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People Break Down The Workplace Mishaps That Should Have Gotten Them Fired But Didn't

In any line of work, we all have made our share of minor mistakes that were acknowledged with a slap on the wrist.

Work mistakes are one thing. Intentionally committing a transgression while on the clock is another.


I had a performer friend who was in high-demand and seized every opportunity to book more work, even though she was under contract with me in a show.

It was during the holiday season when there was a high volume of one-off gigs. She called in sick for the weekend and used her sick hours so as not to miss out on a full paycheck.


Lo-and-behold, the stage managers discovered during our matinee that she was not sick at all. But it appeared she had given birth.

To Jesus Christ.

There, on live television in the stage management office, was my friend dressed as Mary – the mother of Jesus – in a televised live nativity scene.

Although her dishonesty was a cardinal sin in the theater world, she was not terminated because our company was short of performers who were already on approved vacations or were legitimately ill.

Redditor pieter2501 wondered if people have ever pulled a fast one at work and got away with it.

They asked:

"What thing did you do that should have gotten you fired, but didn't?"


Idiot Foreman

"I called my general foreman a f'king idiot for doing something. I don't remember what it was but the safety foreman called me and apparently I was right to call him out because what he did was an osha violation or something."

Captain-Cannoli

On The Company's Dime

"For my last buisness trip, I booked myself not into the usual mediocre 2star-bed-'n'-breakfast our company wants us to book, but into a nice 5star-Wellness-Resort with daily 5-course dinners, free access to a large spa, and a complimentary 45-minute massage."

"I payed with our company credit card, fully expecting to get into trouble (although I actually didn't expect to get fired). When billing called to have me explain what I was thinking, I explained that, due to the fact that dinner was included in the rate, we were able to save on additional expenses. The guy literally said 'Oh, well, that's fair, I guess!' and hung up on me. I haven't heard anyting from them (nor from my boss) since, so I guess everything's fine...."

URKiddingMe

Close Call

"I constantly clocked in late, took 1-2 hour lunch breaks, and left early."

"My boss finally caught on and told me to come into his office later that afternoon to presumably reprimand me and/or fire me."

"But before he got the chance to, his boss came into his office and fired him."

cloudsandlightning

"Funny Looking Backpack"

"My company once helped provide technical support for a local high school's back to school event. I left a piece of equipment roughly the size of a football that comes in it's own portable backpack on the athletic field. That piece of equipment costs $45,000. We didn't know it was missing until we drove the hour back to headquarters and all had dinner. I drove back down at about 10 PM to look for it with the help of police and couldn't find anything. I cried myself to sleep after getting back around 2 AM."

"At 8 AM our company got a call from an older lady who said she 'found a funny looking backpack' with our logo on the football field and took it home since no one was there and asked what time would work best to drop it off at our facility."

"I think the fact that it was found is the only reason I remained employed."

MDVAME

Dirty Drawing

"To protect each other from cooties, my office installed plexi glass around our desks. I found out that you can use dry erase markers on them and wrote little notes to my colleague, which erased just fine. I joked, 'Watch, I'll write a dumb note and it won't erase.'"

"At the end of a long day, I was foolin around and drew a naked lady fully expecting to be able to erase it. It did not."

"I made sure the marker was indeed dry erase, it was the same plexi glass I had marked on before. For some reason this one just didn't come off. I was panicking and NOTHING worked. How could I even explain this to my boss?"

"Eventually, I remembered that Mr.Clean's Magic Eraser took off the 5 year old permanent marker drawing that I put on my mom's cabinets as a kid. That finally got the scandalous drawing off. I swear I would've been fired."

CoffeeAndPizzaRolls

Toddlers And Pink Eye

"I worked in daycare. If your child had pink eye they were sent home and not allowed back for a couple days or until it went away. This really bothered some parents."

"We sent one child home with pink eye and his mother was pretty pissed at us. Whatever rules are rules."

