It's okay to have a momentary lapse of judgement and even the smartest of us can forget the simplest of things sometimes! But when those little dumb moments effect your job or other people's lives they can go from forgettable funny moments to a life changing event.
These real people shared the dumbest things they ever witnessed and they are pretty surprising, to say the least.
Her Greatest Hits
My sister has done all of the following. She is 26 years old, and all of these have occurred around and after the age of 18. She accidentally lit a loaf of bread on fire in the microwave, and set countless frozen pizzas aflame from neglecting to remove the cardboard ring on bottom.
In the car, she insisted that her headlights wouldn’t work because she’s almost out of gasoline. She also asked my dad if our boat had brakes. He knew just what to say for a laugh. He told her yes, but they don’t work because they’re wet for a laugh. But those are nothing compared to her greatest hits.
She once asked my mom if Mickey Mouse was a cat or a dog. She thought Canada was a state and thought Washington, DC was in the Pacific Northwest.
She also asked why we (as humans) can’t air-condition the outside world. She once asked how to spell VCR, as she thought it was a word. Also, just last week she bought two right shoes!
It Must Be Right
My sister was working on something and asked me if a word was spelled right. As I was looking at it, she said something I’ll never forget, “It must be right; there isn’t a red line under it”.
She wasn’t on a computer. She was writing something on paper by hand. I couldn’t get over it. It was too perfect. I’ll mock her forever for that one.
Maybe They Were Exaggerating
I worked security at a hospital desk during the start of the pandemic. A security bulletin had gone out about an escaped psychiatric patient with a history of being violent and obsessive towards pregnant women.
He had gotten loose during a patient transfer because he was being taken to a secure prison psychiatric facility. We were told to be extra careful of who we sent to the OB/GYN floor. I was worried—but I had no idea just how nightmarish it would be.
He showed up at our desks and asked for directions to the maternity ward. Before I could make up an excuse to stall him or do anything else of the kind, my co-worker told him where it was! I freaked out and said how that was the escaped patient, thinking my co-worker hadn’t paid attention or something.
My dumb co-worker said, “Oh, yeah, I know. That was definitely him, but I’m sure that it’ll be fine. The whole ‘violent and obsessive towards pregnant women’ thing is probably an exaggeration. People can be so sensitive”.
This idiot didn’t even think to call security and let them know he was on his way up. I yelled at a different co-worker to call security and then had to run and hurl myself into the elevator with him and distract him until security got to us.
My co-worker was fired really fast. That was the only time I was actually happy to see someone let go.
She Was Allowed to Keep Her Job
I worked in a restaurant that didn’t serve booze on Sundays, so there was no one behind the bar, but our lemonade was kept there. Someone, one of the new waitresses made a big mistake.
She filled a child’s cup with pre-mixed margarita, thinking it was lemonade. The worst part was that the child drank it all before his grandparents noticed the cup smelled like booze.
They were religious, non-drinkers, and the grandfather was a state police officer. They were obviously outraged, but our manager was able to talk them out of pressing any type of charges. The waitress was allowed to keep her job but quit shortly after that.
Still Learning the Ropes
I worked at Starbucks. I had a newish co-worker come up to me and ask why the water was going straight through the coffeemaker and not changing color. I had seen him brew coffee regularly before, so I went over to check.
He was trying to brew coffee without grinding the coffee beans. I still have a good laugh about that every once in a while.
It Probably Cost a Fortune
I was a wedding photographer. I worked with many videographers I liked—but then there was Chuck. This dude was entirely incompetent at his job. He had messed up my pictures more than a few times before. I was working with Chuck for a very large Catholic wedding that probably cost more than I made in a year.
Chuck was walking backward down the aisle for that “dramatic” feel when he suddenly walked right into a giant decoration. It was a 5-foot-tall glass vase filled with glass beads and feathers.
The thing came crashing down during their ceremony, shattered, and beads flew everywhere. The church went completely silent before the officiant slowly continued.
The bride and groom tried to ensure him that everything was okay, but the bride stared daggers at Chuck for the rest of the night.
Check the Dumpster
I worked at a vet clinic. We had a contract with a local pet cemetery to do cremation services for the animals that pass or get euthanized. The remains are shipped back to us with a packing list that we have to sign and mail back stating that we got all the urns and that they were in good condition.
We had one employee unpack and put away a shipment of urns and sign the form. She then proceeded to throw the box in the dumpster with the last urn still in it. But that’s not the worst part. What made the situation really infuriating was that the urn contained MY pet’s ashes.
The package came in on my day off, and when I came in the next day, I saw the clinic’s copy of the packing list with my pet’s name on it, but there was no urn to be found. Fortunately, another co-worker had the idea to check the dumpster, and the urn was still there.
Keep the Tribe Alive
We were learning about local Native American cultures and legends in elementary school. One legend had all the men go off to fight except one boy, and it was left to him to continue the tribe’s existence.
We got in a debate with a girl who loudly asked why didn’t he just go and die too, saying that the women can keep the tribe alive. Being worldly and having had “the talk” already, I tried to explain that there would be no more tribe without at least one guy present.
She yelled back, “That’s not true! We know how to fish”! I had to be told to sit outside because I couldn’t stop laughing.
No-Show
I was a social worker. We were supposed to see clients who lived with families once a year. A mom of a kid kept calling her worker but got no answer. So, the mom called the on-call worker, who discovered the assigned worker had logged the visits in and made thorough notes.
However, the mom said she had never seen her social worker in two years. This led to her whole caseload being audited. What they discovered was chilling. They found that the worker had logged a visit with a client who had been deceased for months.
While being audited, her supervisor decided to do a surprise visit to the client she was supposed to see. She never showed up and logged in the visit the next day.
You Are Here
Once, my significant other and I went for a walk around a local nature reserve. On the way in we got a map given to us so we could navigate the area. Later on the walk she is looking at the map and says to me, “These maps really need a ‘you are here’ on them”.
It took me a second to realize what she meant, so I explained that it’s a handheld map and that it wouldn’t be possible. It took four or five attempts before it clicked with her.
There Are Hospitals Everywhere
My old friend was hands down the stupidest man I’ve ever met. He had a heart of gold, though. He once called me while he was in Maryland—we’re from Ohio. What he said was so bizarre, it’s unforgettable.
He asked me to call 9-1-1 for him because he was having a panic attack and was genuinely worried that he was going to have a heart attack. I proceeded to explain that instead of calling me, he should call 9-1-1 for himself or go to the hospital.
He replied: “What? Maryland doesn’t have any hospitals”! He then started arguing with me that Maryland doesn’t have hospitals. He legit thought hospitals only existed in Ohio. It took like five minutes to get him to understand that hospitals are literally EVERYWHERE.
I’m still absolutely dumbfounded by that conversation five years later.
Know Your Tools
I had a guy I worked with take a cover off the base of a radar unit that had about 40 bolts holding it on. I gave him a ratchet wrench to do it. A half-hour later, I went to check on him. He only had about ten off.
I watched him for a while. He would take the ratchet off each time to move it for the next turn! I had to show him how a ratchet works.
Lunar Eclipse
I had a boss named Tammy. One night, we were all working late doing stock take and we were discussing the impending lunar eclipse. Someone asked what happens during an eclipse.
Tammy’s explanation for it was seriously deranged. She grandly explained that the eclipse would occur when America went in front of the moon, blocking our (Australia’s) view of it.
Like she literally thought the earth stretched itself into a “u bend” or neck pillow shape, and half of it stayed in our normal orbit while the other half stretched itself around to casually block the moon for the rest of the earth.
Always Sort Your Pets by Gender
I worked at Petco. We had all the guinea pigs in a big plexiglass enclosure with a center divider. The males were on one side and the females on the other. An employee decided that all the long-haired guinea pigs should be on one side and short-haired on the other.
Well, there was one thing that he didn’t think of. Not only did it take forever to sort them out—but all the females ended up pregnant.
Always Wear Protection
I worked on a golf course during the summer. The area had lots of poison ivy. Two of my co-workers were instructed to weed a river edge area. If we encountered poison ivy, we had to either stop what we were doing or go get full suit protection with respirators.
