30 Horrible Mistakes People Made at Work That Their Coworkers Never Forgot

You read things sometimes and can’t help but wonder where the rest of the story is. This is one of those stories. We completely understand that this is a major mistake.

There’s not really any good way to be surprised by this much water in a restaurant. We just also really wonder how this person managed to mess up like this. How much damage did something like this do?

Farming is a crucial job, but it isn’t easy. Taking care of animals and crops takes hard work and long hours — plus a healthy understanding of your trade.

When you take care of living things, though, you also get pretty familiar with the circle of life. However, you probably hope that you don’t have this much of a hand in it. This seems like it would be a pretty horrifying scene for everyone… but mostly the calf.

When you first start a job, you’re probably already a bit nervous about making a mistake. After all, you’re still learning the ropes and figuring out how things work. Most mistakes are generally expected and manageable when you first start, though.

Then again, those mistakes don’t usually cause a problem quite this massive. Can you blame them for leaving and never coming back after this happened on just the fourth day?

While you watch your movies on a disc or on a streaming service at home, movie theaters rely on a projector to give you that larger-than-life picture in the dark.

Of course, you have to carefully take care of these reels for them to work. If they, for example, came unrolled and fell on the floor, it might take you a while to correct the mishap.

If you work in IT, you might find that a lot more of your job is educating others, even if you don’t go down a teaching route. This person was trying to teach the company about the dangers of malware.

Of course, if you want to teach people not to click a malware link, it’s a real “trial by fire” method to send them a malware link and wait to see who fails this test. Next time, we might advise skipping out on sending the malware link with the warning.

This guy found a pretty great way to get his paella plans clean by the end of the night. If the tide came in, the waves would help beat away anything burnt on.

Then again, if you rely on this method, you’ll also want to double-check those ties before you call it a night. Otherwise, you might try to open tomorrow only to find that all of your pans have gone out to sea. That could make the morning worse.

Some days just don’t go your way. Whether you woke up on the wrong side of the bed or had a rough commute, you end up making mistakes at work and start counting down the hours in your shift.

Other days, the mistakes are just too much — and you decide the whole field isn’t your cup of tea. No matter if it was our mistake or not, we’d probably rethink the position after taking a tumble like this… which surely left the OP in a good bit of pain.

If you want to keep a pool running, there’s a bit of chemistry to it. In the end, you want to avoid things like algae and bacteria growing in your pool.

Then again, chemicals like chlorine are dangerous to swim in if you go overboard with your ratio. When this person got in, they could tell from the smell that they weren’t going to open that day unless someone wanted to take a painful dip in bleach.

When you’re leading someone who’s blind, it’s important to make sure you warn them about any obstacles and terrain changes. If we were this guy, we probably wouldn’t want the OP’s help anymore.

In fact, we might only ask him for help covering any upcoming medical bills — thanks to being led straight down a staircase.

If you make six figures a year, you’re already in a position that most people would envy. In most cases, you’d have to do a lot to endanger that position.

Unless you’re talking to this person’s former coworker, that is. We’re not sure what this company does, but just knowing the salary alone, we might have run to the nearest convenience store for our own juice at this rate.

Do you remember being in school and your teachers hammering in the lesson that you should probably take the time to double-check your work no matter what?

That’s something this design team might have missed. After all, it only took a typo of missing one letter in the brief to lead to 40,000 flyers going out with a slightly different kind of event than they initially planned.

There are a lot of things about being an electrician that take special training. Rule one for professionals and amateurs, though, is to cut the power.

That’s a step that this person didn’t just miss, but they verbally confirmed that they had ignored. The result was, well, about as electric as you might expect. It seems like he suffered some fairly serious injuries because of it, too.

When RadioShack was at its prime, it was the go-to place for electronics. So, you might think that you’d be more mindful of theft than this.

We can only imagine that when this guy asked to do this, he was probably not really expecting this to work. Usually, a cashier would say no to this. We have to wonder what the look on the rest of the staff’s face was in that moment.

Getting anything poured on you unexpectedly is pretty unpleasant. If that liquid is piping-hot coffee, it’s probably going to hurt as well. This situation quickly played out in a pretty awful way.

You never really want to be the reason an elderly woman needs to cool her foot off in a public toilet. It seems like she was a total sweetheart about the whole thing, even when most customers would be reasonably upset!

Most businesses rely on their website to a certain extent to keep things running. Even if customers aren’t directly ordering, it’s an important marketing tool in this day and age.

When you’re website is down, it can really cost you business. The good news is that with low traffic at the time, they did manage to get it up relatively soon. We’re sure it was a nerve-wracking two hours, though.