"Next day at drop off, she has this kid wearing a damn eye patch. Tells me I'm not allowed to touch it. It was pretty flimsy and if you know toddlers you know it wasn't going to last. So as soon as she hands me her kid I lift up his eye patch and bam, pink eye."

"She's livid and starts yelling at me. My supervisor gets involved, I'm pretty sure I was going to get fired. But I didn't somehow. Just got chewed out pretty bad."

"There were numerous steps I should've taken instead of lifting up his eye patch right infront of his mother. But when you're getting minimum wage to change dirty diapers and keep little suicide machines alive you just don't care."

princessnanny

The Day After

"I've definitely turned up to work bagged up after a few too many on Friday night turning up twitching like a bird and sh*t."

Altruistic_Handle_61

"In college, I once went to work not realizing I was still drunk from the night before. Back when I was young and desperately wanted to appear cool, I had a party trick of doing rows of flaming 151 shots, guaranteed to impress and give you alcohol poisoning."

"At work, I started to open up the store around 7am, tripped over a box, and apparently just passed out and stayed in that exact spot until my next coworker came in to find me laying there around 8am. This was a cool coworker who just laughed about it and helped me finish opening up real quick before the boss man came."

snoochiestothemax

Singing Cockroaches

"I was doing programming for kids at the library and the summer theme was bug-related. Remembering a charming movie that involved bugs, I gathered all the kids together and put on the movie... Joe's Apartment. (If you've never heard of it, it's a fairly innocuous rom-com plot with a ton of swearing. One of the running jokes is that a character is in a band called "SH*T.")"

"The library was in a super conservative neighborhood and if even one child had told their parents I could have been in a world of trouble. However they all thought it was hilarious and didn't rat me out."

scurvy_knave

Free Popcorn!

"I worked at a movie theater and would give free stuff to people who i randomly liked everyday on the cash register. Probably tens of thousands in lost profit because of me."

CNNandFOXisLame

Better Drunk

"When I work for an auto parts store I would drink on the job daily. The manager even knew but wouldn't fire me because me drunk was better than half the people there."

helplessinsanity

"Please Don't Stay With Us"

"I worked at a reservation center for a large hotel chain."

"A lady called to stay in a small town. As it happens, it was my hometown. She wanted to book the suite at the hotel for her honeymoon."

"I told her not to. That it was nice, but not for an occasion like that. That they would be disappointed. I recommended a much better, locally ran, hotel that was way better for a honeymoon."

"If my boss had heard that call, me recommending another hotel... I'd have been gone that day."

"THEN..."

"About two weeks later, she called back and asked to speak to me. Which wasn't that uncommon. Usually it was to thank you. This time too. She was so happy. The hotel I had sent her to was exactly what she had hoped for. She said her and her husband looked at the suite at the chain's hotel that I talked them out of and she agreed that they would have been pissed."

"I'm lucky that my boss never heard any part of either of those calls, lol"

RaxusDoom

Dealing With A Boozy Patron

"When I was a server there was this lady that came in on the busiest day of the week, that was intolerably impatient. When I went to run her tables food, the cook told me they had dropped her entire plate and were making another one. When I went to tell her this she got all in a huff so I asked her if she wanted me to scrape the food off the floor and give it to her instead. She lost it, demanded to talk to my manager, didn't tip etc. My manager said she reeked of booze at 8am so I just got a slap on the wrist for being rude to the customer."

carch20

Never Mess With A Nerd

"I was a pizza delivery driver right out of high school. Our pizza place had a contract to deliver pizza to the school cafeterias. So I delivered to the local Middle School and a group of cool kids were out front talking sh*t. On the way back out the little bastards kept talking sh*t. So I lunged at one of them with my fist raised up and he screamed and jumped back. I walked away laughing, got in my car, flipped them off and drove away. When I got back to the store my manager was waiting for me, I denied everything, blamed the kids, and kept my job. As a real adult I know I should have done nothing, but I was so sick of stupid sh**ty pre teens thinking they were big tough guys and I had seen them bullying nerd folk before, nerds are my people."

giantdadofrichland

The Big Bang Incident

"Made a dry ice bomb that exploded in my coworkers hand."

