“To err is human to forgive is divine” gets floated around a lot and generally is a good mindset to have, but in a professional setting, there are some errors grievous enough that one can and will lose any potential second chances. 

So one netizen wanted to know what outrageous, career-ending mistakes people had made and the internet delivered in spades. From downright malicious bosses to dangerous slip-ups, all sorts of things can ultimately get a person unemployed. Be sure to upvote your favorites and comment your own stories below. 

#1

I was opening my packages in the mailroom, using a pocket knife to slice open the package tape. Secretary came in and chatted. We’re both Italian so we gesture a lot while talking.

Sometime after the conversation, the Ops manager came down from his office and escorted me out of the building. Had forgotten the knife in my hand while talking with the the secretary and she made an accusation that I had threatened her with it during our conversation.

Was fired three days later.

I had worked with this woman for almost a decade. Helped her children with their homework etc.

Years later I learned corporate wanted to take down my boss, and started the process by going after his biggest supporters. I was the 3rd domino to fall. After I was railroaded, almost 40% of the branch’s staff left the company. I guess the secretary was in on it, and leapt at any excuse to take me out.

Shame. Really loved that job. And got fired when my first child was due in only four weeks. Was very demoralizing for quite a while.

Image credits: Bokuden101

#2

Led and recruited a sales team. One of the female sellers admitted that our CEO was sexually harassing her. Got her to confess to our Sales Manager. Found out that more of our female staff had similar experiences so i rallied them as i needed evidence before proceeding. CEO got an ear full from HR. Proceeds to pressure all his female victims until one of them drops my name. I get fired.

Image credits: IntenselySwedish

#3

Showing up to work noticeably drunk (I broke my typical vodka-for-breakfast routine) and it ended everything in my life as I knew it…

But in the best way possible. I worked a corporate insurance job and was already on notice for poor performance/attendance. I went to work, and was in a black out, which wasn’t unusual, but because I drank more and added a different liquor than usual I wasn’t really functioning. My boss had a coworker Take me home. HR called and told me basically that I could take some time off and take care of my “health issues”… strongly suggested FMLA… saw my therapist that weekend— I’d been lying to him about how much I drank and desperately trying to get him to help me manage my drinking better.

Turns out I’m an alcoholic!! I checked myself in rehab and haven’t had a drink in eight years.

At that particular job, I went from being on the brink of being fired to being promoted to assistant vice president, and being sought after by competitors in my industry.

I ended my career as a drinker. And I shifted the trajectory of my life.

Quitting, drinking and reflecting on the reasons why I was drinking and learning that I can’t control jack s**t aside from my reactions and responses changed my life. I’ve been through some of the most difficult adult situations in these past eight years and I would still say that my life has only gotten better and better over time.

If you think you have a drinking problem, I say it’s worth a look at yourself. quitting drugs and alcohol is not easy, but my God it’s so worth it.

Most errors and mistakes end up remaining internal, nothing but an unhappy memory for all involved. But add in a live broadcast and a microphone and we can still “enjoy” some particularly public mistakes to this day. Football (the one where you actually kick the ball) presenters Richard Keys and Andy Gray unknowingly broadcasted their opinion that a female referee wouldn’t understand offside rules. Both lost their jobs. 

Networks are pretty quick to dump workers who make such mistakes, but politicians tend to have a bit more staying power. In 1997 Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien joked around with some other Prime Ministers that U.S. politicians would all be in jail for selling votes in nearly any other country. 

#4

Went on a first date with a girl who turned out to be a horrible person 20mins in, I did what I could to get out of it because she was telling stories about crazy things she’d done and was proud of. I didn’t pull anything to get out of it, just dodged land mines and asked a ton of questions about her so I could get out of it sooner. Then said I wasn’t feeling the connection and I wanted to be honest so we didn’t waste each others time.

Found out a week later that she contacted my previous employers, because she found my LinkedIn, told them all stories about how I talked a ton of s**t about them all. And now I can’t get a reference from my previous 3 jobs… and people I was on good terms with.