When you order food, you want to get what you order. The only good thing we can say about this is that at least leaving something out won’t trigger an allergy.

It seems like this person didn’t face a lot of consequences for this mistake aside from their personal guilt — these things happen! Still, we’re sure there were some disappointed customers after they checked out and opened their really expensive plain bread cakes.

This might be the closest thing to a “reply all” you can get if you’re doing something other than sending emails. It seems like it had serious consequences, too.

This employee was only asked to cancel about 10 credit cards. Instead, she made the mistake of canceling, well, about 17 million. There’s a bit of a difference there. We’re sure that the calls did start to roll in pretty quickly after that!

Working as a maid in a hotel already seems like a hard job. After all, some of those hotel rooms are left in some pretty horrific conditions after guests leave. If you plan on working with any cleaning solutions, you should know how to handle them, though.

As this maid learned, it’s too easy for someone to thoughtlessly create a really dangerous mix. This is a mistake that wouldn’t be easy to forgive your coworker for!

You can’t overstate the importance of safety in the workplace. If you stop prioritizing it, especially when you’re working at an industrial plant, someone is going to get hurt sooner or later.

In this workplace, it only took a week before someone experienced a traumatic and life-changing injury from these decisions. This is one entry that isn’t as much of a mistake as it is outright neglect.

Usually, accidentally printing something off on the wrong printer isn’t too bad. At worst, you might have to reprint it or hunt down the printer you actually sent it to.

This person might have made a bigger mistake in that they revealed something their employees noticed right away. Not only was there no convention but the travel plans that they’d set out were a bit lavish and suspicious, to say the least.

When you work as a cashier, you have to keep an eye out that people are giving you the right amount of money. Since fake money has no value, you have to keep an eye out.

A lot of cashiers have a pen that will react differently to fake money. Even without one, though, this mistake is a bit much. $100 is a lot to lose, especially when the fake money the cashier accepted has a big label reading “movie prop.”

Some of these mistakes are easy to laugh at, even if things don’t go to plan. This is one of the cases where you might just feel a creeping sense of horror.

Not only did this teacher leave a kid behind because they weren’t paying attention, but he managed to get trapped in a closet as well. He was clearly pretty distressed by the whole thing, considering how another teacher found him. We can’t believe how the whole thing was handled, either.

This is another one that brings a sense of sadness and horror. After all, some professions have much higher consequences for the mistakes made. If a cashier charges the wrong amount, it can be worked out.

If a doctor administers the wrong dose, the consequences can be fatal. The good news is that this time, there was someone to stop them before they caused a serious problem for the patient.

The bad news is that mistakes like the ones that we just looked at aren’t always caught in time. Sometimes, you only realize a mistake was made because of serious consequences.

This mistake at work cost a child their life and a family their happiness. When you go to the hospital, you expect help, not something like this. Of course, it devastated the child’s loved ones and left everyone in the hospital absolutely horrified.

If you work on a helpline for people who are dealing with serious issues, it’s absolutely crucial to handle the situation they’re dealing with while being as delicate as you can.

For one, it’s pretty thoughtless to consider someone’s very real mental health scare as pure entertainment. On top of that, it was particularly inappropriate given the circumstances — and instead of helping, this person managed to make things much worse.

People forget to send things over all the time. When you work in a doctor’s office, though, you have to be a lot more careful about things like that.

If you forget to send something like a medical report on, it can delay treatment. That’s a serious matter — especially when someone has something like lung disease that leaves them in a lot of discomfort and gets worse if left completely untreated.

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again — always proofread what you write at work. Otherwise, you might find yourself in this person’s shoes.

This person was going about their day when they realized that they’d made a typo on some already-made t-shirts. The result? A $30,000 loss. As it turns out, their willingness to own the mistake actually earned the respect of their superiors.

There are plenty of scams out there that people try to pull on cashiers. So many have heard, “You forgot my change” only moments after handing it back.

It’s easy to fall for one of these when the shop is busy, and you’re trying to juggle a thousand things at once. However, this scam was a little harder to sell — or at least you would think so. One cashier bought it without any questions.

When you have a lot of things to send out, it makes sense to try and approach it in the most efficient way possible. That’s what this person tried to do.

The only problem is that when you set up an assembly line like this, you have to be really careful about setting it up, or it’s easy to mess up every item you complete. This is a mistake that would be hard to explain to everyone.

Sometimes, you’re the one who makes a mistake, not your coworker. This person admitted their own mistake that cost them their job.

As we’ve said before, you might forget things when you hear the magic words, “You can clock out now.” It just so happened that it led to a mechanical error that would have been easily avoided. Well, at least they gave them that last paycheck.

