1. A Major Discrepancy
We’ve collected the most shocking and disturbing stories of people who didn’t get fired after doing some pretty messed up things at work. From harassing their coworkers to drinking on the job, these stories will leave you speechless!
I heard a story about a guy whose job was to choose which army base soldiers would get assigned to. He sent every soldier under 5’5″ and over 6’5″ to one particular camp.
On the parade, when they lined up in height order (which was the style at the time), there was this massive discrepancy right in the middle of the parade.
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2. Movie Time
I used to work installing large computer labs for schools during the summer. It was a 6 am to 5 pm job, but we usually finished our job by noon or so.
Since most of the schools were gigantic, my co-workers and I would rush to finish our work, and then we’d find a random classroom that had a projector. We’d hook it up to our laptops and just watch movies for the next 5 hours.
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3. Sleeping At Work
I used to work housekeeping at a medium-sized hotel. It was my job to do things like carpet shampooing, refinishing furniture, and cleaning grease traps. They would have me come in and work 12 am – 8 am shampooing carpets.
I would wait until the night audit went home at 1 am, then I would sleep until 5 am before the morning crew came in.
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4. An Open Secret
Not something I did, but at my last job, a guy wrote an entire novel at work over the course of about a year. He found a publisher and sold it (also during office hours).
I don’t believe it sold very well, however. It was sort of an open secret; everyone knew what he was doing except the people who would have cared.
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5. Pooping On The Plumber
Working on a building site during the initial strip-out phase, I needed to use the toilet. Went for a number 2, hit the flush, and returned to the site office only to hear yelling from downstairs.
The plumber we’d contracted was standing in a puddle holding the soil pipe he was disconnecting and had poop on him and the floor. No one had thought to put up a sign not to use the mains toilets. So basically, pooped on the plumber at work.
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6. White Cars Only
One of my roommates told me this story. He was working at the parking garage in Universal Studios Florida during the peak of summer. He got bored with his coworkers and, at the start of the day, decided to marshall every single white-colored car to the third floor of the garage.
By the end of the afternoon, the entire third floor was a sea of white cars. The next shift was pissed because they had to work extra hours since people were having a hard time finding their cars.
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7. That’s What You Get For Not Letting Me Pee
Working in a ticket sales booth at Six Flags. They left me there for eight hours despite having to pee for the last five of them. Finally, I peed in the vacuum tube, which takes the money to the counting room. At the end of the day, people were wondering about the tiny droplets on all the canisters.
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8. So Cringe
At work, we communicate through Skype. There was a coworker I kinda flirted with. We would ask each other questions, and the other person had to answer honestly. I asked the guy whether he had chesthair, but instead of sending it to him, I sent it to my boss.
Fortunately, my boss laughed it off and told me to go back to work. I still cringe at the memory.
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9. Alcohol Was Involved
While working at a national accounting firm of 2,000+ employees, I e-mailed a picture of a kitten to the CEO, every Partner/head honcho I knew, and my co-workers late at night. Alcohol was involved.
No one ever reprimanded me. I left the firm (for other reasons), but from what I hear, people still talk about it.
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10. I Felt Awful
The worst thing I ever did, ever in my life, was when I worked at a cafe. I was running out of orders and bussing tables, and I was just learning how to hold the tray properly with my left hand.
So I get an order; one cappuccino, one strawberry milkshake for a mother and her little girl. As I get to their table, I put the coffee in front of the woman, then unbalance the tray and accidentally spill the milkshake.
All over this seven-year-old kid. It was her birthday, and they were her new clothes and shoes. Man, even her feet were just swimming in the milkshake. Horrifying.
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11. I Still Got Paid
One day I went to work. It was around 8:45 am. Got on the Internet to do some literature search. Then my auto-pilot kicked in. I don’t even know what happened.
The next thing I recall is that it was 2 pm, all the Reddit links on the top 600 hottest links were purple, and the only reason I stopped was to check the time because I was hungry. I got paid for the whole day and felt guilty.
Went home, ate dinner, slept, and repeated again and again for the next 6 months.
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12. I’m Technically A Thief
When I was younger, I worked at a home for deaf people with severe autism. There were five residents, and one of them was completely deaf and blind, coupled with his autism, he didn’t have a lot of pleasures in life other than wearing comfortable hats and necklaces.
One of the workers there decided on a whim that it would be a good idea to buy him a very expensive stereo set with a top-of-the-line headset.
There were attempts to get him to use it with the idea that he might like the feeling of the bass on his eardrums, but he never took a liking to it, and so it sat in his room year after year.
I came back summer after summer, and every time I went into his room, I just saw it lying there collecting dust. In a spur-of-the-moment decision, I took the headset home with me.
No one ever noticed or cared, but that doesn’t change the fact that I stole from a blind, deaf, autistic man with epilepsy and, at the time, a broken jaw.
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13. I Broke At Least 50 TVs
I used to work at a Walmart distribution center. One day we were unloading a truck full of TVs. This was pretty hard, slow work loading them onto metal pallets.
Aboud mid-morning, my manager comes over and says, “jfinneg1 we get paid for quantity, not quality, unload these things faster.” That day I probably broke at least 50 TVs by throwing them from the truck onto the pallet.
I kinda felt like I was sticking it to the man every time the pallet rail would bust through the front of the TV box and obviously go straight through the screen.
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14. No Vegan Food For You
I worked at a vegetarian restaurant in college. There were vegan options upon request. A couple of times, I would get a vegan customer who would be rude or mean. If that happened, I just wouldn’t mark that the meal needed to be vegan. “This is the best dish I’ve ever had here!” Well yeah, it’s because it has ANIMAL FAT IN IT!
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15. I Got Good At Badgering People
I worked at the Telefund center in my college, so I had to call alumni, parents, and even students and convince them to give money to the college that already has cost them thousands in student loans and debt.
After the first few weeks of feeling pity when I heard the sob stories of how much debt people were in and how they had no job or no family, etc., I got really good at badgering people and making them feel like the school had no money and they just HAD to give back and help us. I’ve raked in about $10,000 from people who don’t have the money to give.
