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There’s little that can take a person’s breath away like the moment they realize they done something horribly, monumentally wrong at work.
It might have been an accident, it might have been negligence, but you know it’s your fault and you’re probably going to pay with your job.
These 15 people had that moment, but it was swiftly followed by one that completely absolved them of their crime.
15. That’s definitely a bad moment.
While phoning a customer and trying to explain I needed a key to get in to the bay, I accidentally just like “F**kinggggg” instead of like “ummmm” like a normal person.
So it was like “Hey there. Calling from (company name). Just needed access to this bay and f**kinnnnggg the door is locked so I need the key.”
The woman on the phone sounded very ESL so I got away with it. No complaint, customer didn’t even acknowledge it.
14. Pass the buck, keep your job.
I used to work as a warehouse manager for a company that sells expensive measuring instruments and managed to accidentally drop a box with glass lenses worth $1100 each.
Most of them were broken. The box was freshly in so I took a huge risk by lying that they came in that way and must have gotten damaged during transport.
Luckily for me they did believe me.
13. That’s some brotherly love right there.
My younger brother and I used to work at the same supermarket.
When I was about 21 or so, I decided to celebrate my birthday with a huge bottle of vodka and some friends.
Had completely forgotten I had work the next day.
Manager had called my phone at 6 in the morning, wondering where the hell I was, but phone had died so it went straight to voicemail.
So he called my brother, who went to check on me. Upon seeing the empty bottle of vodka and me passed the f**k out on my bed, he called the manager back and told him that the two of us had agreed to switch shifts and forgot to write it down. Totally his bad, he’ll be right over.
Little bro wakes me up, explains he covered for me, and that I need to sober up and be at work for his 9:00 shift in three hours.
By 9:00, it was clear I still was not sober, but fear of losing my job meant going to work anyway.
Little bro spends the day shepherding my drunk a** around the store to avoid customers or the manager getting close enough to smell the alcohol on me. I sobered up over the course of the day, and felt like s**t, but thanks to my little brother’s actions I wasn’t actually caught.
12. There’s no drunk like wine drunk.
It was the night before I was scheduled to have a tense meeting with my boss and a client. The meeting was supposed to be a sort of “peace talk” because of tension growing between my staff and the client who was an emotional and difficult person to work with.
The night before my wife and I opened a bottle of wine with dinner and managed to finish it off before bed. This didn’t seem like too much at the time but the next morning I woke up sicker than I have ever been. I still had this difficult meeting so I got up got dressed managed to choke down some Advil and a glass of water. The minute I get on the highway to work I feel my stomach twisting. There is nothing between where I am now and where my office is except highway with almost no shoulder. Half way to work I feel that feeling in my throat, like a tightening, and my bowels are starting to make terrible noises.
I realize I am going to throw up and look around my car for anything to throw up in. I spot McDonalds bag is on the floor so I grab it. Hoping I don’t need to use it I speed up trying to get to my exit so I can pull over and ralph. No dice. I held the bag up to my mouth going 85 MPH and throw up red wine into the McDonalds bag which had the strength of tissue paper because my hot acid puke punched right through the bag and into my lap. By some miracle I had extra business slacks in my car. I stopped at a gas station and changed in the bathroom.
I looked into the mirror and a haggard sallow man with flop sweat and sunken eyes stared back at me. Even with the wardrobe change I smelled faintly of booze and vomit. I went to the meeting and my boss noticed something was up. He rescheduled with the client telling me “I don’t think you’re up to it this morning”.
I for sure thought he was going to fire me for being a huge drunk but nothing happened.
I don’t drink wine anymore.
11. Nice old lady is debatable.
Spilled soil samples from an ecology project I was helping our doctorate student on. I contemplated just putting them back into the containers and playing dumb, but that would have been a sh**ty thing.
So instead, I take our work truck, the soil coring device and in the middle of the night I go to each area again and retake the cores. The bad thing is some sites are on people’s front yards, so here I am, coring yards at 2am on a Wednesday in front of a house like some really sh**ty dirt burglar.
One old lady heard me and asked what I was doing in her yard, and thankfully instead of shoot me, or let my Lab Director know what the hell I was doing she simply told me that “everyone makes mistakes in science, take those scientists trying to tell us the Earth is getting too warm. Good luck with your dirt study!”
You know what silly old lady? I’ll let this one slide, ignore the fact that we are trying to work out how climate change is interacting with urban ecosystems, you didn’t rat on me. Yes I will enjoy my dirt study.
I did not get fired. No one knew what I did except that nice old lady. And now the internet.
10. The day he almost died.
I climbed in the bailer, to push a stuck bale out.