All because I went on a date with a psychopath.

Image credits: FirstFlight

#5

Tried to get better pay for my workers. Corporate did not like that.

Image credits: Shimariel

#6

A guy I knew got fired for sleeping with the boss’s daughter

Nothing dodgy, entirely above board – he didn’t even know they were related and had never met her before

They met on a night out, he went back to her (parents’) place and they had sex. No problems, no drama etc.

The next morning they got dressed and she was showing him to the door when her dad… his boss… walked out of the kitchen

IMO that’s pretty f****d up – they were consenting adults, he had no idea it was his boss’s daughter. No significant age difference, she wasn’t wasted or anything, she’d never worked at (or AFAIK even visited) the company when my friend was there or even met him

Image credits: audigex

Another way to end up with a particularly well-known mistake is if there is enough money involved. In the world of financial markets, these are called “fat finger errors,” where someone hits the wrong keys (easy to do with fat fingers) and sends out a trade with wildly incorrect amounts. In 2006 a trader at Mizuho Securities in Japan short-sold a stock and ended up making the company spend around ¥40 billion to fix it. This would be about 288,084,775.00 United States Dollars in 2023. 

#7

Called the HR lady the “angel of death” to a coworker on chat. (HR was in a different state, so any time they came to town we all knew it was most likely to lay off people ). Angel of death came to get me shortly after ??

Image credits: michaudra2

#8

Kind of the opposite.

I worked at a second hand electronics store, a dude came in with a PS2 to sell. I noticed the serial number was scratched off and thought that was a concern, but processed it anyway.

It went through testing, came back greenlit and I assumed that meant that it was ok.

Assumed wrong, management sacked my a*s an hour later.

Went home, re-evaluated my life choices, and that year went back to college. Got my A-levels, then my degree, and now Ive been a software engineer for almost 10 years.

Image credits: drake3011

#9

Not exactly a “career” but i worked in a fast food spot that didn’t have any air conditioning, and theres a workers law where i live that states once it gets to a certain temp in the building they legally can’t stay open. I brought a thermometer to work

Image credits: alonthestreet

Similarly, Deutsche Bank on accident sent $6 billion to a hedge fund in 2015. This was a result of a junior employee putting in the wrong number while their boss was on vacation. The error was later rectified, but it does make one wonder why these mistakes never end with a bank depositing $6 billion in my bank account. 

#10

I was a part time intern making $9 an hour (USD) and my boss asked if I had any plans for the weekend. I had said I was going to buy a new car (very much old and used as that’s what I could afford) and he asked if I was buying a brand new car. My response was that my budget isn’t big enough for a new car and a couple weeks later during my 1 year review my manager said they didn’t have the work for me and that I was disrespectful for telling the boss I didn’t make enough money. At the time I was living comfortably as a college student just needed different transportation. I tried not to be disrespectful but apparently I was.

Image credits: Kulee43

#11

One of the Directors wasn’t happy with some work I’d done, started poking me hard with his finger to punctuate his comments. I punctuated back considerably more forcefully.

Image credits: jonnymars

#12

Didn’t happen to me. But I remember a coworker of mine getting fired because he put laxatives in his own lunch bag. Some d******d kept stealing parts of our lunches. Turned out, it was our supervisor.

Edit: Jesus Christ…that’s a lot of upvotes

Edit 2: I’m not to keen on the specifics since that coworker and I weren’t exactly friends or anything. Just kind of had simple conversations during lunch and whatnot. Apparently it is illegal to poison food with malicious intent. And some of my friends who worked there said he got into some legal trouble because of it. Nothing came of it from what I heard. But that’s about all I know.

Image credits: DeicideandDivide

While not career-breaking, actors messing up lines in front of a camera is a pretty common bit of entertainment for all of us to enjoy later. Many contemporary films will post gag or blooper reels later, but these exist for a variety of media. Leonard Nimoy, most famous as the emotionless and logical Spock famously cracked up when he misdelivered the line “The plants act as a repository” and instead said, “The plants act as a suppository.”