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16. I Got Him Fired
I used to work on an assembly line next to a complete asshole. He was obnoxious, and everyone hated his guts. He liked to sabotage the work stations to make you look bad, and all of the girls especially hated him because he was overly aggressive toward them.
One day, I made sure to work upstream of him because the next person down the line from you is responsible for checking your work.
I made 4 defective parts in a row because we were allowed 5 defects/per month before getting fired. The supervisor seized the opportunity to fire his ass, and he didn’t even talk to me about the defects. Everyone loved it, but I kinda felt bad afterward because I saw him crying on the way out.
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17. The Coolest Woman Ever
I am a server at a Mexican restaurant. I spilled 12 oz. Of Blanco queso (white melted cheese) all down a woman’s back, on her sweatshirt. I wanted to die. They were celebrating her birthday, and she was having surgery the next day.
Awesome. Thank god, she was the COOLEST person ever, and after I took a ton of money off of their bill, their bill came to around $6, the husband tipped me $12 and wrote on my copy, “Thanks for the cheese.” Best restaurant guests ever!
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18. Surprisingly I Didn’t Get Fired
Used to work at a golf course in college. It was tournament day, and I was stocking ice in the tents around the course. It was towards the end of the day, and I was getting careless (12 straight hours worked.).
I was putting giant bags of ice on a golf cart to take to the drink tents. I stacked a couple in the front seat next to me. I put one too many and walked away for one more, trying to see how many I could get on at a time.
As soon as I turn around, BANG … WHOOSH. I spin to see that a bag of ice had fallen off my seat and right onto the gas pedal. The ice cart zoomed directly up a hill, through a flimsy wooden fence, and right into a parked car in the parking lot…. upside down. Oops.
I didn’t get fired, surprisingly. Didn’t even make me pay for damages.
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19. Not My Finest Hour
In my second year of college, I was partying all day on Saturday. Woke up, got high, and proceeded to drink copious amounts of a drink we call “Strip and Go, Naked,” which consists of a case of beer, a handle of vodka, and two frozen pink lemonade concentrates.
Anyways, I got belligerent drunk. After stopping drinking around three, I started to drink lots of water. Genius me thought it would be smart to throw up to sober up. I did so, and all that came out was water.
Finally, to no avail, I went to work at 4:30 (started at 5). I work at an Italian restaurant. There, they gave me a plate of gnocchi alongside tons of bread and water. Thank goodness I wasn’t slated to serve that night.
I sat up at the cash register, head propped up in my hands, with a glazed look in my eyes. My coworkers told me I was about to pass out and that I liked to follow around servers if I saw them after seating someone.Not my finest hour.
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20. A Stupid Decision
I worked at a residential summer camp as a counselor. Two coworkers and myself were once very tired, bored, and stupid, and we made the rather poor decision to throw an empty spray can of sunscreen into a fire.
The kids were asleep and in the cabins away from the fire, so it was just us. The result was loud. Our other coworkers thought it was a gunshot and came running. We told them that we knocked it in by accident. It was not my finest moment.
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21. I Hated That Job
When I was 16, I worked at Arby’s, and my manager always rode my ass to clean the bathroom, including the inside of the toilet barehanded, the walls, the floor, the sink, and everything.
I hated this job, so I swirled the mop around the inside of the toilet, used the newly-wet mop to take care of the walls, and then used it to clean the sink.I had a little growing up to do.
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22. I Sunk It
Back in high school, I did landscaping during the summers. I sunk a $10,000+ commercial lawnmower. And I mean, I SUNK it. Like 15 feet deep, 25 feet out into a manmade pond.
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23. The Boss Wasn’t Mad
I screwed up pretty badly one Christmas. Was playing beer pong with friends, and we ran out of beer. No biggie, I managed a daiquiri shop in town and regularly got beer after hours.
Usually, I just went alone, but I was too drunk, so we all piled in the car. We get to the shop, I do my thing and grab snacks, cigs, beer, etc.
As I set the alarm and lock up, I come around the corner to nine red dots pointing at me. Cops are screaming, ‘Hands in the air! Get on the ground!’ I throw everything down and the cops jump on me. They have all my friends spread-eagle on the ground.
Turns out someone broke into a business around the corner, so the cops thought we were the burglars. Called the owner, he comes to the store and confirms who I was. They let us go and keep the beer.
Only because I had left the money for it in the register. Bossman calls me the next day and gives me a $1,000 Christmas bonus and his old big screen.
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24. Why Did He Think That Was A Good Idea?
As a teen, I worked in a grocery store, and this other teenage kid was goofing off ’til he got caught by a manager. The manager started reprimanding him when, mid-rant, the kid picked up a spray bottle full of cleaner and drenched the manager. The guy just walked away. Didn’t fire the kid. No mention of it.
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25. The Manager Believed Me
Stole a whole cheesecake from Denny’s after my shift. The manager saw me on the camera, but luckily my coworker also saw and covered my ass, saying that I pre-paid for the cheesecake. The manager believed it.
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26. A Simple Hack
In a supermarket, I used to reduce items that were going out of date to 1-5p (depending on how generous I was feeling), hide them out back until the shop was about to close, then buy them. It was a pretty common thing among lower employees.
Did it for a year or so before someone else was caught taking home 10 pizzas every night. But twice a week, I’d come home with expensive desserts (trifle, profiteroles, tarts), for virtually no money.
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27. Bread Fights
Used to work at Panera bread. A coworker and I used to have massive fights with the leftover breads… nothing is worse than a buttery croissant in your back and a shot of powdered sugar in your hair. We got away with it, though.
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28. That’s A Lot Of Money
Back in college, I worked for a medium-sized law firm. Among other office tasks, I was responsible for booking business trips (flights, hotels, rental cars, etc.).
Used to milk every last cent out of whatever bonus program (rewards, cash back websites, affiliate programs, credit card points – you name it) I could get my hands on and pocket them. Since there were at least 5 bookings a day, you can see that this did add up eventually.