"I work with icecream at a theme park and we use dry ice for a lot of the carts. It was close to closing and there was a crate full of the stuff next to our table in the little warehouse we work out of and pretty much everybody was working just outside or in the office. So we decide we're going to put dry ice in a bottle and seal it up and throw it into our giant walk-in cooler."

"I took a bottle of water, he drank half of it and I scooped out some of the dry ice with a paper cup and whacked it against the table to try and break it up because it likes to stick together. Start pouring it in until we have a pretty decent bottle of smoke going and he seals it up. I slide open the door of the cooler and he starts shaking the bottle."

"Suddenly there's a BANG and me and this dude are staring at eachother with everything in a 2 meter radius covered in a fine mist of water. We bust out laughing, he looks at his hand and points to it bleeding and we laugh harder. Uncontrollable, jovial laughter. People start walking in from outside to investigate the bang, and then the managers came out of the office from the opposite side of the building. So it's me, this other guy everything is slightly wet and we're still laughing like idiots. The manager on duty asked what happened and we couldn't even answer her. We just start trying to put words together but we're still losing our sh*t too much to make any sense."

"She pulls me into the office and makes me write a statement on the situation while they bandaged his hand up and I wrote that we were working and I heard an explosion and we were covered in water and that I had no idea what was going on. They swapped us out and he said the bottle must have fallen in because his water bottle was missing from the table and he had no clue how the explosion happened, but his hand was on the same side as the dry ice. We walked free, no discipline. She knew we were full of sh*t, but HR said the story made sense. I still am not sure how they let us get away with it."

PMYOURBOOBOVERFLOW

People Describe The Most Historically Significant Event They've Ever Witnessed In Person

Reddit user FictionVent asked: 'What is the most historically significant event you witnessed IN PERSON?'

Aircraft losing control
Richard R. Schünemann/Unsplash

Do you ever wonder what it must've been like to experience major events throughout world history when reading about them in text books?

But if you take pause and actually think about it, we're living through many newsworthy current events that succeeding generations will be talking about long after we're gone.

Reading about them online or in newspapers is one thing. But seeing them happen unfold before our eyes is another.

Curious to hear from those who'll have anecdotes to tell in the future, Redditor FictionVent asked:
"What is the most historically significant event you witnessed IN PERSON?"

People recall the natural disaster events they've witnessed.

Tremors

"1964 Good Friday Earthquake 9.2 Richter. Was a boy in Cordova, Alaska at the time."

– KitchenLab2536

"My father was skipper of the USCG cutter stationed there. He was inport, and when the quake struck shortly before 5:30pm, he and my mom gathered me and my three siblings on the front porch. At first, it felt like the house was crumbling at the foundation, but on the porch we could plainly see our whole world was shaking. I remember watching telephone poles swaying, and the wires snapping and crackling in the street. The quake lasted about five minutes initially. My dad got his ship underway to avoid the tidal wave which was sure to come. We had several aftershocks in the coming weeks, some of which were quite strong, though nowhere near as strong or as long as the quake itself. I was seven at the time."

– KitchenLab2536

Collapsing Freeway

"October 17th, 1989. I watched the 880 Nimitz freeway collapse during the San Francisco earthquake. The Honda in front of me had the upper deck crush her front-end engine compartment. The mother and her daughter were shaken up but completely fine."

"I was driving a convertible Triumph Spitfire, which was scratched up slightly from debris. However, I walked away unscathed. Aside from the fact I pissed my pants, which I didn't notice until much later."

– CatDaddyWhisper

Thar She Blows

"I sat on the roof of our house and watched Mt. St. Helens erupt less than 100 miles away."