#13

Derailed it a bit, took some years to recover.

Got security responsibilities added to my duties as sysadmin at a small university. Was asked by my boss’ boss, the IT director, to do a security audit. He asked me to report on the audit at a department meeting.

I asked if I could present my results to him privately instead and have him present to the meeting, but he insisted I could take care of it.

My report showed major security holes, demonstrations of tests of said holes and recommendations for patching said holes. Many of the patches were at the level of “change the administrator password from ‘password’ to something less obvious”.

As my political acumen was near zero at the time I didn’t realize how the report on major security problems made the IT Director look completely incompetent in front of the entire department – he had built and configured the campus computer system pretty much on his own, at least in his mind, and was quite proud of his accomplishment.

He suspended me on the spot, demoted me and tried to convince the university to fire me and try to bring me up on criminal charges for hacking into the university’s computer systems.

Image credits: firelock_ny

#14

Call centre taking a manager call, put the chap on hold and comforted the teammember “he is a bit of an arsehole isn’t he”… Forgot to also put the call on mute and he requested a call recording… Whoops!

Then while on suspension, I broke my leg, and went to my hearing after far too little sleep and too much tramadol. When they asked me what the impact of my actions was, I said it was “crippling”. Far too pleased with that pun to give a f**k about the outcome.

Spent the next few months coasting through bills selling bits and bats; eventually got into marketing, a win in the long run!

Image credits: tinkk56

#15

Built a castle out of Christmas chocolate biscuit boxes in the warehouse of a major retailer on a night shift and proceeded to fall asleep in it for a few hours.

Image credits: masontraining

These can be so popular that certain animated films will include them, most famously Pixar, which animates scenes of the characters messing up their lines. This creates an interesting parallel universe where, for example, Woody is just a character played by a toy. And if it wasn’t already clear, Pixar films are animated, so there can’t be bloopers, at least not in the sense that we think of them, so this was all just extra content for the viewer to enjoy. 

#16

Sent an email to someone I thought was helping me, threw me under the bus

Image credits: jarvo30

#17

I sent a scathing email about my boss directly to my boss. It wasn’t meant for him. To this day I still have no idea what possessed me to put his name in the address bar. I noticed his name the exact moment I hit send. You have never felt that much panic.

Image credits: Happy1327

#18

i took a half day off for a doctor’s appointment. it ran longer than i thought. i texted my boss that i’d be a bit later than expected.

i got home 1 hour past the allotted time for a half day and missed a meeting. i was fired the next day. “an hour isn’t ‘a bit.'” i’d been at the company for 6 years. it took me 6 months to find a new job in a different field. but i’m much happier with the work i’m doing now.

Image credits: spacemandown

#19

Getting promoted to supervisor started the dominoes falling.

I worked at a prison. I had been there for about 7 years and I knew I was most qualified, so I applied for the open sergeants position. I got it, which is where this story starts.

As a sergeant, it was my job to do investigations and document the findings whenever an inmate alleged his life was in danger. I would do the investigation and do a report on my findings, and it would get sent to the warden for them to interpret the evidence and make a final decision.

So, one day, an inmate gets beat up on a building I was in charge of. This inmate had never spoken to me, and had never told anyone he was having friction with his cell mate. Well, when questioned about it, the inmate said he had told me he needed to be moved and I told him I would. Initially, my supervisors believed him, but after I pulled up the surveillance camera that showed i had never even gotten down to that area that night due to being on a mission from another one of my supervisors all night, they admitted I hadn’t talked to him. However, the higher ups needed someone to blame and because it was my area, I got the blame, and got fired.

As a side note, I was salty about getting fired because I cared about my job but I wouldn’t go back if they begged me. I have a much better job now and the prison is so short staffed because of how they treat their people, the officers are stuck doing 16 hour days, 6 days a week. No thank you.

Edit: f**k it, what are they gonna do? This was the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.