When I left after about two years, I had raked in about half a million frequent flyer miles (through credit card points), something in the area of half a year’s worth of hotel nights and easily many thousand € of cash. Didn’t get caught.
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29. Living A Dangerous Life
Sometimes I sneak bottles of cleaning chemicals out so I can clean my house nicely. I live a dangerous life.
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30. “Keep Up The Good Work”
Did a grand total of nothing for 8 hours. Had an incredibly busy day the day before, and my boss told me, “I see you’ve been productive, keep up the good work.”
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31. When I Worked In The Mail Room
Working in the mail room, I totaled two company vans and metered a couple of thousand paychecks with $2.10 of postage instead of $.21. Not sure how I wasn’t fired. Been with the company for 25 years now. Not in the mailroom anymore, though.
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32. Don’t Mess With Me
I was 19, working the third shift at a fast food restaurant. A car full of guys comes through and generally start being an ass over the speaker. Calling me names, being a smartass, etc.
They get to the window, and they start to get out of the car and start taking a piss in the drive-thru. They continue being assholes, and the guy making sandwiches, seeing how they are treating me, toasts their buns and then undoes his pants and wipes them on his balls.
I wrapped up the sandwiches and served them with a smile. That’s the only time I ever messed with anyone’s food.
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33. Wasn’t Me
Washing checkout counters, I noticed a big red button under the checkout. Normally your brain tells you big red not to press big red buttons, but I did anyway.
It was the panic button. The manager had to explain to the cops that we were all perfectly safe. Later that evening, none of us were allowed to leave until someone confessed.
The older woman who worked there (mid-60s?) said she could have possibly done it with her being wobbly when she worked the checkout. I stayed quiet and let the old lady take the blame.
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34. My Coworker Is The Best
I use to work at a movie theater. We had two buckets. One for refilling the ice by the soda machines and one for cleaning supplies. We would dump soap, bleach, etc. in the cleaning one and soak sponges to scrub the floors, walls, chairs, etc. with.
Well, one day, I accidentally used the cleaning bucket to refill the ice. Some of my coworkers saw, and they told me to just leave it and hurry, so I didn’t get in trouble with my manager.
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35. Drinking At Work
I used to work at a banquet hall. My co-workers and I would get drunk on the job all the time. We would also steal the customers’ liquor and drink that. The customers would bring boxes of liquor and give them to the banquet hall to hold on to and replace empty bottles, so essentially the staff was in charge.
So there was no way for the customers to know how many bottles we had to replace. We would grab them and go drink out back.
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36. Extra Mayo
I worked at Mcdonald’s when I was about 17, and I wasn’t really invested in keeping the job, per say. One day, I got a bug up my butt when a customer ordered “extra mayo,” and I just piled about 6 oz of white gold onto that puppy.
About 3 minutes later, my boss pretty much just threw the soggy mayo-soaked mess at me and asked, “would YOU eat this?” I replied, “Well, no, I don’t like extra mayo.”
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37. A Creepy Doll
I used to work at a portrait studio. One day a family left this ugly baby doll behind, so we started to mess around with it. Upon kicking it over the counter, its head broke off.
The next day the parents came back and asked if they had left the doll there. Naturally, we said no cuz we busted the hell out of it.
We ended up duct-taping the head back on the body and then drew tattoos on it. It became our mascot for a while. Eventually, it got so weird looking that it would creep the other employees out, and then it became a game of leaving it in unexpected places for each other, trying to see who could startle each other the most. Then it vanished.
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38. Bad Idea
For some reason, I drew a swastika out of ranch on a burger(under the lettuce and tomato and such)….turned out it went to a couple of regulars at the restaurant who happened to be Jewish. And yes, they opened up the burger for some reason and saw it.
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39. She Knew
Straight up fell asleep. Snoring, drooling, everything. I worked in an extremely slow family-owned clothing store. The sun would come through the windows just right – that warm, lazy glow.
My manager stopped by one day while I was alone on my shift just to “pop in”; there I was snoozing in the chair, my head slumped upon a stack of sweaters. The door opening startled me, and I shot up abruptly, but she knew. She knew…
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40. The Worst Company Ever
Found out my fellow freelancer was getting 2x the rate I was. I asked for an increase. They said no. So then I told them the job would take twice as long. They said yes.
I ended up getting the same amount of money in the end—worst.company.ever. Eventually, I wrote a script that automated it and made something like $300 an hour. It was awesome.
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41. Know Your Worth
I worked at a small pet store as my first job when I was 16. The Point Of Sale machine was bad and had no security. If you scanned an item, not in the system, it would ask if you wanted to add it, you just had to fill out the description, price, quantity on hand, etc.
So naturally, I pulled out my student I.D. and scanned the barcode. I then added myself to the system for the price of 100 billion dollars. After a few weeks, a co-worker told me my manager found it and was pissed.
So I promptly removed it from the system. When I walked in the next day, my manager demanded to see my I.D., so I handed it over and the look on his face when he scanned it and nothing showed up was priceless.
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42. ‘Hide The Shot’
I wouldn’t say this is the worst thing because it is kind of awesome, but we used to play ‘hide the shot’ at a restaurant I worked out.
Basically, someone makes a shot and hides it in the restaurant, if you find it, you take it, then you hide one. Repeat for hours and hours. This game was invented by my supervisor.
There was never any inventory done on anything, so it was basically alcohol-free for all. I used to take home plastic cups full of vodka!
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43. Dirty Dishes
I did dishes at a resort. You put the dishes on a sort of tray and then send them through a machine for a certain amount of time.
One time I put dishes in the machine, then forgot that I hadn’t turned on the machine and immediately set tables with them. I was sure that I was absolutely screwed, but I only ended up getting two complaints.
My boss wasn’t happy with me, but it means that about 15 people ate off of dirty dishes and utensils without even noticing.
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44. Free Food
I worked in the kitchen of a steak and lobster joint. Brought a schoolbag with me and at the end of every shift, I would pack 2 big, cooked lobsters and a few fresh steaks. Good eats during that year, I’ll tell ya.
