I respect that hustle so hard."
"Imagine how far ahead you could get in life if you didn't have to pay rent/utilities for just 1 year. I could afford a reasonable down payment on a house and stop this rent hell feedback loop." -- Neat_On_The_Rocks
What Luck!
"I used to work at a staffing agency that placed people at manufacturing positions. Everyone had to be drug tested at the office as part of the orientation."
"One guy failed his drug test at the lab. He came back to the office claiming that it wasn't his fault."
"He explained that he he was riding in a car and he stuck his head of the the window. Then, when the car passed under a bridge, someone threw a bunch of cocaine off the bridge, it hit him in the face, and he accidentally inhaled it."
A Digital Classroom of Sorts, I Suppose
"One of the candidates I was interviewing via Skype had a porn site up and open during a shared screen trial (to see how well he can use the digital classroom)."
"I had to remind him I can see his screen he goes, 'Oh yeah, sorry.' Next, instead of just closing it from the corner of his partially hidden window, he clicks open the window in full view and THEN closes it."
"That was nice."
-- SoBreezy74
Gotta Keep it Fresh
"Guy that carried a cooler every day was wiping sh!t on random walls and desks. It was his sh*t in his cooler. We thought it was his lunch. He got caught when he wiped it on the front desk directly in sight of the camera."
"Another guy had a colostomy bag that he refused to empty when it got full. You would find these trails of liquid poo randomly and we had to throw out four chairs that he ruined. He was fired quickly and tried to claim discrimination because he was a veteran."
-- cincyfan04