When I walked up to check on them, my blood ran cold. These guys were weed-whacking in the thickest poison ivy field I had ever seen. They had no protective suit, glasses, or respirators on. I rolled up and noticed what they were doing and pointed out all the poison ivy everywhere.
They were aerosolizing the plant’s oil. They both ended up in the hospital on steroids to prevent them from dying because of the oils they had inhaled.
I Promise He's Smart
As I’m in labor with our daughter, my husband asks, “Do you want her to have an innie or an outie belly button”? Weird question, but whatever. So I tell him I don’t mind either way, both are cute. And then he says, “Yeah, but when the doctor asks, which should we pick for her”?
He thought when they clamp the umbilical cord, parents tell the doctor the type of belly button they prefer. He’s really smart, I promise.
Tax Prep
I worked for an attorney who did ex-pat tax preparation. We had a friend’s girlfriend working with us to help purge files and set up a new office. She stayed on because we needed a secretary.
For some reason, she thought that we were equals in the office and that we shared the same responsibilities of answering the phone and email, filing documents, and making copies, even though I was a tax-preparer, not a secretary. She also refused to be called a secretary.
She had a good-intentioned e-mail written to request tax documents from our clients if they hadn’t already submitted them to us. The email was going to be sent to our entire client list. She went and added all of the clients and sent it off.
However, instead of sending the email to ourselves with the client emails in BCC, it was a giant thread. All the clients could see each other’s emails, and if someone responded to that email, all clients would be able to see that person’s private financial information.
I had to immediately follow up with another email requesting them to disregard and delete the message. She got fired the next day. My boss and her couldn’t see eye to eye on many things, but that mistake was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
Our Only Accountant
I once witnessed our chief accounting officer—who was our only accountant—type in values into two Excel cells by pulling out a calculator, adding the two numbers together in the calculator, and then typing the answer in a third cell on the spreadsheet.
She had apparently been doing this for years, with sheets consisting of thousands of rows. I explained how to use the program’s formulas and copy them, but she must have forgotten because I saw her doing the same thing again months later.
I'm Glad She Quit
I was a float pharmacist. There was this lady who was a pharmacy assistant. She was dumb as bricks and extremely negligent but hadn’t made enough mistakes to get fired yet.
You would pull up the prescriptions that need to be filled from a queue, scan the bottle, and the label for the patient would print out. If the medication is incorrect, it will tell you that you’re wrong, and the label won’t print.
I could only assume that she scanned the incorrect bottle, went to get the right one, scanned that one, bent down to get a vial, then opened the WRONG bottle and dumped the contents of that one into the vial along with the right one.
The prescription was for 200 tabs, and most bottles are 100 count. She then left it on the counter to get checked. I always open the vial and look at the tabs or capsules to make sure they are right. Since the correct tablets were on top, I opened it, and it looked correct.
What followed next gave me the scare of a lifetime. Later, when the person came to pick it up, the vial was jostled from hanging out in the pickup area. I always open it again to show the person what’s there, which serves as another check for me as well.
Lo and behold, the two medications were mixed together! I apologized and corrected it, but I was furious. She put a high dose of one medication in the bottle, and the person was on a low dose of another.
The patient could’ve had a critical hypoglycemic event because they were old, and both meds make you release more insulin. I told her she wasn’t allowed to put any bottles in recycling anymore; she had to leave everything she touched on the counter.
I also couldn’t ask her to enter prescriptions or do anything else because she was useless. She’d worked there for nine months, and despite close shadowing and training with the best assistants, she just didn’t understand anything. Luckily, she eventually quit.
Will It Ever Grow Back?
When I worked in the oil field I had an accident that chopped off the top 1/4 of one of my fingers. I was young so still going to parties and such with my gauze on. When it finally healed enough to let it breathe I took it off, and people were looking at how gnarly it looked.
This one girl came up completely serious, looked at it and said, “How long will it take to grow back”?
I Can't Miss My Soaps
I had a co-worker who was a guidance counselor at five schools in the district. She was supposed to work one day at each school unless she was called to a school for an urgent case. She would frequently call the school she was supposed to be at, stating she had an urgent case at another school.
One day at lunch, she was talking about what was happening in her favorite soap opera. This was before VCRs, and the show aired long before the school day ended. The principal was sitting at our lunch table. He got up, smiled, and told her, “See me when you are done with your lunch”.
After checking, he noticed that she hadn’t seen more than a few kids per week for many months. The funny thing was that complaints about her work had gone down during that time. She was a terrible guidance counselor.
I Don't Think So
My mother once told me that a horse ate a needle and thread, which sewed its intestines shut (perfectly, like with stitching). When I asked where she heard this, she replied, “in a book I read”. I asked if the book was fiction. Her answer was seriously haunting.
She said, “Yes, but most of the time fiction is more real than non-fiction”. Another time, she called from her cell and was annoyed. Her landline hadn’t been working for the past six months even though she’d been paying the bill. I called and it rang, she couldn’t hear it. I told her I’d help her troubleshoot.
Got her to check the ringer volume on the cordless, check that it was plugged in, etc. When I asked if the cord was in the wall well, she said, “It is, but the cord is cut”. I was like, “The cord is cut? Like, in half”?
“Yes”, she says. “Well, there’s your problem. Get a new cord”. Long pause, then she tells me, “No, I don’t think that’s it. I’m going to go find a man because a man would probably know”.
Blinded For a Minute
I managed a recycling center for the city. The baler went down with a blown fuse. These fuses were huge, and we were looking at it, trying to figure out if we could pull the fuse and where to get one. We had not shut off the power yet.
Just then, this guy—who was well known for not having any common sense—stuck a screwdriver into the fuse. It caused the brightest flash of light and blinded us all for a minute. When I got my vision back, I thought for sure this guy was going to be a goner, but he was not. In fact, he was fine.
I regained my composure, fired the guy on the spot, and called a professional to fix the baler. To this day I am not sure how he was not injured. He was a walking workers comp claim just waiting to happen.
Baby Safe
I worked in a paint shop and every time a new chemical was introduced to the shop, I would ask about the hazards. They would tell me that it was a green chemical and there were no hazards, saying, “It’s baby-safe”. Once I entered the shop and I saw a guy using a new spray.
The side of the bucket indicated that it was dangerously poisonous and highly corrosive. I told him that he should be using a mask and gloves to use that chemical. He said, “Don’t worry, it’s baby safe. They even have a picture of a baby playing in it”.
I took a closer look and nearly burst out laughing. Sure enough, it did. After seeing the image though, I yelled at the guy, “This is the baby. He is not playing. He is not swimming. HE’S DYING”!
Never Give Up
Here it is, the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard: “I’m never going to quit smoking. My aunt was healthy until she quit. Then she was diagnosed with stage 3 cancer”. This was said to me by my manager at a Domino’s Pizza.
I didn’t have the time or energy to explain to a man three decades my senior that she probably had cancer for a long time, but didn’t go to the doctor until she was feeling withdrawal from the nicotine.
So we finished our smokes and went back to slingin’ pizzas. I quit smoking and delivering pizza not long after.
Close Call
I worked in a machine shop. One of the lathe operators left the bar of cold-rolled steel that he was turning hanging out the back. When he turned the machine on, it literally deformed and turned into a helicopter blade that ripped the back of the machine apart and eventually flew off at high speed.
Luckily no one got hit by it. If so, they would’ve been a goner.
Fire Safety
I worked at a bar in a small town where we made Moroccan coffees by lighting 151 rum on fire after pouring it into a chalice and sprinkling nutmeg and cinnamon in it. My co-worker was a bubbly and adorable sweetheart, but she was a train wreck.
She was making one of those coffees, and after she lit the booze on fire, she decided she needed more of it in the glass. She just started pouring 151 into the glass on top of the flame.
Fire darted up the stream of liquid from the glass to the bottle—which popped the pour spout off—and lit the whole bar and a customer’s jacket on fire as flaming 151 spilled over the back of the bar counter. The customer started hitting his arm, trying to put it out, but it wasn’t working.
