Let’s admit it: We all make work mistakes from time to time. My worst one was when I caused a chandelier to shatter at the clothing store I worked at — it was truly the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever done. So when redditor u/Midtown-Fur asked the r/AskReddit community to share their own work blunders, tons of employees weighed in. Here are their worst and most embarrassing mistakes.
1.“I drove a semi-truck full of mail from Providence to Boston with the trailer door open.”
2.“I was giving a presentation to 300-plus people and rested my arm on top of the podium in a spot where there was a button that turned the entire system off — it took about 10 minutes to reboot and get my presentation back up. Two minutes into talking again, I did it again.”
—u/redmooncat15
3.“I was 16, 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 Cakes that were 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. I think to myself, ‘I’ll handle this.’ So I scooped up all the boxes, took them out to the dumpster, and threw them all away.
As I was dusting my hands off and congratulating myself on being so helpful, a manager asked, ‘What did you just do?’ And I said, ‘I cleaned up a big mess; a kid threw up on everything.’ He said, ‘Yeah, but you can’t just throw a whole display away. There’s a process. Inventory. We have to report these losses.’
I told him, ‘I push shopping carts, man. I don’t know anything about any of that.’ 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.
In case you were wondering, I haven’t eaten an Entenmann’s Snack Cake since.”
—u/DryTown
Jeff Greenberg / Jeffrey Greenberg/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
4.“I was working for an investment manager. He gave me an order to sell $80,000 of Microsoft in a client account. I wasn’t thinking and entered a sale of 80,000 shares. MSFT was selling at $100-plus per share at the time. I was crapping bricks as I got the brokerage firm’s trading desk on the phone and waited on hold to hear if they could bust the trade. They did. Phew.”
—u/MissSnuggelsxz
5.“I cut grass on a zero-turn mower for like an hour before I realized I forgot to turn the blades on.”
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 box cutter through the hose directly 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 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 most chill 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.”
8.“I accidentally deleted the entire project directory for my company, thinking I was deleting a folder called ‘proposals.’ We lost about two-thirds 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 permanently deleted files as it went along.”
—u/Twinchad
9.“I forgot to turn the sign to ‘open.’ My 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. After that, my coworkers greeted me until I resigned with, ‘Are we open?'”
10.“I put an adrenaline needle through my thumb. I was basically messing around with returned stock at a pharmacy while destroying old medication. Our old-fashioned pharmacist/owner would always prime the adrenaline injectors and stab them into the wall to get rid of the liquid before disposing of them. I stupidly tried doing this myself one day, but I squeezed the wrong end as I tried to prime it, and it ended up going right through my thumb and out the other side, popping through my nail. I felt like such an idiot. The needle wasn’t actually used; it was just out-of-date stock that a patient had returned. I still think about what could have happened quite often, nearly 15 years later.”
—u/ruobrah
11.“Not me, but someone 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. The CEO and the group directors all calmly (at first) told her to please mute before the panic started to set in. She thought she was muted the entire time. She couldn’t hear people yelling at her because her volume was set low so that she could be on her own call. Almost five minutes into the call, we heard the toilet paper rolling in the dispenser. She went dead quiet and left the meeting a second later. This was also not a work-from-home position either.”
12.“Well, many years ago, while in my early days of military life, I was in charge of ordering supplies for my division. I was trying to order D batteries for Maglites. I wanted to order about 38 cases, which were 380 batteries. I misread how they came. I thought it was by individual battery, so I ordered 380 batteries. That was the first mistake. For the second mistake, I actually fat-fingered it and ordered 3800. To compound the error, the unit of issue was by the case. I ended up with 3,800 cases of D batteries while at sea on an aircraft carrier. It sucked so bad.”
—u/hurtmore
13.“I was filling a paint drum and left to use the bathroom, then proceeded to go on break. Midway through my snack, I realized and ran all the way back to paint everywhere.”
14.“I work in payroll, so having $5–10k mistakes isn’t uncommon. I was testing out a new warning/deduction code on a new account and had entered $5k as a test check and forgot to delete it before processing it to a terminated employee, who promptly emptied his bank account so we couldn’t pull it back.”
—u/Familiar_Cow_5501
15.“I 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; I just pushed it. Needless to say, the former employee locked all our computers, 25,000 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 any time to prepare.”
16.“As a new manager trainee, I had to sit through death-by-’90s OSHA videos. It was 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; the big guy from the corporate merchandising team several states away is gonna be here in an hour or two.’ He goes, ‘I’m filling in for the 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.'”
—u/FormerStuff
17.“I took a new medicine at work that made me act like I was drunk as fuck; it was so embarrassing and dumb. I should’ve tried the new medicine at home first.”
18.“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 am also responsible for flipping a switch that resulted in a mass murder of fish large enough that the local media covered the event and postulated the possible causes.”
—u/Silver-Reserve-1482
19.“Teams meeting, thought I was on mute. A person I dislike shows up a couple of minutes late, and I blurt out, ‘Stupid ass finally decides to show up.'”
20.“Not me per se, but an attorney at a large NY law firm where I was a paralegal knew I was taking a trip to Amsterdam. I sent my out-of-office email to the litigation team, and he replied all with ‘Pothead slacker.’ He was gone the next day — poor guy.”
—u/sloppy-secundz
21.“I practice criminal law. During a drink and drive trial, I was, for some reason, using the word ‘circumscribed’ during a question to a witness. However, without realizing it, what I actually said was ‘circumcised.’ Twice. On break, the court reporter asked me why I said what I’d said. I didn’t believe her. She played it back for me. I’d said it.”
22.“I spilled a Bloody Mary on the lap of a very rich American who had just told me he was on his way to Heathrow. He was wearing a cream linen suit. He told me his baggage had gone ahead, and he was having brunch and then heading to the airport. I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone look at me with such anger in their eyes, before or since.”
—u/Littlened
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 get well soon flowers to the wake.”
What’s the worst mistake you’ve ever made at work? Tell us about it in the comments, or fill out this anonymous form!