Kate Hackett
We all make mistakes is a corny platitude, but it’s also true. Of course… some of us make more (and dumber) mistakes than others.
u/PeteK816 asked over on Reddit “What’s your biggest ‘I f*cked up’ moment?” and people really came up to the plate with their stories.
1. Fire hazard
“At about 3 a.m. after a long night of gaming, I decided to microwave some chicken nuggets. I got them out of the freezer and read the package: ’30 minutes on high blah blah blah.’ So, I shoved them in the microwave for 30 minutes, and went back to watching a movie in the living room. About five minutes went by, and I smelled this awful stench. It was at this moment I knew I had f*cked up.
I jumped up and ran to the kitchen to see smoke pouring out of every crack and crevice on that microwave. I opened the microwave door, fanned the smoke away, opened the back door to let the smoke out, and grabbed the plate of nuggets with a hand cloth.
They were literally black rocks that looked like coal. I poured them in the trash (they burnt straight through the bag) and decided I didn’t need food and should sleep instead. Turns out, those 30-minute instructions were meant for the oven.” —u/da_boy-roy
2. Infinite loop
“I once accidentally created an infinite network loop on my college campus network and crashed the entire school’s internet. This was during my certification program as a Cisco Certified Networking Administrator.” —u/BlackTemplar2154
3. A date on moving day is crazy
“On the day I was moving to New Jersey from Virginia, I had a date in Virginia. I was planning on driving straight to New Jersey after the date. I ate something bad during dinner, and my stomach started acting up. But the date was going well, and didn’t want to cut it short, so I thought I could hold it until the date was over.
Right after the date ended, I got in my car and drove to nearest restaurant to use the bathroom. But nature prevailed and couldn’t hold it. I literally shit my pants. It was so bad I couldn’t even get out of my car. So, I drove with shit in my pants from Virginia to New Jersey. I was worried that I might get pulled over. I got to my apartment building at 3 a.m., walked up three flights of stairs, got rid of my clothes, and took a shower. PS: I married my date. She does not know the story.” —u/joker1547
4. That guy is an angel
“I was a bank teller working drive-thru. I had a fat stack of cash in an envelope (roughly $3,000) that I had set aside. I needed my manager to take it to the vault, because it was over the maximum amount we were allowed to keep in the drawer. I was just going through the motions, and some guy was doing a cash withdrawal.
While I was on auto-pilot, I sent back his tube with the envelope containing the $3,000 instead of the few hundred he was withdrawing. The worst part was I didn’t realize this until about 15 minutes and 10 or so transactions later. I immediately called my manager and just said, ‘I f*cked up big time.’ I couldn’t even remember which account it was on, so I had no idea who to call or who he was.
He could have kept that money, and we would have never known. Luckily, he was a good samaritan. He came back into the branch and asked for the manager and said, ‘I believe there was a mistake. I was given way too much money, but I noticed it wasn’t taken out of my account. I don’t want your teller to get fired over this!’ The issue was resolved in under an hour. I’m forever thankful that guy was a good person and came back to return the money.” — u/HallucinatesOtters
5. Oops
“When I was in seventh grade, my parents woke me up and took me to the guest room, where they proceeded to show me what ‘history’ on the computer was.” —u/D4rks1id3
6. Doors
“I was in my 20s and working at Home Depot, and I casually walked by an aisle full of pallets of doors. As soon as I walked by, all of the doors came crashing down, pallets and all. No one knows how it happened, but I’m pretty sure I was the one that put the pallets there a few days prior. Damages were in the thousands. Luckily no one was hurt, but I still think about all of the booby traps I left in that place.” —u/Jetix_MK3
7. That’s not the blender!
“Our very old blender started smoking when I was using it, so I frantically unplugged it from the wall and started taking it apart. When I heard the whirring and felt the blade go through my finger tip, I realized that, in my panic, I had instead unplugged the toaster from the socket next to it.” —u/taversham
8. Oh no!
“I temped as a receptionist for a company that sold those massive printing presses. Someone called and said they wanted a guillotine. I replied in the nicest tone that we didn’t sell those. I mean, who calls a company that sells printing presses to buy a French execution instrument, right? Turns out, those big things they use to cut newspapers in mass quantities — we did sell them. I probably cost them a few million dollars, as a competitor landed a big deal with a lucrative account a few days later. Guess what they bought.” —u/dead_PROcrastinator
9. I mean, TO BE FAIR
“I was at a job interview for Whataburger. The guy asked, ‘Do you think you could handle this job?’ For some dumb reason, I answered like Elle Woods in Legally Blonde when she says, ‘What? Like it’s hard?’ after her ex is shocked she got into law school. As soon as I said it, I realized I sounded like an asshole. I watched this thirtysomething-year-old manager sneer in disapproval at 16-year-old me, probably shouting in his head about arrogant youth or something. He thanked me for coming in, and that was that. Needless to say, I didn’t get the job.” —u/zerogirl0
10. Biggest whoops
“My ex left her panties at my house a few months before I started dating my current girlfriend. When I found them, I thought they were my current girlfriend’s. When I handed her the panties like, ‘Hey, you left these!’ with a smile on my face and she told me they weren’t hers, my heart dropped like an anvil. She was definitely pissed off for a few days, but we’re fine now.” —u/PyroIrish
11. Sorry, boyfriend
“I was driving home from my boyfriend’s place in another city and started feeling like I was gonna fall asleep. I specifically [usually] avoided driving home from his city after dark because that highway was just a perfectly straight line and SO boring that it would make me super tired. I tried to call my boyfriend to talk to me and keep me awake, but he didn’t hear the call. I saw a rest stop, so I pulled over and parked, thinking I would just take a minute to wake myself up. I ended up taking a half-hour long nap and woke up to several missed calls and text messages from my boyfriend. Apparently when he saw I called, he checked my location and my little dot was stopped on the side of the road — but the rest stop was relatively new, and it didn’t show on the map. He thought I had fallen asleep, crashed, and died. Oops.” —u/CumulativeHazard
12. Oh god, the nerves
“Doctor here. During the first surgery I did for my surgery clerkship in medical school, I accidentally stabbed the patient’s liver with a tool called a trocar. Just for some background, in laparoscopic surgery, typically three small incisions are made, and surgical tools and a camera (laparoscope) are inserted in order to perform the surgery.