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45. Got Away With Stealing
I worked for a large entertainment store. We sold books, music, movies, stupid novelty toys, and had a small coffee shop in the corner of the building.
I worked there for two years and had a terrible manager. Eventually, I became tired of all of the crap she put me through and decided I would see exactly what I could get away with.
I began stealing because, hey, I could. I knew where all of the security cameras’ blind spots were, which made it too easy.
Over the course of two months, I stole probably $200 worth of CDs and DVDs, several books and magazines, a bag of bagels from the coffee shop, popcorn, candy, and my crowning achievement, a PS2. And then I got bored and quit.
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46. Don’t Make Me Work On Weekends
My Boss made me work a Saturday (I would be the only person working in my department). I was pissed, so I clocked in at 8, left, and clocked out at 5.
No one noticed that I wasn’t there because my department never works Saturdays. The best part was she thanked me later for coming in on an off day and getting a bunch of stuff done.
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47. $3,000 Worth Of Stuff
I used to work at a spa for 2 years and took well over $3,000 worth of free samples, cosmetics, candles, products, and supplies. I still have and use some things. Sometimes I wish I worked there still just so I could take stuff.
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48. We Did Them A Favor
I worked at a small video game store (not a chain). This was before they installed cameras or anything. When the bosses were out of town, we’d occasionally do what we call “black bagging” – taking some of the worst games that never sell, wrapping them in a few black plastic shopping bags, and throwing them in the trash.
We got rid of a lot of bad games that way.
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49. Oops!
Pushed shopping carts at a high-end grocery store. A BMW almost runs over me, honks his horn, and laughs at me after I almost jump out of the way.
I remember the license plate number and about 20 minutes later accidentally pushed a line of 10 shopping carts into his passenger side door. I even pretended to run and cringe when it hit. Oops.
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50. I Regret This One
I was working a seasonal summer job in high school as a restaurant cook. Didn’t like one of the guys I worked with. So I put raw fish in a container with water and hid it under the dishwasher for three weeks.
On my last day, a co-conspirator and I filled a super soaker with the nastiest fish juice ever and sprayed him down. It was horrific. I could barely make my escape without vomiting.
I really regret that. He took it better than I would have. Also, we’d had a series of pranks going back and forth that led up to this. It was, admittedly, a severe escalation.
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51. I Didn’t Even Try To Hide It
In college, I worked at a gas station, and one day, I decided that I hated my manager/job so much that I would just virtually stop working until I got fired.
It got to the point where I would regularly let my friends buy a few 18-packs of beer and a bag of skittles, and I would only ring up the skittles.
After a few weeks, the manager ends up leaving a 7k cash bank deposit in the back office, where for some reason, there are no cameras, and a co-worker steals it.
I was so pissed that someone else got it and not me that I wrote up a scathing resignation/hate letter and never showed up again.
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52. The Best Job Ever
During the first week of work this year, my boss was away on holidays and set my work for the week. So, on the first day back, I’m enthusiastic to start the year, and somehow I actually finish all the week’s work in like five hours (like a boss).
The rest of the week was literally power naps interrupted by Redditing. I even spent all of Wednesday smoking cigars and sharing a bottle of wine with the girl from the office next door just to kill time.
Ohh, and the funny thing is, this job is in Government zing.
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53. My Little Secret
When working at Walmart, I hid a computer monitor on sale in the backroom on Black Friday, then bought it up front and bought it after my shift.
Alternatively, when working at an airport: Kinda lied to a passenger about how long it would take for him to go through the whole convoluted airport process so he’d just give me his bottle of sake he bought duty-free overseas instead of missing his flight.
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54. What A Fun Job
A couple of years ago, I worked as a postman. In my country, the postman delivers the money for retired folks in a cash.
So every time I had to deliver the money, I had to go in, count the money, let them sign some papers, etc. The old people are always happy when the postman came with their money, so they would offer you a beer or some gin, and I took it, like most postmen.
But on a busy day, you could have like 15 people you would have to give their money to. You can imagine how drunk I was since most people offer you more than 1 drink because the postman is the only company they get for some days.
So on a particularly busy day, I was very drunk, I finished my tour and went back to the post office (on a bike like most postmen here), crashed in a bush, fell a couple of times, and vomited in front of the post office.
The day after, I went back to work, scared because the bike needed repairing because of me falling in the bushes and because I vomited in front of the post office and generally giving a bad image for the post.
The only thing that happened was the boss and the older colleagues that were laughing with me because I couldn’t cope with all the alcohol like they do.
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55. The Kids Loved It
In my previous life as a teacher, me and the other teacher in the department were heavy, heavy drinkers. Teaching music to 13-year-olds with a hangover would never work, so we took turns teaching all the classes.
Instead of two classes of twenty kids, we had the genius idea of one class of forty kids. One of us teaches the mega class, and the other one nurse a hangover next door.
We effectively halved our working hours, in absolute contravention of every law, regulation, and social expectation. In my defense, the kids loved it, and we created some great energy and terrific ensemble work.
We also nominated one kid every day as the Gatorade monitor, whose job it was to leave class, go up to shop and keep me and my colleagues in Gatorade.
I left that job before authorities caught up to what we were actually doing.
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56. Fighting With Shoplifters
I used to work at a grocery store that had strict policies about dealing with shoplifters. We were not allowed to touch them if inside the store and not allowed to engage them outside of the store.
I ended up getting in 3 fights with shoplifters while working there, including chasing a guy down in the parking lot and tackling him hard on concrete for taking a dollar out of a Hurricane Katrina donation box (that really pissed me off).
Never got fired or even suspended for any of them. I showed up late about 50% of the time and was nerve reprimanded.
I also showed up for work hammered once for a 6am shift, straight from the party. Nobody noticed.
