17 people share the absolute worst mistake they've seen someone make at work.

'Everyone makes mistakes,' but royally messing up at work is a special sort of panic-inducing nightmare...

Even when you've lost all your will to try, becoming the reason they have to put up a sign that says 'don't text and use the coffee maker' in the staff kitchen is never a proud moment. Oops, sorry about sending that private email to the entire staff that included a thread where everyone was roasting the boss.

So, when a Reddit user asked, 'What's the worst mistake you've seen someone do in their job?' people were ready to share the most embarrassing, funniest, or more destructive mid-shift mishaps they've ever seen on the clock.

1.

Printed 500 copies of her gas bill on the company printer. The printer only has enough tray capacity for 250 copies so she had to have reloaded the paper at least once. - alltherobots

2.

When I was a teen i worked at a full service gas station. One day a guy came in towing a boat to get gas. A guy a couple years younger was working and thought the owner had taken the gas cap off of the boat.

He placed the gas nozzle in a fishing rod holder. It is basically a hole in the top of the side of the boat. He proceeded to pump about $40.00 worth of gas on to the floor of the boat. The owner was understandably upset. - RayATrogdon

3.

My pharmacy manager accidentally stabbed himself with a USED needle after vaccinating someone. he had to leave immediately to get a blood test lmao - lets_get_wavy_duuude

4.

Make a $30,000 art mistake. Misspelled text on a tee shirt that was produced for costco and the spelling error was only realized after 15k shirts were made. Really the opportunity cost probably bumped that up to about $60,000 since the shirts couldn't be remade in time. It was me about 10 years ago. - sooprvylyn

5.

I'm a home appliance installer and was out working a pretty big job at some 20,000 square foot mansion. They had another installation team working on a second kitchen in the basement.

One of these guys was drilling the mounting holes for the dishwasher into their granite countertop (don't do this, ok?) and drilled them too small, so when we went to secure it a massive 4ft chunk of granite split off and smashed into the floor, breaking a couple tiles in the process. Dude sounded like Yosemite Sam with his cussing and the customer was pissed. - bushpotatoe

6.

Saw a guy get zapped pretty bad when he stuck a tool in the wrong place on a big dryer at a hotel where I worked. We had asked him if he should cut the power first, and he said naww, don't need to. For a moment after, we thought he was dead. - Imaginary_Medium

7.

I had a girl that worked for me that one day had a guy try to pay with a $100 bill. We all knew that we did not take any bill over a $20 but she didn’t listen sometimes. This time she took the bill and when she was cashing out her draw the smart safe didn’t take the $100 bill. I asked if she checked it and she of course said yes.

I looked at the bill and noticed it said “Movie Prop” on the bill. She somehow missed it. - BugJuiceForever

8.

My manager at my previous job mixed up the class dates for employees of a very large client, and it affected their billing. Of course, none of us including our manager knew she did it at the time. I had to find out due to the barrage of emails and angry phone calls I got from said client.

After assuring them I'd look into it, I had look through a long email chain just to find out it was our manager who made the mistake. I told her, and her reply was for me to fix it.

It frustrated me to no end because she always lectured me on making little mistakes and I had to fix them myself. This mistake, however, was huge as it took months to figure out what went wrong, and I already had to deal with the brunt of the client’s anger and frustration.

There was no accountability on my manager's end. Not even a thank you or any kind of appreciation for me for sorting it out. Glad I left that place. - afewapplesshort

9.

I worked for a start-up cider manufacturer in my second year of college. Normally after a day of production we have to sanitize all the metal components in hot caustic wash. There are hundreds of pieces, so it takes a while. Anyways, our managers left us an hour before our shift ended to clean up. I had to go do some e-commerce end-of-day stuff before leaving so my coworker wrapped up the cleanup.

On Monday we returned to the warehouse burned down. Apparently he left the caustic heater on all weekend and it caused a chemical fire. Everything was destroyed and it ended up bankrupting the company. He dropped out of his co-op degree after, he wouldn’t be able to get recommended for another placement. - byebyecars

10.

It's me, I'm the idiot. I was a busser in a busy restaurant when I was 18, and I managed to dump an entire full bus tub onto a little girl. - GrinAndBeerIt

11.

Told a newbie to clean the steel panels on the deep fryers, expecting them to wipe them down with a cloth. They instead grabbed a jug of water and decided to rinse it, with water going into the still hot oil. Yanked them back so fast I nearly gave them whiplash. - chillyfeets

12.

Once, I served drinks to a child and her mom. I accidentally got them mixed up. The mom ordered a mixed drink with bourbon and the daughter said her drink tasted funny. - achenx75

13.

Newish employee deleted the root directory for the SFTP server. Took the server guys about a day and a half to fully restore it, with all files since the previous night backup lost. Same employee did the exact same thing again a few weeks later. Still had a job when I left, somehow. - GreatTragedy

14.

Company director sent his travel plans for a ‘work convention’ to the communal printer in the staff room. Bet him and the other director would have had a lovely time. 5* hotel, presidential suite in Barcelona for a week sounded nice.

His wife thought so too and was furious she wasn’t going also surprised that him and lady director were sharing a room…for a week… and that when she looked into it there was no convention. Things went south pretty fast and now the company is no more. - Quizzical_Chimp

15.

A girl on the till had a guy come up and buy a $2 pack of gum with a $100 note saying sorry he didn’t have anything smaller. She gave him his $98 change and he left. He came back in a few minutes later and said “hey I found a $2 coin in my car can I have my $100 back?”

So she did it. It was a small shop so it was a tough scam to fall for. She also managed to lock herself out of her own car while it was running but parked in a way that no one could get in or out of the car park - quietlycommenting

16.

I started a job in the computer department of a library, and the director was showing me how to edit the website. He made a new page, and said 'this is how you delete a page,' then he clocked 'delete all' and clocked 'yes' on the warning which came up without reading it, this caused the entire website to be deleted.

He had the mouse hovering over the Delete All button for a few second before clocking it, but I didn't say anything because I figured that there's no way the guy would be stupid enough to delete the whole website. Thankfully they had a black of the website which they could use. - locks_are_paranoid

17.

One time a member of my dev team was given a task to cancel a few credit cards (less than 10) directly in the database. They canceled 17 million, the mistake was only caught when the company help line started to receive millions of calls the next day from all over the country with people asking why their cards were not working. - Due-Aioli-6641