He ran outside and threw it on the asphalt and started stomping on it. We stood there, too shocked to do anything, for a good five seconds before anyone even reacted. It happened so fast. It didn’t seem real.
There were no water pitchers anywhere, and we didn’t want to just pour water all over the bar because that’s where the computer and all of the electrical wiring were.
We grabbed a wet bar rag from the sanitizer bucket and poured it over the fire, and put it out. The best part is the girl who lit the customer on fire was the daughter of the Fire Marshal of the small town where our bar was.
The Power's Out
My now ex-girlfriend from high school said the dumbest thing ever. Her power had gone out. She called crying saying she had so much homework to complete. I told her to drive to my house since I still had power.
She yelled at me saying, “How dare you attempt to get me to drive! How do you expect me to do that? My headlights won’t work”! It didn’t last much longer after that.
Don't Forget to Mute Yourself
The office we worked in was shut down due to the pandemic, and the company went 100% remote. A new senior engineer was hired to work directly with our product team and also manage a team of developers.
During our company-wide weekly Zoom meeting—after he was done presenting for the company—he went and turned his camera off. However, he forgot one crucial thing. To put himself on mute.
More than a hundred people heard this man playing Fortnite and talking down about the company to someone else in the background, among other things. He only lasted a month.
Everything Was Rendered Useless
Someone who had just been hired decided that a spare computer lab needed to be redesigned for better feng shui. He did so without realizing that the lab was designed in a haphazard way thanks to a fluke of the building interfering with the computer network.
The entire lab was then rendered useless. He was gone within an hour.
A Gruesome Mistake
I worked in a veterinary hospital for a good number of years. One day, unknown to me, some little girl had found a lifeless/declining seagull with her family and brought it in to see if we could help it. Unfortunately, it had died by the time they arrived.
Our veterinary technician took the bird for disposal but was too busy to deal with it. That’s when he made a gruesome mistake. Instead of taking a quick minute to put it in the freezer, he just packed the box with the deceased bird into our storage area with dozens of similar boxes and just left it there.
Days went by—while he was still working—and I came back on shift, and something was seriously rank in the office. Customers were complaining.
No one knew what the cause was. Eventually, I found the box buried beneath other supplies. I walked up to my head receptionist and said, “So…seagull”? I watched the absolute fury grow in her eyes. The tech did not last long after that.
I'm Sure It'll Be Fine
An employee poured sink cleaning solution into the ice cream machine instead of the cream mixture. I had to stop them. They said, “I’m sure it’ll be fine. It was only a little”, not realizing that it would poison people.
I didn’t even know how she could have possibly mixed the two up. The containers didn’t look anything alike. The cleaning solution came in big plastic jugs with screwtops, and the ice cream came in cardboard cartons that you had to cut open.
I had to clean out the whole machine from top to bottom and refill it. I ended up throwing away nearly a whole bucket full of contaminated ice cream mixture.
Wandering Off
We took a large group of 4 and 5-year-old children to visit a farm/petting zoo/pumpkin patch. We had three vehicles. I was in charge of my own group, but I noticed one of the other teachers was being very lax in her supervision for most of the trip.
When it was time to leave, I loaded my children on the bus along with some other adults and did a head-count/attendance check. Before getting on my bus, I noticed that the other teacher had climbed onto her bus and sat down BEFORE the children boarded. She walked on first and had the kids follow her.
I almost let it go, but gut instinct told me she wasn’t counting her students. Once they were all boarded, I walked back and climbed on her bus. She seemed irritated when she realized I was checking on her.
I was not a supervisor or anything, just a fellow teacher, so she didn’t answer to me in any way. She said, “We’re all good. Let’s go”! I knew how many were in each group, so without answering her, I did a quick count. Sure enough, we were missing one. I ended up leaving the bus and going to find the kid myself.
He was still on the playground with children from another school. When we got back to the bus, the other teacher blamed the kid! She said he “wandered off”. Meanwhile, she was the one who gathered the group and left the play area.
She was the one who “wandered off”. She got mad when I went to the administration about the incident.
I Thought You Made Them Up
My high school physics teacher thought I made up narwhals. In his defense, I absolutely had a penchant for drawing weird, made-up creatures whenever the moment presented itself.
We had to do a sock puppet show to explain something I don’t remember and I chose to make narwhals for my puppets, because it was 2010 and I thought it was the funniest. He asked me if the creatures in my presentation were creatures I made up, or if they were from mythology.
I’ll never forget the projector pulled up to the Wikipedia page on narwhals, and my teacher scrolling through it going, “This is crazy! I thought you made them up”!
We Changed Our Minds
When my brother passed, the hearse took the funeral procession to the wrong cemetery. My brother was being buried at a different cemetery than the rest of our family had been, next to his son. As we pulled into the cemetery, there was an obviously confused groundskeeper staring at us.
He knew he hadn’t opened any graves that day. I called the funeral home, and they called the hearse, which made a loop around. As we drove back past on the way out, I rolled down my window and shouted to the groundskeeper, “We’ve changed our minds”.
Don't Forget to Turn the Power On
I worked as a Radiation Protection Tech at a power plant that was refueling. My job was to sit outside of a contaminated area, and if anyone wanted to take something out of the site, such as tools, etc., I had to make sure it didn’t have any radioactive particles on it.
To do that, I had to wipe the tool with something like a tissue and then hold the tissue up to a machine called a frisker. If the needle on the frisker went above a threshold, then the tool had to be cleaned or left in the area. One day, I came back to relieve a guy who had been sitting outside the area for two hours.
He told me there had been no issues, and everything had cleared. But I noticed something that he hadn’t. I looked at the frisker, leaned over, and turned the machine on.
No Computer Experience
We had a volunteer who had no computer experience. We showed her step-by-step how to do her job. She didn’t know what a mouse was, how to click on something, etc.
We got her up and running. She was pleased with herself at having gotten the hang of using a PC. Two hours later, I returned to the office, and she was in tears.
She said, “I swear I didn’t do anything! There were just fish everywhere all of a sudden”! I looked at the computer, and the aquarium screen saver was on. After her little breakdown, she had to take the rest of the afternoon off.
It Can't Be Real
A few years ago leading up to an eclipse, a co-worker overheard us discussing it and said, “You guys don’t actually believe in that, do you”?
I figured he misunderstood whatever we were talking about and thought we were talking about mysticism or something regarding the eclipse, but I was so completely wrong about that.
He followed up with, “Don’t you know if the moon went into the sun, it would melt. That’s why the eclipse can’t be real”. I genuinely felt like humanity should probably start over from scratch after that.
Where's the Shut-Off Valve?
One of the plumbers at the university my stepfather worked for unscrewed the big bolt/stopper thing at the elbow of a urinal flusher without shutting the water off first. It flew off with enough force to give him a massive bruise on his chest.
Then, the gushing water proceeded to flood three floors of the building while he ran around looking for the shut-off valve.
It Smells Funny
I used to work as a pharmacy tech. Most antibiotics for kids come as a powder in a bottle. We add distilled water to make it into a liquid upon receiving prescriptions, as the solution only remains stable for 10 to 14 days, depending. One day, a father dropped an amoxicillin prescription for a child.
The product was prepared and given to the father. He left. Two hours later, he came back. He said that the medication smelled funny. I thought, “Duh, medications often do”. I still wafted the scent with my hand to my nose, and he was right—something was off. I give the bottle to the pharmacist.
He agreed and made another bottle right away. The original bottle smelled like straight-up alcohol. In the lab, we kept multiple solvents for many uses—water, simple syrup, mineral oil, ethanol, etc. One of the techs added ethanol to the antibiotic instead of water.
We were all flabbergasted at how the mistake could have occurred because all the solvents are different sizes, have different colored labels, and are identified in giant letters.
We identified the tech who was guilty of the mistake, and they couldn’t even say how that error occurred.
Do Rabbits Lay Eggs?
I remarked that it’s odd that we associate rabbits with eggs for Easter. I jokingly said we should make it an Easter platypus because unlike rabbits, they do actually lay eggs.