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57. Can’t Believe Nobody Noticed
On numerous occasions, I showed up still drunk from the night before (technically, that same morning). I was un-shaved, un-showered, red-eyed, reeking of alcohol, hands not steady, for lunch, I would have to sleep in my car. I probably did this 100-200 times.
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58. Easiest Job Ever
Worked at a call center, browsed Reddit and Wikipedia for hours every day for about a year, no one ever noticed. I was a bilingual agent. They forgot to throw my login into the queue, which resulted in me never taking any calls, best job ever.
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59. You’re The Problem
Told the CEO in a meeting, “My job is to make the best possible software I can, despite management.” Implying that it was his interference that was causing most of the development problems.
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60. Destroying A Work Vehicle
I straight up destroyed a work vehicle when I worked as a janitor in college. Basically, we were loading up recycling into the truck, and I was trying to turn around and ended up with the truck stuck in between two walls (the exterior wall of a building and a retaining wall), facing one of the walls.
My younger coworker tried to help and smashed the truck into the wall. We were like 22 and 18 at the time and pissing our pants thinking of how much trouble we were in.
They ended up needing to lift the truck up and out to get it un-wedged. Tons of people came to watch. Turns out the truck needed replacing anyway, and our supervisor mostly laughed it off. Really dodged a bullet there.
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61. I Wasn’t Doing Much
As an intern, I had to punch out/in my hours every day. This got annoying, so within a week of starting, I wrote a script to do my hours for me within a 30-minute random range for a 9-5 and proceeded to work 6hrs/day for the rest of the internship.
I also spent roughly 2hrs/a day on Reddit or hearthstone on my phone, so I worked maybe 4hrs/day the whole internship. This didn’t get noticed because most of my team worked remotely multiple days a week, and my manager was super busy and not around much.
Still did good work, got praised for being an excellent intern, and got a return offer.
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62. The Morale Was Low
The company was about to be acquired. Morale was low. Boss didn’t show up to work that day. Boss’s boss was out too. Most of the management was either out that day or on the other side of the office.
A coworker said screw it, and we watched movies all day.
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63. The Company Was Paying Me For This
In my office, everyone would leave at 5. But I always stayed till 5:30 or 6, so I could avoid rush hour traffic. Well, the secretary of our office did too.
We ended up hooking up in the conference room several days a week after everyone left. Did that for months. And I kept thinking to myself, “Company is paying me for this!!!” It was awesome. Then she decided she wanted to try for management. Went crazy. Had a breakdown during a client meeting and threatened to jump out a window, and quit.
No regrets tho. I tried with the next office secretary, and we dated, but she never wanted to do it at work. She was paranoid that there were cameras everywhere.
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64. No One Suspected A Thing
Several years ago, in the late ’90s, I worked part-time for a janitorial company. One night we got a contract to strip and wax the floors at a local Best Buy.
The general manager of the store (his name was Bob) oversaw our operations, probably just making sure we weren’t stealing and whatnot. After the job was done that following day, I went back into the store to buy a video game I spotted the night before.
With my receipt in hand from the video game I just bought, I walked over to someone in the TV area, held up my receipt, and said, “Bob told me to get one of you guys to help me take one of these TV’s out to my truck.”
Needless to say, he didn’t check my receipt and got 2 other guys to help me carry a $1200 big-screen TV right out the front door.
65. Playing Games At Work
The computer security was pretty tight with regards to what I could install or download, but they didn’t lock down the Remote Desktop Connections, so I’d connect to my computer at home and play games there. It obviously couldn’t support new games, but I just emulated Sega and Nintendo games.
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66. It Took Them Almost A Year To Figure Out
Not me, but a guy I used to work with used to come to the shop in the morning, get the work truck, go home and park it in his garage and chill all day. He would come back at the end of the day like nothing. Got away with it for almost a year.
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67. Sending Nudes To My Boss
Sending my boss nudes. We would interact normally and never had a fling, he would just smile at me when no one was looking. It was awesome.
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68. Napping In The Fitting Rooms
When I worked at a clothing retail store, I would nap in the fitting rooms. Not something you could get away with all the time, but during January-March, it’s slow, and I’d see like 7 customers in a 6-hour shift and never see a boss walking around, so I’d nap it out in the handicap room, lol.
The longest nap time was 20 minutes.
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69. A Spontaneous Vacation
I called into work and pretended to have an injured foot, took a week off, and took a spontaneous trip to the other side of the country.
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70. Stealing A Kid’s Skateboard
There was this douchebag kid that would come in every day and shoplift, but according to store policy, we could not do anything about it unless we caught it on camera, and the kid always shoplifted little things that weren’t on the camera.
So one day, while he was busy sneaking around stuffing his pockets, I grabbed his skateboard (which he had left by the door when he walked in) and hid it behind the register.
The kid came back and asked what happened to his skateboard, and I told him I might know where it is if he knows where all my stolen merchandise is. The kid pulled an astonishing (probably like $50 worth of $1-$2 items) out of his pants, so I gave him back the skateboard and told him never to come back.
I could have been fired if the kid had simply denied stealing anything and asked to see a manager.
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71. Messing With The Equipment
I worked at Burger King in high school. I was a great employee, aside from getting bored during slow times and just trying things with the equipment:
1. I took the bottom of a bun and ran it through the broiler. It came out looking like a hockey puck.
2. Someone taught me that if you wadded up a pickle slice and put it in the microwave, it would give off a fire poof after a few seconds. I did this all the time…even after we got brand-new microwaves.
Less than a week after getting them, a manager who was a foot shorter than me looked up into the top of the microwave to see it charred. I had no idea since the microwaves were all at just below eye level for me.
3. Occasionally, our ice maker would spit out sheets of ice because they didn’t fall far enough to break apart. I took a whole sheet and dropped it in the hot oil once. It was impressive how long that thing went apeshit.
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72. Watching TV With Senile People
I worked in a retirement residence for a few months, and I used to go to an old and senile (but wonderful) man’s room where he watched tv and just watch tv during a lot of the day (he didn’t call me out cause he was senile). I must’ve collectively spent at least a few days altogether chilling in his room watching TV.