Image credits: TheDanBot85

#20

Didn’t get any sleep the night before (answering calls from a store in need) and did not take the next day off when I needed it. Ended up speaking my mind in front of a corporate liason…

Image credits: User1239876

#21

I was the assistant director at a summer camp. One of the very last nights was a sleepover night where all of the campers were there, but not all of the regular day staff.

Two of the counsellors were caught drinking beer, and in an attempt to weasel his way out, one of them told the head of the camp that I gave him permission to do so (I most definitely had not).

While I didn’t get fired on the spot or have my year end bonus withheld like the other two, I was told I wouldn’t be asked back again for next year where there had already been talks of me being a full director in the future.

Image credits: Cobrachimkin

#22

A guy I worked with was caught stealing 2 cigarettes from a colleagues bag. Was on a six-figure salary. Not any more!

Image credits: Rude-Scholar-469

#23

I got written up and pushed out of the company for farting in the wrong place.

To be fair, I was working in our microbiology QA group at a big pharmaceutical manufacturing company that made contact solution and other stuff. It was Thursday because that was taco soup day and this particular day it was extra spicy.

To get into the fill room, you have to spend like 45 minutes getting dressed in sterile room garb without touching the outside of your suits. It’s quite the dance. So I’m in there sampling 100+ points of contact around the fill needle and my stomach starts grumbling. It’s the end of the day, I don’t want to leave and get dressed again. I look around and there are a few ladies working upstream on the conveyor belt looking for jams or whatever, and immediately after the fill needle, it goes out a little cutout in the window to be immediately packaged. The fill room itself has these cascading air pressures blowing away from the fill needle and is super loud.

So, that’s my spot, I start to sample in that area, and let out a little ‘pffffrrrrrrrrrrt!’. I feel better and go about my business. But then I start to hear this MOOOP MOOOP sound. Now, we have alarms, it’s a stack of lights every few feet and a high pitched red light is a jam in the tracks somewhere, a blue alarm is something else, but this time a yellow alarm is going off. I look around unconcerned and see the ladies upstream are laughing their asses off. I look out to the packaging area and everyone is staring in the window at me. The line boss bangs on the window and demands that I see him outside.

There are hydrogen sulfide sensors around the sensitive areas of the line. That’s because farts cause pink eye and I had just contaminated product. Thousands of bottles were thrown away and the line had to be purged for minutes before and after the ‘incident’.

It took 15 minutes to properly disrobe, the whole time the rest of my QA department came to stare and laugh at me through the windows (you don’t get naked l and they have to supervise you changing to make sure you do it right). When I got out, I had to sign several forms that claimed that I, Fr0thbeard, farted in the fill room. I got written up for it, but in my defence, so did the guy who trained me since he didn’t mention the yellow alarms apparently. My boss let me go home early and I was forced out soon after.

#24

I worked in public relations agencies for quite a long time, and mostly hated every minute of it. I didn’t really understand what I was doing, but felt trapped in the business because I couldn’t think of anything else I’d be able to do.

I got into it because around 2005-2010 social media was just becoming a big thing and old-school PR agencies would hire anybody who knew anything about Twitter, Facebook and all these exciting new channels. Pretty much all I had to do was show up to meetings and enthusiastically explain what social media was to confused old business dinosaurs.

So even though I knew nothing about PR and didn’t really understand how agencies work, I quickly got over-promoted and for the first time in my life found I was in high demand, so I was getting paid more money than ever before. However, eventually social wasn’t seen as such a big deal any more, so I found myself just trying to do whatever work they threw at me, hoping I could keep hold of that sweet salary for a little longer.

But because I wasn’t into the job at all, I was always procrastinating, and I’d pull late nights to get work done at the last minute.

One day my boss asked to see my progress on a big client presentation that wasn’t due for another week. I literally hadn’t done a single thing on it, and I tried to bluster my way out of it, but the s**t hit the fan and I got fired.

Overnight I found I could no longer get interviews at agencies that used to be desperate for “social media experts” to work for them, and really started to worry about how I’d find another job.