Then someone overheard this and said, “Wait…no, rabbits DO lay eggs”. This turned into a two-minute argument over whether or not rabbits lay eggs.
And then when she finally accepted that she was wrong, she was so irritated that she asked all of our co-workers if they thought the same as her. To the best of my knowledge, she’s the only one.
Bruised Ego
I worked for a non-profit that hired a guy in fundraising purely “for his Rolodex”. They didn’t care about any of his job functions as long as he kept bringing in more rich people to fundraising parties.
When the pandemic hit and we were forced to go remote, it became clear how incompetent he was with technology and how he had been coasting for years in the office by sticking to phone calls instead of emails, etc.
We had our first major online fundraiser coming up, and I warned my boss that this dude had no idea how Zoom worked. He never muted himself, had his camera up his nose, and treated it like watching a YouTube video.
However, he was the guy inviting all the rich people to the event, so they didn’t want to “lecture him about a computer program” and “hurt his ego”. Big mistake. Then came our massive 200+ person Zoom event.
He set his laptop on his bathroom counter and proceeded to take a shirtless, nasty old man dump—complete with grunting, splashing, and squelching. It was so loud it drowned out the speaker.
They had to end the event early because they had no way to mute him, and it kept going for a full two minutes without stopping. I nearly threw my laptop out a window that night.
No More Pizza
I was making pizza. A guy broke the pizza board that you use to slide the pizza into the oven. I found the other one, and he lost that one too. So, I told him to make pizzas on one of the plastic cutting boards.
He put the pizza into the oven on the board and just left it. The board melted. There was no more pizza that day.
Reliving His Glory Days
I worked at a summer camp. The employees were usually college students, but one time we hired this guy in his early 40s. At the onset, it seemed like no big deal, he was just trying to act like he was 20. Slowly things got weirder. He kept getting in trouble for strange things.
He got caught at least three times working shirtless with the kids. He would be out canoeing and rip off his shirt and life jacket, or he would be lying in the middle of the park with no shirt on. No one was really comfortable with him because he seemed like he was trying to relive his glory days.
Then, we had an overnight training. It started at 9 AM and went to 3 PM the following day. We were about to discover just how bizarre he truly was. It was a camp, so we set up our tents around the site for the overnight portion.
He was his usual self at the start of the day, but throughout the day, he kept sneaking off to his tent for a few minutes at a time. He had set his tent up much further away from everyone else, so he would disappear for 10–20 minute increments. He was acting weirder and weirder as the day went on.
He took off his shirt while the boss was talking and threw it in the fire screaming “WOOOO”!! He started talking about his ex-wife a lot and was yelling at the birds. Things got really uncomfortable when he started talking about the birds and the bees.
Around dinner time, he got up, ran to his car, and peeled out of the parking lot so fast that his tires were screeching. We thought he was gone and were happy, thinking we could move on with our training. About an hour later, we heard his car fly back into the parking lot.
Our manager started shaking her head, saying, “Oh God, he’s back”. I thought it couldn’t get weirder—I was wrong. Soon after, we saw homeboy running at top speed out of the woods and cannonball into the lake. He then got out—in his birthday suit.
He walked over to where we were all sitting and started doing the helicopter. He put his arms around both of my bosses and declared his love for them. At that point, we could all smell him.
He reeked like a distillery. He asked us when we were all taking our clothes off and encouraged us to “get this party started”. Finally, he was escorted out. Someone went to clean up his tent and found he had been smoking out of pop cans and had a bunch of booze bottles.
The worst part was he was scheduled for a shift the next Monday at 11 AM, and he texted us saying he would be late for his shift because he had a meeting with the boss. Needless to say, he didn’t make it to the shift after that.
Do the Math
My job had 50% off sales fairly regularly. I had one particular customer who stood out. This woman was middle-aged, dressed very well, and looked like she either had done very well for herself or married into money.
For the better part of an hour, she proceeded to ask how much 50% off would come for each and every item she looked at. “What is half of $20? What would half of $50 be? How much is $24.50 after the sale? Could you check to see what half of $60 is? How much is this?” The worst part?
She did this for every item she touched. I was getting a little frustrated and began giving her short answers. After checking out, her total was about $180. She asked how much she had saved. I calmly told her, “About as much as you paid”.
You Missed the Meeting!
One of my reports missed a 9 AM meeting, and when I asked him why, he said, “You said the meeting was at 12, not 9”! Of course, I was very confused because the meeting invite said 9 AM and everyone else on the team knew it was at nine as well.
So, he sent me a screenshot of his Outlook calendar, and it turned out he just had all his stuff set to the wrong time zone.
Do Not Proceed
I worked on trains and have heard a lot of stupid stuff, but this was my top one yet. We got to a station and the signal ahead was on a red light, meaning “stop” or “do not proceed”. Basically the same as traffic lights.
I made an announcement saying, “Sorry for the delay, we are currently being held on a red signal and will be moving momentarily”. Five minutes later, we moved but got stopped at the next station.
A couple was walking down the platform toward the exit and I heard the husband/boyfriend go, “Ah, stuck at a red signal again”. I acknowledged him and said, “Yeh, red signal again”. The woman looked me straight in the eye and asked, “What’s a red signal”?
I was stunned for a moment as I thought she was pulling my leg, but the horrible truth quickly dawned on me. She was serious. Her husband chimed in, “You know, red means stop and green means go”.
We both saw that it still hadn’t sunk in, so he said again, “Like a traffic light”. She took about five to ten seconds, and finally said, “Ooooo”.
This was as they kept walking down the platform. All I could think of at that moment was that she was having a blank day where her head was not functioning correctly, or she was one of those people that get you thinking, “How do you get up in the morning”?
It Was All Guesswork
I worked with someone in the dementia ward who thought it was a good idea to put all the patients’ false teeth into a bowl together to soak. It took us weeks to try and match the correct patient to their teeth.
None of them were marked up in any way with the patients’ names. I doubt the correct teeth ended up with the right patient—it was all guesswork.
Made Up Words
During a foreign language class, we were learning the names of different countries. Suddenly, someone stopped the lecture and asked the dumbest question known to man: They asked why the language we were learning made up names for different countries.
They said, “Why can’t we just use the real names like Germany, Japan, etc”? There was total silence in the classroom. Then, we spent 10 minutes of the entire class time trying to get this person to understand that “Germany” is not the name of Germany in German.
We had to explain to them that all the country names we know are all English “made up” names for those countries. They did not comprehend this concept.
It confounds me to this day, especially since that person was not from an English-speaking country to begin with.
This Thing is Broken!
My old roommate pointed a laser thermometer at a pencil on a table, inside our house. The laser thermometer read 68F. He exclaimed, “This thing is broken”! I asked why he thought it was broken? His answer blew me away.
He said: “This is a pencil. It doesn’t produce any heat. This thermometer should say 0”. At first, I didn’t know what to say. I stared at him for a few seconds, unable to collect my jaw off the floor.
I said: “Well, 0F would mean it is frozen, or well beyond frozen, so I think 68F is the temperature of the air in the room”. This man was 26. His two adult brothers were sitting in the room. I was the only one who understood why the thermometer was correct.
Maybe There's a Better Way
My wife worked at a gas station and found out her co-worker—who had been there for years— had been refilling the napkin dispenser by cramming the napkins in one at a time through the front slot. She walked up and unfastened the back, and apparently, his jaw hit the floor.
He had never considered that there might be a better way to do this.
Former Co-Worker
One of the stupidest questions I’ve ever heard came from a former co-worker. About 14 years ago, the company I worked at had a corporate-wide meeting for about 100 people. It was led by the owner and president of the company.
The meeting topic was that we were moving our corporate office from the property it had resided on since the company started 60+ years prior to a new building a few suburbs over. Included in the presentation was a picture of the new building, with the other company’s signage still on the building.
At the end of the presentation, the owner opened it up for questions. A woman raised her hand, stood up in front of every corporate employee, and she exposed her stupidity with a single question: “Are we going to change the sign on the building?”