If, after a while, someone walked in on me, I’d say, “Hey,” start doing the job that I had set up to look busy, and move on to the next senile person’s room until someone walked in again, so it didn’t look suspicious.
I spent probably at least half of every afternoon, on average, watching TV in the rooms of senile people.
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73. Nobody Was Checking Up On Us
When I was 19, I had a job working for a “healthy” snack company where I was required to go to stores, give out samples, make displays, give stuff out at fairs, just summer stuff.
Now I really hate working, and at the time, I hated driving which was about 40% of the job, getting from place to place.
I regularly had to go to the same stores week after week, and at the end of the day, I had to send picture evidence that I had been there and done my thing.
Once I realized I could fake it (nobody came to check on me, and stores didn’t keep track), I just started taking multiple pictures a day with my setup rearranged and moved ever so slightly. One store I didn’t return to for a month.
Then it was just a matter of sleeping in and lying about my hours worked, which was regularly 10-12 more than I would have worked when I did show up. The easiest part about this was that coworkers were doing the same thing, so if we caught each other, it was fine, just laughed it off.
It only lasted the summer, so by the end of it, I’m pretty sure my superiors knew, but it wasn’t worth it to fire me, and they needed me for bigger events, which of course, I always showed up for.
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74. An Allergic Reaction
When I worked as a waitress, there was this guy who was allergic to mushrooms. So he ordered a bacon and egg omelet, and I put in a memo saying, “no mushrooms allergic”.
As if out of spite, the kitchen left one shred of mushroom in the guy’s omelet. The guy had a reaction, but luckily it wasn’t so bad that he needed to be hospitalized. I apologize profusely, but I’m sure he probably thinks I tried to kill him.
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75. The Salmon Destruction
I worked in a salmon processing plant in Alaska. There was a dude in his mid-20s who had worked there before, so they assigned him to run the holding tanks.
The tanks were two huge (like 3 stories tall) tanks that stored the fish from the boats. One day the dude thought he had drained both tanks of all the fish, so they called it a day. We didn’t work with fresh fish for two days, when we got back, it smelt like death.
Turns out he hadn’t drained one of the tanks, so the fish sat in lukewarm water for 3 days. He destroyed about 500,000 lbs of salmon. After that, he worked in the gutting section.
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76. On Fire
I worked in a mall, and a guy in an athletic store two places up saw a spider in the back room. He decided to take a shoe-cleaning spray and try to kill it by setting the spider on fire.
He kind of succeeded, but the spider still scurried away under the shoe boxes. On fire. The guy realized he was probably going to be in trouble, so he just walked out of the back room and shut the door behind him.
Yes, that was enough to close the mall and a number of stores.
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77. My Boss Tried To Blame Me For It
I worked at Enterprise Rent-A-Car, and my office rented Mercedes and Audi’s to the Mercedes/Audi dealership across the street. My boss and I were working on Saturday, and we forgot we left a Benz over in the dealership parking lot unlocked, with the keys above the visor. It got stolen that night, of course, and my boss tried to blame me for it and say that I did it on purpose to have it stolen.
Ultimately, she was just embarrassed and didn’t want to take responsibility for being careless. Her branch ended up eating the cost of the car, and our relationship was pretty sour from that point on, and I quit about 5 months later.
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78. Hitting A Supervisor’s Car
A coworker of mine hit a supervisor’s car with a forklift while he was emptying out the trash. You are supposed to drive back when you’re moving a dumpster. He thought it would be faster to go forward even dough he couldn’t see well because the dumpster was blocking his view. Did I mention it was nighttime?
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79. Deleting An Entire Database
One guy straight-up deleted the entire database of the multiple ad listing sites the company ran one night. That did not sit well with the bosses.
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80. He Did It Twice
My husband works in a factory that makes “corrugated fiberboard” (cardboard, the kind used in shipping boxes).
A lot of the machinery is incredibly expensive. His co-worker dropped a wrench into the machine and destroyed a $500,000 dollar tungsten carbide corrugating roll. They did not fire him, but he did get written up and suspended for a while.
A year later, he did it again. Very fired after that one.
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81. Cumin Instead Of Cinnamon
A bakery I used to work at sold dry health cookie mix for tourists to take home. Originally the cooks mixed and packaged it instead of the bakers. They accidentally put cumin in instead of cinnamon, then package them. No one knew until customers started emailing about it.
After that it was the bakers job.
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82. A Lucky Guy
Work at a thrift store, and we had a bow and arrow come in. One of my co-worker finds it and proceeds to shoot the donations door. Somehow he kept his job.
Later he asked a customer if she GAINED weight when he checked her ID. Somehow kept his job. He was let go a month or so later for reasons I don’t know.
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83. No More Compressions On A Real Person
I lifeguarded for a few years. We would do drills from time to time to make sure the guards on the stand were paying attention and could perform their skills correctly.
We once had a guard pretend to have no heartbeat, so the rescuing guard had to pretend to perform CPR on her. However, he didn’t just pretend…he started doing real compressions.
After a few, he was stopped. But her ribs were bruised, and I believe one or two were even cracked. This resulted in worker’s compensation for her for sure.
That story still gets told, and after that, we weren’t allowed to even pretend to do compressions on a real person, they had to be on the guard tube.
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84. A Work Accident
Not really a screwup, but…A waiter slipped in the kitchen when I worked at Perkins restaurant in the 90s, I will never forget that blood-curdling scream he emitted as he fell towards the deep fryer and ended up with his entire arm submerged in boiling oil up to his shoulder.
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85. Covering Himself In Poop
Watched my coworker cover himself in poop. He improperly operated the waste pump out equipment at a marina I worked at.
The nozzle came off the boat and forcefully sprayed him in the face with several gallons of weeks-old human feces. This is also mid-summer in Florida. And he had his mouth open.
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86.”Customer Service”
I worked at a direct mail company. One morning, a colleague comes bursting into our boss’s office and slams a brochure on the table. He yells, “Call customer service!” My boss puts his phone on speaker and dials customer service.