In the end it turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me, because out of desperation I took a temporary 3-month contract to do some basic marketing stuff at a small tech company and before my contract expired the company got bought by a bigger company.

They decided they needed a marketing director for my region, and because I was sitting in the right chair at the time, I got promoted and given a permanent contract. I was given plenty of time and space to figure out how to do the job as the company grew, so I felt much more comfortable in the role, not like I was constantly making it up as I went along.

Been there 7 years, love the job and the people, and earn more money than I ever thought I would.

Image credits: BigDumbGreenMong

#25

Way late to this, so it will probably get buried, but oh well.

I used to be an arborist. I specialised in awkward tree removals, preferably big trees with structural issues and loads breakable, non movable objects (e.g. buildings, etc) around that needed to not be damaged.

My career was to the point where other local companies would call the company a worked for and ask if they could hire me out for a job that they were worried about. This isn’t meant to be braggy, I’m definitely not proud of who I was at this time in my life.

I took pride in the fact that I would climb almost anything. I used to love working, turning up every day and being pointed towards a sketchy tree and having a big adventure taking it down. Looking back, though, it was the most egotistical I’ve ever been in my life. I was a show off, I was extremely competitive towards anyone who i thought had similar or, god forbid, superior abilities to me, and I *needed* to be seen as fearless and a cut above the rest (no pun intended). I even got to the point where I would be incredibly rude to the ground crews if I thought they weren’t working hard enough and were going to cause me to complete the job at a less impressive speed.

Anyway in all my hubris I agreed to climb a tree that never should have been climbed, and only by sheer luck avoided being squashed like a bug between the trunk and the roof of an outbuilding when the tree decided to fall over as I was half way up getting ready to cut the second branch of the day off.

I was mostly uninjured, but the mental toll was quite large. I totally lost my edge and started getting jittery and even backing out of perfectly stable trees. Ended up having to take a pay cut, nobody was requesting me anymore, that’s for sure. I also developed vertigo, and any time i was up a tree it felt as if the tree was falling and the ground was rushing up at me. I couldn’t sleep any night when I knew I had work the next day (which is most nights when you think about it). And I started having crazy anxious moments where my heart would beat really fast. I carried on like it for 2 years with minimal improvement because I had financial responsibilities and no skills for anything else.

Luckily, I was eventually able to get work as a consultant in the same industry, which is a mixture of office based work and site visits that involve looking at trees instead of climbing them. But my career as a climber is definitely over.

#26

Talked about comp to another employe. They told the manager about it. Got fired. The good part is it’s illegal and the idiot created a paper trail around it. They settled out of court for way more than they would have saved by people not talking about comp.

#27

Browsing for another job while at the job

Image credits: galaxycactus

#28

i saw a video once of a nurse explaining why she lost her job and nursing license – she took a photo of her entire emergency department track board with all the patients names, birthdays, and complaints and accidentally posted it on her public snapchat story. It was meant for her friend but everyone saw it and someone notified the hospital.

edit: forgot to add that this whole fiasco was because she wanted to show her friend how the doctor misspelled something

Image credits: eatandgreetme

#29

No me- my fiancee before she met me. She reported a board member of a bank to HR for repeatedly sexually harassing her and groping her. Her fifteen year very successful career as a VP at that bank was over a week later. They said take your buyout / settlement offer or we will drag you through the courts for years. Never got another job in banking again. To this day she says she should have kept her mouth shut.

#30

Working at a builders’ merchants.
Customer calls to place order over the phone (not unusual) and wants to give me the card details there and then (red flag). I initially refused but another member of staff vouched for them as they were regulars. Put the order through, knowing that whoever came to collect would need to come into the office for their paperwork before loading so we would have them on CCTV if it did turn out to be suspect…..only the yard crew didn’t follow process. When a van turned up for the goods, they loaded it all up and sent them away without asking for any kind of ID or manifest.

The payment card was later reported as stolen and the staff member who vouched for the customer denied even being in that day, which was a f*****g lie as she never took time off. I got fired and everyone else got to keep their jobs.
Source: boredpanda.com