Nearly everyone turned to look at who would ask such a question. We all saw who it was and collectively thought, “Oh yeah, of course, it was her.”
The owner stared at her for at least five seconds, as dumbfounded as the rest of us, before finally just replying, “Yes, we will change the sign to read the name of our company”.
The Earth is Round
We were in class and this girl was so confused at how a flight from America to Russia could be quick, because the world map shows America being at the far left and Russia on the right.
The teacher said, “Look at the map”. She replies, “Yeah, they’re so far away”. A moment of silence. Teacher says, “The world is round; it isn’t flat like a map”.
A Mile-Long List
I have a list a mile long of the nonsense our completely incompetent project manager did. He insisted that a $3,000 load of fertilizer still absolutely had to be delivered as previously scheduled despite the company warning against it, as we were expecting heavy rains that day.
The entire pile was washed away within a couple of hours.
I Was Stunned
I managed a construction security team for a beachfront project which required 24-hour on-site patrol. I ran the daytime team, and my friend ran the graveyard shift. As it was a dredging operation, we had to have two guys posted near the shore to make sure civilians weren’t running into the area.
Think of a square on the beach with a guard on each corner. One night, we couldn’t find one of our night guards, and his phone was sending calls to voicemail. When I discovered where he was, I was stunned.
It turned out that he had set up a folding chair in the sand at 2 AM and fell asleep at his post, only to get wrecked by high tide an hour later. His phone and everything in his pockets was destroyed, and he went home soaking wet without telling anyone.
He later got fired for driving a company ATV off a sand bank and getting it stuck.
What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
I was doing a tile repair in the lobby of a Taco Bell. I had to build it up on a heavy layer of thin-set mortar. I had my son’s buddy helping me. He was a super nice kid but not the brightest. We got the whole thing laid down and level. There were about ten 12×12 inch tiles, two rows wide.
I said to him, “Okay, whatever you do, don’t step on it”. He replied, “Okay, boss”, stood up, and stepped directly on it. I had to pull it all up and redo it.
User Error
I was working in IT at a hospital. We had received a call regarding a computer that was not turning on, so I went to one of the offices. This wasn’t strange because we got these types of calls all the time.
Ninety-five percent of those calls were due to “user mistake”, so I was bracing myself for the worst—however, not to this extent. When I arrived, I confirmed that the computer would not power on.
I first examined the plug. It was affixed to the wall and appeared to be in good working order in the computer’s back office. I asked, “So, what were you doing when this computer stopped working”? She responded, “Well, I thought it was too hot, so I used the water cooling option”.
The computer featured a fan port on the top of the machine that looked like a funnel. She pointed to the fan port when she said “water-cooled”. When I returned to my desk with the sloshing PC, my IT colleagues were bewildered as to why I had pulled the machine without permission.
Then, I emptied the water into a garbage pail.
Bill of Rights
When I was in high school and in Grade 11, I was taking a law class. The teacher was talking about different bills that the government had implemented throughout history, such as the Bill of Rights.
Thirty minutes into the lesson, the girl next to me raised her hand and asked the teacher, “Who’s this bill guy we’ve been talking about”? The whole class burst out laughing, and the teacher was struggling to keep it together as well.
That's Not Big Enough
A woman was trying to buy fabric to cover tables but didn’t have measurements of the tables. After I explained a lack of size standards since tables come in all sorts of sizes and shapes, she immediately said the first table was standard size. We were off to a great start.
We finally figured out how much she needed for the first one and cut it for her. Then we moved on to the second one—and things went downhill. I rolled some fabric off the bolt and went to straighten it out, only for her to grab the material and start moving it.
She opened it and asked the width, which I read off the bolt, and she paused. She thought for a moment and said, “That’s just not big enough. If I cut it, will that make it bigger?”
It took all my willpower to tell her, “Unfortunately, no, making it smaller will not make it bigger,” with a professional tone.
Open Floor Plan
I worked in an open-plan office with a small kitchen area at one end with a microwave, kettle, sink, toaster, and water cooler. We saw one of the managers fiddling with the toaster for a while. She looked like she was trying to clean it. It never occurred to her to remove the crumb tray.
Instead, she was poking around inside it with a knife while it was still plugged into the wall. People just sat back and watched, wondering how long it would be before she got zapped. Then she turned on the tap and lifted the toaster towards the sink.
Someone finally stepped in to stop her. One might just write this off as someone being a bit dim, but she was the Health and Safety Officer for the building.
Runaway Wheelchair
I worked in home healthcare. My client was moving to another area, so I was training my replacement as the new area was quite a bit of a drive for me. We went over loading and unloading my client from a wheelchair to a vehicle and from a vehicle to a wheelchair.
Things were going well, and I thought the new guy got it. We took my client to the doctor. The client said he wanted the new guy to load and unload him by himself as I won’t be there to supervise. It made perfect sense since I was still there in case something went wrong—and it did!
The client told me to go into the doctor’s office and get him checked in while the new guy unloaded him. I should have stayed with them the entire time, but the client was insistent that the new guy could handle things. We had gone over this several times in training and believed he would be fine.
The new guy got the client out of the car and into the wheelchair fine. He then backed the chair away from the car so he could grab the client’s bag and close the door. But there was something he missed.
The numbskull neglected to engage the brakes on the wheelchair before letting go of the chair. The wheelchair was on a slight incline. He turned to grab the bag, and the client started rolling backward down the slope. I happened to notice and dashed out of the office.
The receptionist was out the door right behind me as the client was rolling down the parking lot. The new guy was still digging in the car. So, the receptionist and I took off after the client.
The dude rolled down the parking lot, across the road, and into a ditch. My client missed his doctor’s appointment as we had to take him to get checked out at the local emergency room.
We also had to talk to the local authorities. The client was fine, and the new guy lost his job. I ended up staying at that job for another two months, making the long drive daily while they looked for another replacement.
A new guy came on board and couldn’t seem to grasp why we were so focused on making sure he understood how the brakes worked until we told him the tale of the runaway wheelchair.
Severe Dyslexia
My sister had very severe dyslexia. Once, she asked me a question that dumbfounded me. She asked me how to spell USB. She asked again, “How do you spell USB”. I was like, “Yeah ok, it’s literally spelled USB, as you say it”.
She freaked out and told me not to poke fun at her for her dyslexia and to tell her how to actually spell it. I started laughing and wrote it down on a piece of paper. I will never forget the look on her face when she realized it.
Rescue Mission
When I was in the coastguard, there was an incident when a vessel called in what they thought was another vessel in distress, but they couldn’t be sure. The watch commander kept refusing to launch the rescue boat until he had more details. We were in the Far North.
The life expectancy of a person in the water without a survival suit was measured in single-digit minutes. We could always get more details when the boat was en route. The exact position of a bunch of floating corpses was of limited value. After three or four minutes, I just said “forget it” and launched the boat.
It turned out the suspected casualty’s radio was banjaxed, but they were otherwise fine. Their boat had a very low freeboard and looked a bit “sinky”. I fully expected to be canned for it, but I was not.
The old man had a long conversation with the guy about how nobody will ever find fault with sending an asset to a possible false alarm, but failing to send an asset to a real emergency is not good.
Before I had joined, the same dude had shrugged off a red flare report as a hoax. Two people lost their lives in that one.
Wireless Television
I worked for Apple for five years at the Genius Bar. One day, a woman came in with a brand new Apple TV and said, “It’s not working”. She handed me the Apple TV, and I placed it on the bar.
Before asking basic troubleshooting questions, I simply wanted to know if she had brought her HDMI and power cords with her; otherwise, I would have to get ours to plug it in.
I asked, “Did you bring your cables?” Her response had me dying of laughter inside. “What are you talking about? It’s wireless.” She thought the TV literally had no wires and thus didn’t plug in the power cable or HDMI.
Vacant Room
During the pandemic, we were not allowed to check in regular, private guests in our hotel, only people visiting on business. One night, a couple came in begging to get a room because they had huge water damage in their place, which made it unliveable at the time. My co-worker turned them down.