If you make medical devices, you probably have to do a lot of precision work that you have to be very careful with. People are really relying on these devices.

The good news is that no one got hurt by this mistake. That doesn’t mean it didn’t really cause problems when she ruined a bunch of merchandise they had to eat the cost of — plus ruined the displays.

If there’s a job that has the potential for injury around every corner, it’s being a chef. From hot stoves to popping grease and sharp knives, you have to keep your wits about you.

Our first reaction to this story is to cringe away from the image this person paints a little too well. Then, we have to wonder how this chef only noticed the problem from the color of the potatoes — not the intense pain in their hand.

You never want to back out of a day of business when you’re trying to turn a profit. If you’re helping provide childcare, you might hesitate even more.

Without enough people to safely care for the kids, though, this was a time to be honest with parents about the situation. As it turned out, she had that assistant for a reason — and it was proven with a dangerous situation that only worked out okay by sheer luck.

If you work at an airport, handling baggage is a big job that has to be filled. Since there’s so much of it, they have special carts to help them out.

They’re strong too — strong enough to damage the planes. If you aren’t careful like this person’s coworker wasn’t, you might just cause some pretty significant financial losses for the company… plus the plane full of now-angry passengers the airline has to deal with.

There are some places where you work and have to be more careful than others. Something like a chemical plant has a lot of rules in place for safety and order.

This mistake comes from the higher-ups in the company rather than the on-site laborers. After neglecting safety upkeep for three years, the problem came to a head and created a serious problem in the area thanks to an avoidable reaction.

A little road rage comes out from time to time when we’re in a hurry. However, that doesn’t really negate the fact that being rude to others can have consequences.

If you’re going to be rude in traffic, you might not want to do it in a company car. The only lucky break this person had was that they answered when the customer called to complain. If anyone else had answered, it could have created a real problem for them!

No matter where you go to school, the first day can be really intimidating. The least you want to know is where you have to be and when.

If you were going to a school where no one speaks your native language and you’re in a new country, that schedule is crucial. Yet, it’s the one part that this person forgot and the result was a day just as if not more chaotic than you might expect.

Working as a bus driver doesn’t seem like an easy job. After all, driving can get tiring and tedious, especially if people are pretty tough on you.

This bus driver was distracted and made a mistake that cost this crowd their trip to Broadway. While we’ve all been there, we can see how running out of gas would be even more frustrating, with a few dozen young adults making their disappointment known.

When businesses take in cash, they have to eventually deposit that cash into an overarching account for the company. That’s what this person was on their way to do.

The important thing during a cash deposit drop is that you take the cash all the way there. Left on the roof, this cash bag was taken by the wind. We’d probably cry, too, if it turned out we were the ones responsible for a loss this big at work.

Running a debit card usually isn’t too difficult. Then again, a little typo can make a big difference when you’re inputting amounts.

Instead of a $30 charge, this person accidentally charged a customer $300. As if that charge wasn’t enough, the bounced cost did come with its own charge. It became a problem on its own pretty quickly after this simple mistake.

When you’re the new guy at work, you might have your coworkers play a trick on you. Sending you off to look for something that doesn’t exist is a pretty old trick. Not one that stopped this new scaffolding apprentice anyway.

After some hard looking, he found someone who had exactly what they were looking for. Well, then again, they weren’t really expecting him to come back with a crane. This might be the mistake of the senior coworkers.

Mass emails are useful if you need to inform everyone of something. However, if it’s not relevant to everyone, then people might get confused, generating more replies than you meant to.

The only problem is that too many people quickly hit “reply all” without looking. So, considering how many people were emailed and how many people were responding to everyone, it didn’t take long for the mistake to crash the server.

If you leave the office for a few days, you might set up your email to auto-reply to any emails you receive, letting the person trying to reach you know that you’re out of the office. That’s all that this person was trying to do.

They just happened to make a pretty remarkable mistake along the way. Instead of kindly giving everyone notice, they managed to take down a pretty significantly sized server. That wasn’t exactly part of the plan.

Some nights when you’re set to close, you do everything you can to get out of the office a little bit faster. That’s what this closing shift felt like for them.

However, skipping out on something like sweeping is one thing. Skipping out on making sure that the car leaving the lot is actually being paid for? That comes with a bigger loss than having to quickly add an extra task to your opening duties.

When you make a design decision at work, it’s important that you consider the consequences of that decision. Not just the ones that you intend but other ones as well.

That seems to be a step of planning that this gardener skipped out on not just once but twice. The first time, he forgot not to cover the drains that kept the garden from flooding. The second flood was more directly his fault by just leaving a tap on all night long.