After making the initial incision, a trocar is placed into the incision to widen it and to facilitate the passage of tools. Basically, I misjudged how much force I would need to push the trocar through, and very slightly nicked the patient’s liver. I immediately began to sweat and fog up my eye protection, thinking I had killed them. Luckily, the injury was very minor, and I didn’t hit any major blood vessels. The surgeon cauterized the area that I hit to stop some minor bleeding, but it was fine. We saw the patient a few weeks later, and she was perfectly fine and recovering well.” —u/PMME_ur_lovely_boobs
13. Hooo boy, that’s a terrible idea
“After a delightful shower one evening, I decided to blow-dry my hair using a hair dryer that had some exposed wiring. It had always worked decently so I figured, No big deal; it’s fine. I got electrocuted. But, on the plus side, I got to see blue lightning go pinging up my arm. I no longer own a hair dryer.” —u/robertlandrum
14. This poor baby
“My son, who was about 2 at the time, was supposed to be taking a nap and wouldn’t go to sleep. I was making jalapeños poppers for a get-together that evening while he was lying down. He started crying, so I went to check on him, and he needed his diaper changed. I changed it and put him back down. After a few minutes, he went nuts and wouldn’t stop crying. I couldn’t figure out why. Then, my hands started to burn like hell from the juice of cutting up jalapeños peppers. I guess some of it rubbed off on him around his diaper area! I still feel bad about that to this day.” —u/matthew83128
15. Absolutely lucky
“One summer at my grandparents’ house in the Colorado mountains, I was playing with fireworks alone. I was about 10 years old, so I wasn’t exactly responsible. I ended up lighting one of those bouncing, spinning things and threw it off the hill on to the gravel road. It went wild shooting sparks everywhere, then bounced off the road and down a hill. I rushed down after it, and found that for every place it had hopped, it had lit a fire. Each one was already about knee-high tall, made of dry pine needles. Luckily, I was smart enough to stomp each one out. To this day, I always think about what would have happened if I didn’t go down the hill after it.” —u/TheOrionNebula
16. Kids.
“When I was about 7, I chased my brother inside the house. As I yanked the front door open, my big toe got caught on it and completely ripped open between my toes. My brother said I went silent and my face turned white, and then he looked down and saw all the blood on our deck. He was a great big brother and scooped me up, set me down on the stairs with a towel, and then ran to get our mom and dad. One emergency trip later and I was all stitched up. They almost had to amputate my toe, all because I was an idiot.” —u/TheZoomingMonkey
17. Too many mushrooms
“When was a stupid teenager, I took double the shrooms because they were not kicking in fast enough. We were in a park, and my friend had a whole ounce on her. Unknown to us, the park closed at 10, right when it kicked in big time. A couple of police cars came around to make sure everyone was out of the park, and we were sitting in the car.
They pulled up behind us with the lights on, and I had a total meltdown. I was sweating buckets, from the top of my head to the bottoms of my feet. My friend (while tripping out of her mind) calmly explained that I was having a panic attack and needed to be left alone. They believed her and let us go. I called my buddy to pick me up and take me home.
Then, I realized that I had locked myself out of the house, and my mom was out of town. I couldn’t stay at my buddy’s place, so he drove me a couple of cities over to another friend’s place. But when we got there, there was no furniture inside because they had apparently moved the week before. My phone ended up dying, so I showed up at my other friend’s doorstep at 1 a.m. Her parents were not too happy to see me.” —u/Top_Box_1935
18. This is such a big mistake!
“One year, we purchased a new house. For Christmas that year, I decided I would buy a ton of things we needed off the ‘for the house’ to-do list — a clothing iron, blender, pots and pans, etc. I then proceeded to gift them to my wife for her Christmas gifts. Never again.” —u/ksozay
19. Dumb!!!
“I pulled to a stop at a red light in the left lane. I smiled at a cop in right lane next to me. Then, I put my foot on the gas and ran the red light.” —u/shahrukh_khan_SRK
20. Wrong Person
“I talked shit about my coworker in a text and accidentally sent it to them instead of the person meant for it. EEEEK! I went into his office the next day and apologized to him for the message. It was at that moment he knew how I really felt.” —u/A-Rae2012
“My old assistant manager did this. They meant to send me a text about a person I assigned to their shift. The text said something about how the employee sucked at his job and asked to find a new person for their shift. Well, that manager accidentally sent it to the employee, who happened to be my friend outside of work. I felt bad for my friend, but it does still make me chuckle today.” —u/jimmyjonsassman