The next day a sketchy dude came in and asked for a room, claiming he was there for business. He didn’t have any proof and paid for half of the room with cash. My colleague didn’t take a credit card from him.
In the morning, we made a chilling discovery. The dude was gone, the hotel room was completely trashed, and the TV was missing. My colleague hadn’t taken an ID or passport, and the name and address he gave didn’t exist.
The hotel also had to pay a fine since she checked in a private person who had no proof of doing business in the city.
Deer Crossing
A woman from North Dakota called a radio station to ask for their help. She had spent two years writing letters and attempting to get the deer crossing sign removed from a high traffic area to a safer place.
She assumed that the deer were looking for the deer crossings in the same way people use the pedestrian crossings.
The sign was there because deer commonly cross there, not because the animals are abiding by human traffic laws and are looking for a place to cross the road.
Houston, We Have a Problem
While showing Apollo 13 to my astronomy class, I had a student ask me the dumbest question I have ever heard as a teacher. During the “Houston, we have a problem” scene, this one student raised their hand in the back of the room.
His friend next to him told him to put his hand down, saying that it was “a stupid question”. I went back and asked them what his question was, and his reply was absolutely golden.
He said, “Are all of the guys there named Houston?” I have taught for nearly ten years, and that one is still the winner.
How Did They Get Past Security?
We had bigwigs from another lab come to audit my lab one day. To enter the property, you needed a key card at the front gate entrance. One of the auditors commented at the number of Canadian geese on the property. I said something about how it had just rained, so they were out in full force that day.
This woman…I can’t believe what she said. She—who made a good six figures and had a PhD—looked me straight in the eyes and said, “How do they get past security”? I laughed and said, “You’re right, they should have cards at the least”.
She wasn’t joking and was expecting an answer. I wasn’t quite sure what to say, I was just like, “They flew”. I didn’t know how else I was supposed to answer that utterly ridiculous question.
What's the Internet?
I used to work for an authorized Apple retailer. One day, this old woman, probably in her late 70s or 80s, came in to ask why her phone was acting up. It was a 4 GB iPhone 4 that had no storage left. She did not understand her smartphone and the upgrades that would be required.
I did my best to explain that she would need to upgrade to a device with more storage so it would work the way she wanted. I told her she could keep all of the pictures of her family; all she would have to do was transfer them through the iCloud system over the internet.
That’s when she asked the most ridiculous question: “What’s the internet?” At that moment, she had tears running down her face as she genuinely did not understand a thing I had explained. I had to take my lunch break, so I handed her off to my store manager to take over.
When I clocked back in, she was still in the store. This time, at the checkout counter, with her brand new phone that my manager had sold her to meet a monthly sales quota. I’m sure he never told her what the internet was or how to actually use it.
Trickster
I worked at a coffee shop where we sold two sizes, small and large. I was working the register, ringing up a girl. I asked her what kind of coffee she got, which was fine. However, when I asked her if she got small or large, she responded with a suspicious tone. “Why do you need to know?”
I had to explain to her that one was a larger quantity than the other, and you had to pay for that extra amount. She scoffed and grudgingly told me, “Do you think I’m tricking you?”
Climb On In!
This one guy I went to high school and then worked with at a cheese factory, was certainly the dumbest guy I have ever known.
At this factory, we had a block dumping room where we would dump cheese out of the cardboard cases they came in, stack them on another pallet and toss the cardboard into a large hydraulic compactor.
He actually asked one day what would happen to him if he was in there while it was pressing the boxes. Despite what everyone was telling him, he was somehow convinced that the boxes would protect him. The boxes that this thing was designed to crush!
He once actually started to climb in it before a couple guys stopped him. I’m truly surprised he hasn’t somehow offed himself already.
Call Your Boss
My wife had only been in the United States for a year, but had a green card. It came time to do our taxes and so we stopped in the little Jackson Hewitt kiosk set up inside of Walmart.
As we were getting started, the accountant asked her about her immigration status and she told him she was a Cuban citizen. His answer sealed his fate. He lifted up her social security card and told her that—in no uncertain terms—she was a US citizen and her card proved that.
I told the guy he was wrong and that every green card carrier has a social security card and that doesn’t make someone a citizen. He then turned to me, shoving the card in my face, and yelled, “Look Mister, here is the proof she is an American citizen!”
By now I was angry and asked if he had a boss. He smugly stated that his mom was the owner of that Jackson Hewitt franchise and so I suggested he call her. He did, and while on speakerphone, she found out what he had said and done, and proceeded to call him an idiot.
After she got off the phone, he tried to backpedal, big time. He wanted to act like it never happened so he could still keep our business. However, it was too late. I stood up and said to my wife, “Let’s go, this guy is too stupid to trust him to do our taxes”.
That moment will stay with me for the rest of my life!
I Didn't Know How to Handle It
A full-grown woman asked me how big our pizzas were. I stuck out my fingers, eyeballed about a foot, and said, “Around this big”. She paused for a moment and finally said, “Oh, length-wise?”
I thought perhaps she didn’t know that our pizzas were round, so I told her that our pizzas were circular; therefore, any point across was length-wise.
I went back to tell the other co-worker what I had just experienced. Right after I told her the punchline, “..any point across is length-wise,” she stared at me with this confused look on her face. Her response had me baffled. She smiled and finally said, “Okay, not all of us are Mr. Engineer over here!”
I just walked away. I didn’t know how to handle it. I didn’t think I was a genius for knowing about the geometry of a circle.
Put the Fire Out
I was doing culinary training in advanced patisserie. We were making sugar sculptures from isomalt. We had to bring in torches to “weld” parts of our sculpture together.
Our instructor explained step by step what to do with the isomalt and explained that when we had our pieces molded and cooled, he would show us how to use the torch.
Many of us were busy molding and cooling our pieces before assembling our sculptures. One of the students who shared a station with me was overly hasty and thought he could just assemble his sculpture without the instructor.
He turned on his torch, set his sculpture on a surface that was covered in plastic wrap, and proceeded to set fire to everything around him. At that point, I was roaring at him to stop, but he just brushed me off and screamed back that he knew what he was doing. Before we knew it, the plastic wrap was on fire.
We quickly grabbed fire blankets, and the instructor managed to put it out, but not before we all had the bejesus scared out of us. The instructor chewed out the student for being so reckless.
The Way the World Works
Was on a very windy hike and I passively mentioned that it would be better once we were protected by the trees. A friend of a friend who was with us stops and says, “Wait, don’t the trees make the wind”?
It took me a minute to realize just how ridiculous their logic was. This human being got to 23 years old believing that trees actively flapped their leaves to generate wind.
They felt the wind on their skin, saw the leaves moving and somehow believed this was the way the world worked and never questioned it.
Permanent Marker
I worked at a retail store that sold big appliances. One gentleman who had been working there for a few years was working the register. A couple came in to buy a washer and dryer using cash, more specifically $100 bills.
To check if they were real, my co-worker had to mark every bill with one of those counterfeit pens. If the bills are fake, the mark will be a dark color, and if they are real, it will be yellowish. Every single mark turned black, so he called the authorities.
Officers came, and what they found was hilarious. It turned out my co-worker used a permanent marker, not the special pen, to check each of the $100 bills.
New Employee
I hired a new employee on a Friday. I gave him directions for Monday morning’s job site. I had no idea what stupidity he had in store for me. The employee got there early and helped some guys load all of the building material onto their truck.
Then they took off. They were thieves, and the webcam showed the employee even stopping traffic so they could take off with the loot.
An Eight-Piece Chicken
I used to work at a grocery store deli. We had one customer who left me totally speechless. She asked me: “The eight-piece chicken…how many pieces are in it?” I said, “How many pieces are in the eight-piece chicken? Um. There are eight pieces in the eight-piece chicken”.
She was very polite and replied, “OK, I’ll have that, please!” So, I packaged it up, and she went away happy.
Just Ditzy Sometimes
I was working with the maintenance guy on the bottom of a grain leg in a concrete pit. It was about 6 feet wide, 15 feet long, by 7 feet tall. It was a tight workspace with a conveyor in the middle and one ladder out. We had a stuck nut and bolt that he sprayed penetrating oil on.