My colleague says, “No, dial the customer service number on the brochure.” My boss redials, and you hear, “Hi gorgeous. Me and my friends are ready to give you the experience of your lifetime. Just take out your credit card and take off your pants.”
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87. Programming Gone Wrong
My dad works as an IT support/programmer/fixer for a bigger situational IT department that handles politicians, hospitals, police, and everything email in one region of Denmark.
While my dad was doing some programming on a server. He accidentally (without any fault, though) closes down the entire mailing system in the entire region. For around 5 hours, there was no possibility of using work email in the entire public system in that region of Denmark.
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88. Orange Soda Syrup Explosion
I was working at Friendly’s as my first job, and my boss told me to change out the fountain orange soda bag. For those of you that don’t know (like myself at 13), the orange soda fountain mixture can be found in a cardboard box that contains a large bag of syrup that mixes with carbonated water to enjoy your fizzy drinks.
I had no idea how to open up the box and thought it was a great idea to stab it a few times with a pen to tear through the cardboard.
Thick orange syrup spilled out everywhere like a friggin volcano erupting. I didn’t ask for help immediately and thought I could clean it, but the bag’s contents were getting all over the floor.
I had to go to my boss, covered in orange goo, saying I needed help because I exploded the orange soda syrup.
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89. She Knew Better
I worked at this restaurant as a server. The way we did it was the cook would put your ticket with your plates, so you knew they were yours. And then the server would stab the ticket, so everyone knew it was done and out.
This cook, that had been there a month or so, was stabbing tickets instead of putting them on/near the plates. No one knew whose food was whose. It was a complete mess of people taking the wrong plates out, people waiting too long for food, food sitting in the window forever, and extra plates being made unnecessarily.
The manager kept telling the cook to stop stabbing the tickets, but she knew better or something.
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90. He Kept His Job
Working at a warehouse that had some pretty tight corners and whatnot, I watched a guy on a picker ride it straight into a shelf, and every box fell to the ground. Boxes almost hit people, it was actually somewhat terrifying.
They didn’t fire him because the shelf wasn’t anchored to the floor like it was supposed to be, and were afraid he would tip off OSHA
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91. Somehow He Kept His Job
We had these special mirrors that need electricity to align properly in the optics lab where I was doing my master’s. A coworker used the wrong settings and over-driven the mirrors (100 times more than allowed), so they shattered instantly, covering us both with tiny pieces of glass.
Turns out your body is amazing and can push tiny pieces of glass out of your skin in a few weeks. So no damage to our health, luckily. Boss didn’t fire him, but he had to pay for the replacements (~500$).
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92. My Uncle Was Lucky
My uncle accidentally shut down an entire power plant sometime in the 80s, I think. It apparently takes a whole day to get it started again. They were making 1,000,000 dollars a day at the time, so it was a million-dollar mistake.
Fortunately for him, he didn’t get fired. They said, “Now we have one employee who will never do that again.”
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93. He Messed Up Big Time
I worked for an investment bank in London. The head of Technology somehow managed to corrupt the Bloomberg terminals on the trading floor, which crashed the system for three days.
Not a single trade was made over the three days, which resulted in a big loss for the bank. He went on stress leave immediately and is still on it. That was 4 years ago.
He knows if he came back to work, he’d be dismissed, so the bank is now legally forced to continue paying his salary even though he messed up big time.
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94. He Didn’t Even Apologize
I worked for a doctor’s office back in the early 90s. One of the doctors used a scalpel on a patient and left it under some paper towels. The nurse came in to clean up and didn’t know it was under there. She sliced open 4 of her fingers.
He was supposed to put it in a container but didn’t. He never even apologized to her. She needed major stitches. It was awful.
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95. Autopilot
Worked in a call center for a bank. Most of what we did was credit card balances and replacing lost and stolen cards. We had a script to follow, and it could get pretty monotonous.
A girl in the next row got a call and went through the script, which ended with, “Ok, your card has been canceled, and you should receive your replacement card within 3-5 working days.”
The only problem was the customer was just calling in to check his balance. The poor girl was on autopilot and treated it like a lost/stolen.
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96. That Was Scary
The manager at Taco Bell tried to hand wipe the wall behind the deep frier by leaning onto the frier. Slipped and fell in past his elbow. His arm looked like something from a zombie movie for a month.
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97. He Still Gets Teased About It
Didn’t witness it but saw the results for a while afterwards. Last year they were digging up the road beside the town bar and one of them swung his excavator around the wrong way and it hit the side of the bar, leaving a hole in the wall. The guy who did it wasn’t fired but his coworkers and everyone else in town still teases him about it.
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98. Waste Of Money
A coworker was pushing a large mixing bowl across the bakery, the wheel got caught, and he dumped 100 pounds of cheesecake batter on the floor. It took us hours to get it all cleaned up. Wasted almost 30 cheesecakes that cost $50 a piece.
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99. Turning The Volume All The Way Down
While working for a local radio company, one of my newer coworkers turned the volume all the way down on one staion’s audio board and went home for the night. Nothing went out over the air on that station for hours, but it’s not like many people were listening.
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100. I Felt Bad For Him
A bit late, but whatever. One of the newer guys from across the production floor was in my department using one of our machines. It gets moved around and borrowed by other people, though, since we’re not constantly using it.
He decides that it’ll be faster to move the machine to his area. It’s on casters, so it should be fine for one person to move. I guess he misjudged how top-heavy it is since he tried to wheel it along and just pushed it right over.
The whole thing broke into several pieces. It was kinda hilarious, but I feel bad for the guy. Because I know if I did that, my heart would sink so deep.
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101. It Was A Disaster
Somebody got smacked in the ass by a door closing, causing them to drop a tray of 9 cups of tea. It went all over the wall and ruined the carpet. They cleaned the tea off the wall, and the water made the paint run all over the carpet too. It was a disaster.
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102. Well, That Was Close
I’m a security technician, and I was working at a local government/council depot. I was upgrading the security system, and I pulled out some cables which I thought were irrelevant.