– stinkykitty71

"This must have been fascinating and terryfing in equal measure. What a thing to witness."

– runrossyrun

"It was amazing! The ash that covered everything like snow was interesting to kid me, but less so to my parents."

– stinkykitty71

People recall seeing major catastrophes as a result of malfunctions or judgement errors.

Bomber Crash

"The b-52 crash that led to changing what large military aircraft are allowed to do for airshows."

"I didn't see the plane, but immediately saw the fireball. It was just a perfect, bright red turning to black mushroom cloud."

"Fairchild is a nuclear air base and there were a few minutes there where I was sure the world was about to end."

"A few years before a KC-135 doing the same thing crashed near the school while we were in class."

– goffstock

Tragic Takeoff

"I was standing on my front porch watching the launch of the Challenger."

– StarChaser_Tyger

"Was riding in my parents car to a basketball game in the next town over in north texas when we saw a shooting star and thought that was neat."

"It was the Columbia..."

– Misdirected_Colors

Demolition Gone Wrong

"The failed implosion of the Zip feed mill in Sioux Falls, SD in 2005."

"They hyped it up, sold tickets to it, had a big 'BOOM' marketing thing, and broadcast it live on TV."

"The explosives took out the main supports on the first floor, and the rest of the building above it just plopped down 10ft or so and came to a rest. It was a massive failure, and was a funny little blurb on news stations around the world that day. Definitely not major news, just the rest of the world taking 20 seconds to laugh at us."

"The building sat like that (the leaning tower of SuFu) for quite a while until they figured out how to safely demolish it."

"Here's a clip of the failed demolition."

https://youtu.be/I8DEDUqd0RU

– KitchenBandicoots

These well-known historical events were seen by very few who are alive today.

Historical Remnant

"The tumbling of the Wall in Germany… along with people selling bits and pieces of it on tables in lobby in front of commissary and px in the following weeks and months. I had picked up a chunk about the size of an oreo and kept it… has blue spray paint on the flat side. Wonder if anyone is buying them now?"

– SingedPenguin13

Major Upheaval

"I would have to say the LA riots. I lived about two blocks from where it started. I was on my way home from school and saw someone throw a brick through a window. I didn’t even wait. I just started running the whole way home."

– Scarlaymama0721

Day Of Infamy

"9/11, I could SMELL the collapse of the towers."

– go4tli

"A friend of mine was there. One day in the warehouse we worked in together there was an odd electrical burning smell. He stopped in his tracks and went 'this is what 9/11 smelled like.'"

– mantistoboggan287

I didn't physically witness the fall of the World Trade Center but I was living in New York City at the time.

However, I did see the smoke.

I was living up north in Washington Heights at the time and knowing what happened, uncertain of what was to come, and seeing the plumes of smoke from the attack site was the most ominous sight I've ever seen in my life to date.

Have you ever lived through a historic moment or witnessed something sure to be noted in history books? Let us know in the comments below.

groom in gray suit kissing bride in white dress
NIKITA SHIROKOV on Unsplash

Many weddings involve months of planning and thousands of dollars.

But the one guarantee in life is that poo happens and weddings are not immune to sh*t storms.

Natural disasters, unexpected illnesses, accidents or animosity can derail even the best laid wedding plans.

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When I was in seventh grade, I had aspirations to be a poet. I made a Mother's Day card for my mom with a cute (but now, cringe-worthy) poem inside, and a hand-drawn picture of a rose that took me hours to perfect.

A friend saw the card and said they wished they could do the same. Then suddenly, she asked if she could buy the card from me. I said no, since I needed to give it to my own mother, but I said I could make her a copy. From there, my friend got the idea for me to make copies of the card to sell. I went along with it, mostly because I didn't think it would actually work.

Turns out, it did. After making sure people would actually be interested, we went to the library after school and made several color copies of my card for 10 cents each. The next day, we sold each card for $1. Not only did we make enough money so that my friend and I could both afford to get our moms an actual present in addition to the card, but we had enough leftover to put us over the top for the money we needed to buy the matching faux leather jackets we'd been wanting all year.