He immediately forgot what he had just done and decided to heat it with a torch. In an instant, there were flames up to the ceiling, and smoke filled the space. He was trapped in a corner while I was able to get an extinguisher.
By the time I got back—30 seconds—he had it knocked down by frantically smacking it with gloves and smothering it. He was a good guy, just ditzy sometimes.
Is This Real?
I used to work at a fine jewelry kiosk in a mall. Our jewelry included gold bracelets and necklaces bonded to sterling silver, sterling silver rings with cubic zirconia gems, gold engagement rings with diamond chips clustered together rather than one large diamond, etc.
I had a lot of regulars, and this one particular woman would come in often. Every time for every item that she was interested in, she would ask the same blood-boiling question: “Is this real?”
I explained what “bonded” meant and how we didn’t sell diamond rings for $25, but that the rings were indeed certified sterling silver with synthetic gems.
I gave her information like this repeatedly, day after day, and she would follow up every explanation with, “Okay, but…is it real?”
Stay Positive
A woman was hired into a position that I was doing the work for and promised a promotion to. I tried to stay positive, but she was an idiot. She came to me asking for help double-checking all the inventory that had been sent out over the past year.
It was an important task because we were a pharmaceutical manufacturer that worked with controlled substances.
The company was way behind the times, so while the current inventory was accounted for via a spreadsheet, most of the records prior to that were just paper packing slips in sleeve protectors in a binder. I helped her get started and went back to trying to get my own work done.
Then, I heard a commotion. She was berating our manufacturing crew because the count was off by 13 cases. She was going bananas, calling people names, and getting our operations director involved.
He came over to me and calmly asked me to double-check her count. She stood over me like a gargoyle while I flipped through the binder.
I got to one day’s particularly large shipment and pulled the very obviously multi-page packing slip out of the sleeve protector. She went white.
She Was Completely Serious
I used to sell paint. A woman came in saying she wanted to paint her fence. I gave her advice and explained to her how to prepare the surface. Then, she asked, “Do I need anything to apply the paint?” I told her she needed a roller or a brush.
Her response left me in disbelief. “Oh, I can’t just splash the paint on the fence?” She was completely serious.
Where Were You?
Back in the day, I worked as a tree surgeon, and each morning, the crews would assemble in the garage, where the boss would hand out a 3×5 card with the address and instructions on what needed to be done. There was a guy who misread the address on the card, and they went to the wrong address.
The instructions were to cut down all trees and shrubs in preparation for demolition work. Before the crew left, the boss said the house was being torn down for new construction, so the job was to clean out the whole lot.
This guy got the crew to the wrong address, and the foreman never checked the card. Therefore, he started cutting down big trees and throwing them through the chipper. The whole lot was cleaned of all shrubs and trees by mid-afternoon, and they went back to the shop.
The boss was hopping mad. He said, “Where were you guys? I went out to the job, and you weren’t there”. I wish I were there to see his face when the foreman told them they had finished the job.
I can’t imagine coming home and finding my big two-foot thick trees, along with all my mature azaleas and rhododendrons, gone.
Call the Authorities
I worked at a small-time aircraft maintenance and supply place. They had opened a new hangar down the road and ordered new toolsets. It was a holiday weekend, and the resident moron was visiting family in the same city as the tool supplier, so they sent him to pick them up.
They bought him a ticket to go down on a Wednesday, and then on Monday—after his vacation—he would rent a box truck and pick up the tool sets. Having this guy pick up the tools was only slightly cheaper and not that much faster than other options.
He rented the truck and picked up the tools the day he got to town. He then proceeded to park the unlocked truck somewhere in the city. He picked up the empty truck on Monday.
He didn’t call the authorities, the company, his supervisor—no one. He just drove the empty truck back. It cost the company over $150K.
An Apple a Day
I asked my boyfriend if he wanted an apple. He said yes, so I pulled one out of the fridge and handed it to him. He looked confused. I asked him what was wrong…his answer still blows me away to this day.
He asked me to slice it for him. He’d never eaten an apple whole before. He wasn’t sure how to bite into it. He was 27.
I'm Used to Seeing Crazy Stuff
Registered nurse here. I see some crazy stuff, but one thing that stands out was the time I was admitting a guy to the hospital. I can’t really remember what for but he was diabetic, had heart disease, and was generally unhealthy.
Anyhow, I’m at the computer going over some admission questions with him and his 10 family members who are crowded in the room with him. A few minutes in, he starts complaining that he’s thirsty. He needs something to drink right now.
So I get on my phone and call the nurse assistant, and ask her to bring in some ice water. As soon as the words are out of my mouth the whole family screams: “NOOOO! NO WATER! HES ALLERGIC TO WATER!” Well, this is going to be a problem.
Turns out the guy had been drinking nothing but Sprite and sweet tea for years, because of his “water allergy.” The next question his wife had was “Where are we all supposed to sleep?”
The whole family, 10 people, were planning to stay at the hospital with him. You can’t make this stuff up.
Make the Grade
I got a bad grade in geography in high school. My teacher kept trying to push me to do better, and suggested I talk to my parents about it. I very reluctantly told my mom that I was failing geography.
I’ll never forget her response: “How irresponsible can you really be Justin? How do you fail geography? It’s just shapes!”
Dumber Than a Bag of Rocks
A girl my dad dated for a while. Even while dating her, my dad would say she was dumber than a bag of rocks. One day, she sat down to watch a movie with my dad.
The movie was all about this guy and his twin brother. She sits and watches the whole thing, no interruptions. At the end, she turns and asks, “So there were two of him?”
That would explain why she always had the TV turned to a music channel. Apparently, she couldn’t follow normal TV or movies.
She's Beyond Help
There is a girl in my class who is beyond help at this point. Her best moments: “I don’t want to donate my eyes because I don’t want people to see what I’ve seen.” “Gingers can’t be American.” “Yay! I got a D in French.”
I just want to clarify the French grade, though. I don’t want to seem like I think I’m better than anyone because of grades. I wrote this one down because she interrupted other people’s learning and shouted this out in the middle of the lesson.
Honestly, as long as anyone tries in their test it’s fine, but she was on her phone most of the time.
Interesting Method
An infantryman was told to trim the hedges. Instead of getting shears, he decided to just lift up the enormous lawnmower, and then have his buddy start the motor…as the infantryman holds the hedges in place with his bare hands.
When the medical team got called in, we bandaged him, then used a tourniquet temporarily. Senior medics took him to the ER, but they couldn’t save his hand. Shocker…
Cart Wrangler
I worked for a big chain grocery store as bagger and cart wrangler. There was this one overweight blond woman who would come in all time and cause chaos to no end.
One example of her ridiculous and unnecessary nonsense included buying a 15-pound turkey and complaining that it tasted bad and wanting to return it.
She presented a platter with an empty carcass except for one piece of meat on one bone. Another time, she bought a $37 plant, did not water it, showed up a year and a half later with the plant dead as a doornail, and demanded a refund.
Then she bought a grill, used 10 gallons of gasoline as fuel, caused an understandable fire/explosion, came back with receipt and charred grill, and demanded a refund. I could go on. This would be a weekly, if not bi-weekly, happening.
It got to the point where many cashiers would see her enter the store, turn off their light, and leave. Now, when I say she made a fuss, I’m not talking about your normal “I want to speak to your manager” type deal. Oh no, she went beyond that and went even further.
She would rant and rave, throw herself on the floor, roll around, throw things, call the police, which I witnessed and kept count at 87 times, and pull out her cell phone filming herself being “victimized” to report us to the media.
She was eventually banned from the store after years of this. I heard stories that she began terrorizing our neighbor branch 7 blocks down the road.
My Biggest Fan
Once I was in line for a Neil Gaiman book signing. As soon as it was my turn to get my book signed, I was so starstruck I blurted out the most backward thing ever: “You are my biggest fan!” I immediately realized my mistake and apologized profusely, and Neil just laughed it off and signed the book.