There’s a camera pointed right at the bailer, so I thought for sure I was done. But nobody saw me or asked about it.
Don’t climb in the bailer, other than stealing that’s the only other thing that will get you fired.
9. So many people’s lives would never have been the same.
Loooong time ago. My first job. In advertising in London.
I was sent a gif by my old college roommate of a woman sucking off a horse and throwing up a ton of jizz. Pretty gross. I forwarded it to his GF to encourage him not to send me this crap again. But I didn’t just send it to her. I sent it to everyone in my office email list. It included clients, some of them pretty high up and very conservative. I panicked like crazy. Luckily, my art director was dating the CEO’s PA and she was really cool. Got the IT guy to delete it from all internal emails, and then sent an email to all the clients telling them there was a virus attached to the email I had sent and to immediately delete it.
No one ever saw that horrendous gif. No one on my agency ever knew except my AD and his GF. I for sure would have been toast.
8. An honest mistake, but still…
Turns out we were allowed to grab free water from the walk in fridge but not Red Bull’s.
Didn’t realize they weren’t comped until someone told me I could get in serious trouble for stealing weeks later.
7. Someone was looking out for you, that’s for sure.
I work a desk job at a small office. Bosses left for a meeting and wouldn’t be back for the rest of the day.
I didn’t have much to do, so I decided to buy a couple tall cans across the street and watch some Netflix.
An hour later, during a quiet part in the show, I heard my boss talking on his phone.
Apparently their meeting got cancelled and they’d been back for about 30 minutes.
My desk is right outside my boss’s office, and somehow he didn’t notice anything.
He’s extremely strict about work and always complains about time-wasting, but never said anything to me.
I have no idea how I wasn’t caught.
6. He could never prove it was him.
Parked badly, my mirror scratched my boss’s truck.
He was a prick so I never mentioned it and I forgot about it until reading this
5. No one to blame but himself.
There were some police officers at the reception desk. Not that unusual, police would show up for a wide range of reasons. I strolled by on the way to my office – they were being attended to so I didn’t need to get involved.
20 minutes later I was strolling past reception again. The police were gone. I popped into the facility manager’s office beside the reception desk. We were talking about stuff and I started telling him about this great hashish I had just got my hands on…maybe I could even get him some…
CEO sticks his head in the door and says ‘Sympleton, can I see you out here?’ I stepped out to see what’s up, and he’s standing there beside the same two police officers.
‘Oh s**t’, I think.
CEO says ‘Sympleton, these officers are here to drop off a donation cheque for our refugee fund! I was just showing them around the building. Can you take some pictures of us for the website?’
4. Answering phones is one of the worst office jobs.
When I was working as an intern, there was this hideous guy who called the office and started making insane accusations and demands.
I thought I had put him on hold when I called one of my supervisors on another line and said, “There’s some crazy f**k on the other line demanding to talk to someone in charge” but actually somehow he wasn’t on hold; he was listening the whole time. I heard a voice say “WHAT?” on the other line and I was like oh f**k, I’m dead. Lol. So I picked up the phone and just hung it up lol.
By some miracle the guy never called back. I told my supervisor that he hung up and that was the end of it.
3. That’s more than one lucky break.
Spilled coffee all over my laptop.
I told my supervisor that it had stopped working and she assumed it stopped because of how old it was.
I got a new, much better laptop out of it!
2. As long as you fix it.
Years ago when I worked at a web agency there were several times where I accidentally took down an entire site.
Luckily, I usually realized it right away and fixed the issue.
The biggest site I did this to was probably Brunswick Bowling.
1. This is like the setup for a movie.
I work at a high volume luxury jewelry boutique, we handle well into the multimillions of dollars worth of jewels and timepieces everyday. When I was moving out of my apartment, I thought it would be smart to save some coin and just take the used boxes from our shipping/receiving room.
Some of you see where this is obviously headed.
I got home from work, dragged the boxes upstairs, and started to pack. 45 minutes into packing my kitchen, I heard a clink on the tile, and didn’t think anything of it, just thought to myself that I’d pick whatever just fell up later.
I forgot about it entirely and went to bed.
Next morning comes around, it’s about 6am. Too dark to see with just the daylight, and too early for me to want to turn too many lights on. I walk into the kitchen to get some coffee going and stepped right on a 9-carat GIA flawless diamond ring. I accidentally stole and then stepped on a 1.3 MILLION DOLLAR RING.
I figured if could take it without anyone noticing, I could put it back the same way. So I tucked it into my lunch bag, and snuck it into our inventory without anybody noticing a damn thing.
I’m so secondhand relieved I think I need a drink!
Would you add a story to this list? Share it with us in the comments!