Suddenly all the doors on the site stopped working, none of the gates would open, and everything was mayhem. My manager and two other senior technicians came down, and we stayed on site till 11 pm on a Friday evening to fix it. The company almost lost its million-dollar contract because of me.
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103. Wrong Roof
Worked for a construction company long ago building track homes. I saw the wrong roof put on to a house. Since the walls were all the same it fit but was not the style of roof it was supposed to have.
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104. She Never Accepted The Responsibility
A new nurse gave insulin to a patient whose blood sugar was 90, and it dropped to 13. She never did accept responsibility and still makes stupid judgment calls. The patient was treated and ended up ok.
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105. Destroying $500 Worth Of Alcohol
Working at a conference center. The waitress broke down the bar after a party ended and loaded all the bottles of wine and liquor onto a plastic cart.
Made it halfway to the storage room when the cart broke. Every single bottle shattered, and a good majority of alcohol sloshed into the drywall closest to her.
Not only did she accidentally destroy $500 worth of alcohol, the wall just happened to be separating the main lobby and our manager’s office. Said manager was trying to stop drinking. His office reeked of wine for almost a month.
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106. It Was Her Fault He Died
The nurse transferred a patient from her unit to another unit, both units in the emergency room. She did not give her report off to the nurse that would be taking the patient.
The patient had a heart condition of some sort and needed to be monitored (vitals/O2/etc). The patient was left in a hallway bed with portable shaders/barricades for privacy.
One of the assistants found the space occupied and thought it was odd as there wasn’t supposed to be anyone there. The patient was grey. An emergency code was immediately called, but patient was not able to be resuscitated. Because one nurse was too damn lazy to do their job correctly.
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107. He’s Lucky To Be Alive
I work on the railway. Not going to say which one, but this type of thing happens everywhere consistently. There was a machine working on the track that was not meant to be there without specific permission from the supervisor.
He had this permission; however, the supervisor did not record or remember this and allowed a train to come through and hit this machine at about 20 mph. The guy was lucky to only get away with 16 stitches and a broken collarbone.
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108. Wrong Family
Called the wrong family and told them their dad/husband died. The family rushed to the hospital, and dad/husband was totally alive, eating chocolate pudding.
Oops, wrong last name, wrong family. Even more wrong is that the person who made the phone call was just a nurse, not their job to call in the first place!
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109. I Was Never Caught
I used to work at a large format printing place and would print out giant posters for myself when the boss went out. And stickers. And things for friends/family.
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110. The Best Shift Ever
I once worked in a large conference center that had excellent audio-visual setups, including massive screens. Well, finally, the day came when no conferences were booked, and the boss was away, and my colleague brought in his PlayStation for a Tony Hawk marathon session on a 15-meter screen. Sweet!
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111. Not The Best Time To Yell At Someone
Either the time I showed up 2 hours late drunk/hungover, or the time a chick was being super rude to a friend of mine and, in front of a dozen coworkers, called her a c-word.
All I could think of during the second one was, I’m going to get fired for this and have to deal with a sexual harassment suit.” The funny part was this was during a sexual harassment training day.
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112. He Will Never Know
Had to work for a few hours on an email server over the weekend. My girlfriend (now fiance) came along with me. We end up using the executive conference table for a good romp.
A few months later, we were told the company was being sold off and we all lost our jobs. The CEO was sitting right where we had done it, and I couldn’t help smiling while he pretended to cry.
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113. Feeling A Little Guilty About This One
I stole some small audio equipment from my last job and hocked it on eBay for $30. I still feel a little guilty about it, though. It was a decent job and I didn’t exactly need the money.
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114. A Rat Problem
We have a rat problem at the fast food joint where I work at. The first time that I saw that there were one or two hamburger buns (in the plastic-wrapped bunch) that had been eaten through, I told the manager. His response was, “Just throw the rat-eaten ones out and use the rest.”
Don’t blame me if someone sues us because they ingested rat feces and contracted an illness…
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115. “That Was Awesome”
Somebody jumped off of the 3rd shelf (about 21ft up) into a pile of boxes. The manager yelled, “WTF were you thinking? Are you okay?” when the guy said, “Yeah, I’m fine,” the manager said that was awesome and that if he did anything like that again, he would be fired. The manager laughed and walked away, shaking his head.
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116. A Repeat Offender
This kid was a repeat offender for alot of things, but the worst one was when he tipped over a used coolant container with a forklift while going down the hill to the other building. The force of the coolant as it hit the building at the bottom of the hill tore the windows from their frames.
I don’t know if you have ever smelled old dirty machining coolant, it smells like rotten death. It flooded the offices the owner worked from.
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117. Still Can’t Believe It
There is a kid at my grocery store that would sexually harass (borderline assault) our female colleagues. He had a good work ethic, and since our turnover rate is horrible, they kept him, gave him a raise, and just made him work the night crew.
Now he works for a roofing company and stays working one day a week at the grocery store in case he gets fired from the roofing.
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118. On Fire
This took place at the hospital, more specific, in the bathroom of the hospital. One doctor wanted to prank a friend. His friend was doing his duty at the toilet, so he somehow let on fire his friend’s pants, the whole hospital had to evacuate because of the fire alarms, even surgeons that were in surgery at the moment, they had to close their patients and leave. He didn’t get fired.
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119. The Students Knew
I am a university prof (lecturer). Once during a final exam, I fell asleep. There were 40 or 50 students in the room, and I alone was responsible for invigilating. When I woke up, everyone was gone, and there was a stack of exams next to me.
I never told anyone about it, though obviously the students knew! Apparently they didn’t complain to the dean or anything like that.
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120. Not Enough Work
When I had an internship, I never felt like there was enough work for me. So I’d take 3+ hour long on-the-clock lunches every day, often times go to borders and read a book. One time, I took a nap in my car, I meant to wake up and show up when it was necessary, but the nap lasted the rest of my shift which was worrisome.
However, no one noticed, so I continued this habit for the rest of the summer.
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