I was so flustered I didn’t pay attention to what he scribbled in. Only after I left the area and opened up my copy of the book to realize he’d signed it with, “From your biggest fan, Neil Gaiman”.
Anatomy Lesson
My friend and his EMT partner got a call that a woman just had her water break while having intercourse with her boyfriend. They rushed over to find this young woman freaking out, complaining she has liquid oozing from her vagina, and that she believes she broke her water.
My buddy calms her down, puts on his gloves, and does a quick examination of her nether regions. After a moment down there he says, “Ma’am,” holds up a finger, “This is sperm. Your water isn’t broken.
How long have you been pregnant?” She replied, “No, I am not pregnant, but I thought he broke my water!” After a quick explanation of human anatomy, they left.
Scam Likely
I work in the dispatch center for a department that serves a city with a population just shy of a million, so we get a buttload of calls every day. Naturally, we get some wild stories about various cons, especially these days.
Because of this, I quickly became numb to some of the mental gymnastics people do while they rationalize why they sent the IRS $5,000 worth of Best Buy gift cards purchased from five different Best Buy stores.
Half the stories give me a chuckle, but an overwhelming majority of them just cause me to feel bad for the caller because I know they’re not getting any of that money back. This brings me to a call that I took last year from a younger woman who was likely in her late 20s or early 30s.
Her story started off like any run-of-the-mill scam: Someone claiming to be from the FBI called to inform her that she had a warrant out for her but that she could “clear her name” if she sent them money.
Well, how much money did they ask for? They told her that all of the money in her checking account would suffice…Yup, that’s correct. Whatever random amount of money she had would do—so, that’s what she sent. The total amounted to about $4,000. But wait—there’s more.
After feeling bad for her and gathering some additional information, I began to let her know about the various reporting options and whatnot. She cut me off and asked, “Well, what can I do about the verification pictures?”
I was like, “What are you talking about?” What she said next blew my mind. She explained, “Well, yeah, they said they needed to verify my identity through their body verification system.
So, I sent them several intimate photos as they asked me to—pictures from the front, the side, and from the back while I was bending over.” I was absolutely stunned.
She had to do a quintessential, “Ya there?” into the phone so that I could come back to freaking reality for a moment. At this point, I thought I was the one getting messed with!
But she was bawling her eyes out by this time, so I made no assumptions, other than the fact that there was probably even more to the story—WHICH THERE FREAKING WAS.
Like a respectful kid listening to a bedtime story, I was just like, “And then what happened?” She proceeded to tell me that they threatened to send the photos to her friends and family if she didn’t pay them even more money.
How much money? Well, in true FBI-Body-Verifying-Agent form, they doubled down and said that all the money she had in her savings account would be enough, WHICH WAS $25,000!
I’m just sitting there in my chair like, please God, no. But of course, she sent it to them. I’ve considered getting into the scamming business ever since.
Licence Plate Number
A few weeks ago, I had to explain to my wife that the letters on her license plate were part of her “license plate number.” She got a ticket at her university for parking without payment.
The payment kiosk makes you enter your license plate number when paying for a day of visitor parking. She was ranting and raving about what bullcrap it was, so I asked her to show me the receipt she got when she paid for parking.
Sure enough, she had just entered the numbers and not the letters. I don’t know how she made it into her mid-30s before learning this.
Bad Life Choices
There was a troubled kid I went to high school with. He struggled with school but had friends. Nevertheless, he was starting to do drugs and go down a bad way. He decided to photocopy the front and back side of a $20 bill, cut it out of normal paper, and glue the two halves with Elmer’s glue.
What is even sadder is that to test his new money he went to the gas station and bought some gum and it ACTUALLY WORKED?!? So in his mind it must have meant that it was fool proof.
So he then tried to go and deposit the glued up money at an actual bank. He was obviously found out and arrested. I don’t know where he is now but I’m assuming he is making similar life choices.
His Answer Was Unforgettable
Last summer, my friend got incredibly sunburned. Like blistering, can’t wear clothes sunburned. When I asked him why he didn’t wear sunscreen, he told me he wanted to get a little tan. When I told him he still would have gotten tan if he had worn at least a low SPF, he didn’t believe me.
So then I asked him what he thought SPF meant. His answer was unforgettable. He said, I kid you not, “That’s the number of hours it works before you have to reapply”. Once I stopped laughing, I sat him down and explained UVA/UVB radiation, how sunscreen works, and what the SPF means.
Fast forward to this summer, hanging out in my neighbor’s pool. I notice my friend is looking a little red and ask if he’s wearing sunscreen. He said: “Yeah! I got SPF 8, so it blocks 80% of the UV rays”! Well, it’s a start. Now we’re learning math.
The Most Baffling Question
I used to work at Disneyland in the outdoor vending department. I sold balloons, ice cream, etc. I would get a lot of dumb questions, but one took the cake. I was working on Main Street at a cart in between Adventureland and Frontierland.
A woman came up with her family, and she asked me the most baffling question ever. “Are we in the castle?” I was a little confused because the castle was in plain view on our left. I just said, “No, it’s right there,” and I pointed. She asked me one more time.
She thought when you entered Disneyland, you were automatically inside a castle. Even her younger daughter said, “See, I told you we weren’t in the castle yet.” It completely blew my mind.
Absent Minded
I worked in a camera store. My co-worker worked in our lab that printed pictures and processed film. We had a machine that developed film automatically. All we had to do was load it and change the chemicals every once in a while.
Since film is light sensitive, if it’s exposed to light before it goes through the chemicals, the film is ruined, and there won’t be any pictures to make from it. My co-worker was working on his computer when the film machine started beeping.
He went over to the machine and opened it up while the film was running through it, exposing the film. Our head lab guy started yelling at him, “Close it, you’re exposing film”! Not only that, but the machine had a screen that said what the problem was and when film was being processed.
I had no idea why he felt the need to open it. The guy barely lasted a month.
Don't Worry, I'll Fix It!
One time my husband called me at work and said, “Babe, you’re gonna be mad. I made a mess, but don’t worry, I’ll fix it”! I didn’t even ask, just sighed, because he is basically Lucy from I Love Lucy. When I got home a little bit later, it was to a living room COVERED in grey powder.
My husband was completely filthy holding a trash bag and broom. He had a super panicked look on his face. That’s when I realized what he’d done. It turned out he’d decided to help around the house and wanted to clean the fireplace.
He’d just decided the best way to do it would be to stand in front of it with a trash bag and use the leaf blower to blow the ashes in. Spoiler, that doesn’t work.
I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, but I laughed my butt off and it’s still one of my favorite weird things he’s done.
Unplug the Router
I worked at a chain pizza store. It was Saturday night, and it was busy, as Saturdays usually are. This employee took it upon himself to unplug the router, disabling the store’s internet and thus online orders without telling anyone.
When I arrived Sunday morning, the internet was out, and I spent all morning trying to fix it. Finally, we called our internet service provider, and they sent out a tech on Tuesday morning. We were without online ordering Saturday night and all of Sunday and Monday and probably lost about $3K in business.
Once the internet was back up, I was able to check the networked security cameras. I watched him unplug it and later plug it back in incorrectly.
When questioned about it, he lied, stating the cables got knocked out on accident. He was fired on Tuesday.
He Was Not Impressed
The first hotel I worked at was new, so some of us working there were also new to the industry. A guest who was already checked in came up after his meal and asked if we had any sweets.
That’s when I made a dire mistake. I said that we only had mints and brought the little bowl up onto the counter. He said, “No, I mean suites, like large guestrooms”.
I was completely embarrassed. The guest was not impressed at all by my stupidity. In my defense, the hotel didn’t have any suites, so the word wasn’t in my vocabulary as of yet.
With Aloe Vera
My friend once thought aloe vera was the name of some European model. Since cosmetic ads would always say the product name and add “with aloe vera” as they showed a number of models washing their faces or whatnot in the background, he believed that aloe vera was one of them.
He actually said something to the effect of, “It’s crazy how she gets hired for literally every single commercial”.