The next year, many people who bought cards asked me to do it again, so I did. Once again, we made a killing. We didn't try to do it again once we got to high school, but it was definitely fun while it lasted.

When we tell people this story, they think it's a pretty crazy money-making scheme. Maybe it is, but we're not the only ones who ever did anything like this. Redditors know all about crazy money-making schemes, and are eager to share their own stories.

It all started when Redditor primeiro23 asked:

"What are the craziest ways you’ve heard of people making money?"

Tumble Into Business

"In college, I take a class on how to start & run a small business. Prof tells us to think of ridiculous business models for our fictitious businesses as we will get more out of the class that way. Stupid ideas ensue. Selling paperclips door to door, refilling car gasoline tanks in people's driveways, service to read & summarize the newspaper to executives etc."

"One classmate decides he is going to sell tumbleweed."

"Guess who quits college and started a successful business? Tumbleweed guy. Takes a van to the desert, collects tumbleweed and sells them to Hollywood movie & TV studios who need them. Keeps the tumbleweed in a warehouse and since they never spoil, his only costs are gasoline, storage & a website. He eventually becomes the number one tumbleweed provider to studios around the world, shipping tumbleweed globally."

"Made a heap of money selling what millions of people drive by and ignore every year."

– Accomplished-Fig745

Synopses

"I did have a job reading and summarizing newspaper articles to the boss. Literally only task I was hired for."

– Draigdwi

"An actual union job in the film industry is reading scripts and summarizing them in short mean book reports."

– Trixiebees

Jump!

"Heard of crazier, but a guy I know, friend of my mother's, went to Texas 30+ years ago. (we are from Norway), and he noticed every single garden had a trampoline. And it was almost always "jump king" - the circular with blue mat ones."

"So he went to the HQ, bought 10 and took back to Norway. Within days they were sold, and he ordered 50 more, same thing. So he became the only importer and has God knows how many millions to his name today."

– alexdaland

"This IS wild. I went to Norway recently and one of the first things I noticed was that almost EVERY yard had a trampoline in it."

– TrulyMadlyCheaply

Working For A Home

"Back when Dogecoin took off I wrote a guide on recovering old lost wallets and it got so popular I was flooded with requests for further help. Some corrupted wallet files, some lost passwords, etc."

"I have a background in computer science and experience in data retrieval and password cracking, so I started helping people in exchange for a percentage cut (industry standard for wallet recovery). All above board with a contract and everything."

"For a while I was getting new clients every week and making hundreds up to thousands of dollars on every successful recovery (with a fairly good rate of success). The biggest one I ever recovered was a 19 letter long password someone had lost. The work dried up when the price of doge dropped but it got me the down-payment on a house."

– internetpillows

Horsing Around

"A cabbie in Dublin once told me a story about one of his fares who had a brilliant hustle."

"The guy was a sculptor. He would watch horse races, then when a horse won, he'd use social media to contact the owner directly with a digital mockup of a life-sized sculpture of the winning horse. Now, the people who own winning racehorses tend to be very rich - we're talking sheikhs, oligarchs, billionaires. Every now and again, one of these owners would bite, and spend €100,000 euros or so on a statue commemorating their animal's win."

"Dude only did a couple a year, and spent the rest of the time living the good life."

– escoterica

Sweet!

"Richest guy in a rich town near us makes enormous amounts of money buying Hershey bars and rewrapping them with customised retirement celebration designs or corporate logos to be given away at events. Literally just rewraps them in pieces of paper and doubles or triples his money."

"Every time I try to start a company or invent a better product or something, I ask myself why I’m not just rewrapping candy bars."

– perchance2cream

"F**k man, I think I found my new niche."

– LibertyPrimeIsASage

Slightly Used

"I went to college in a capitol C college town. A friend of mine bought an old school bus, fixed it up and took out all the seats."

"At the end of every semester she would drive around the neighborhood that was the fancier side of off campus living and collect whatever the rich kids were throwing out before they moved / went home for the summer. Flat screen TVs, couches, computers, tables, it was wild to see what people would chuck out and replace the next semester rather than having to deal with getting a storage unit or moving themselves."

"Sold it all on Craigslist over the summer or the beginning of the next semester and made a killing."

– sam_neil

Credit Where Credit Is Undue

"When I worked in a really busy, upscale restaurant my coworker would put all of his cash-paying customer’s bills on his credit card and keep the cash which he used to promptly pay off his credit card."

"He did this all day, every day for quite a while and the points started to add up and he was getting free airfare, etc."

"Worked great for a while until management notice a rise in credit card processing fees with an emphasis on one employee and they shut him down real quick."

– blinkysmurf

We Found Gold!

"My buddy worked his way through college by panning for gold. This was in 2009 in California. Most days he made nothing, occasionally he would come home with a couple hundred bucks worth and I think once he found a night worth over $1k."

– discostud1515

"My cousin had a metal detector when he was in HS. He would go every weekend down to the lake and take it with him on vacation. He found all kinds of things. He did find gold jewelry and would sell it online. He made so much money he bought his own car."

– Content_Pool_1391

Sleeping For The Job

"I knew a woman whose job was literally to sleep."

"A local office building owner wanted somebody on-site 24/7 to be the point of contact with first responders if they ever needed to be called. So they hired her to come in to the building in the evening when the maintenance crew was finishing their work. And she would settle up to sleep for the night in a bedroom they'd set aside for her. In the morning she'd hand the building back over to the office employees and go on about her day."

"No first responders were ever called. It's about the least stressful legitimate job I could ever imagine."

– CaptainTime5556

The Secret

"Back in the 90s, I knew a guy who put an ad in the classified section of the newspaper which read something along the lines of, “For $10, I’ll tell you my secret to making easy money. Send $10 cash to (address) to find out how.” People would send him $10 & he would then instruct them to put a classified ad in the newspaper telling people to send $10 & how to make money."

– freudianfalls

Accident Payment

"I was pushed down the stairs by a teen girl who told me to "pay attention and get out of her way" i ripped my dress during the fall and was getting back up when some guy rushed up to me, apologized for his daughter and handed me $500 as compensation."

– thebrilliantcounc

"LOL - years back, I was in a parking lot during a snowstorm. A guy was trying to pull around me, slid on the snow/ice and hit into my passenger side door. It really and truly was an accident. He was all apologies. We exchanged info - he said to get a quote and he would pay for the damage."

"Well, the car I was driving at the time was a crappy old Ford worth maybe $500. But, I went to a body shop, got a quote on the repair and it was $900. I faxed it to him (this was back in the 90's, LOL) thinking he'd tell me to go through the insurance company and just have the car totaled out."

"To my surprise, I had a bank check for $900 from him in my mailbox three days later. Now, I already owned another car, so I pocketed the $900, sold the smashed car for parts for $300 and ended up with $1200 on a car that was worth only $500 before the accident. I was very glad that he ran into me!"

– Deleted User

Only Feet

"I have a friend who sells pictures of her feet. In heels. Barefoot squishing cake. In mud. She charges extra for special requests. Has strict ‘no go’ rules. Never shows anything above the calf so she can’t be identified (no tats). All proceeds go to her kid’s college fund. Has made enough to fund a PhD."

– NotACrazyCatLadyx2

The things people do for money! But, I guess it works for her!

hospital waiting area
Martha Dominguez de Gouveia on Unsplash

When we're in pain or scared, we're not on our best behavior.

We've got more important things on our minds than proper etiquette.

Couple our lowered inhibitions with the bizarre amalgam that is the human body and weirdness is bound to happen in hospital waiting rooms.

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