18 Mistakes Employees Made That Almost Got Them Fired 'On the first day of my first job, I rolled a Silverado off a cliff that had under a thousand miles on the odometer...' I'm a Southern California-based writer on the Lifestyle team who likes to try and rank viral foods and read and recommend awesome books. We all make mistakes, but making mistakes at work is a whole different type of fear. Recently, people shared the mishaps they made at their job that led them to believe they were, and some of them are...quite major. Here are some of the worst, embarrassing, or honest-to-god accidental mistakes that employees made:"It happened at my last workplace. My colleague needed a specific washing machine for a customer. We had a pretty small warehouse for our stuff, and it was around Christmastime, so you can imagine how much stuff we had in there and on top of each other. Anyway, the washing machines were stacked on top of each other, and the one he needed was right at the edge of something that looked like a pyramid. He was on the forklift, and he aimed it directly at the pyramid without thinking to move the other machines. As you can already imagine, the whole thing collapsed, and he basically destroyed a bunch of washing machines, TVs, and some other stuff. Our boss rushed into the warehouse, and you could tell by the face of my colleague that it said, 'I'm fired, right?'" "My first job was with Honey Baked Ham. For giggles, I thought it'd be funny to answer the phone and say, 'Thank you for calling HBH, where our meat is always tender and moist!' There was a brief moment of silence, and then I heard my manager on the other end say, 'Excuse me?!'" "Two weeks into a new job, I thought I'd lost a master key that worked at six locations , and that they'd all need re-keying. Turns out, someone had taken the master key off my desk to teach me a lesson about keeping it on my desk instead of putting it in the key safe." "I started my evening warehouse job right before Thanksgiving. I needed this job, too; it was a great blessing to get it because I was newly married and had a baby girl. We were making hardly anything, so this job was literally an answer to a prayer. After a few weeks, I finally received my forklift certification. I was trying to turn in a tight spot and accidentally broke off the rear light housing from the forklift. Not wanting to hide it, I immediately told my coworkers, and they said not to sweat it and to just tell the supervisor. They said I'd probably get a slap on the hand, but that the light was easy to replace. So I told my supervisor. He looked at me with a straight face and said, 'You're fired.' I just wanted to make sure he wasn't kidding, so I asked if he was serious. He said, 'Yes, because of a safety violation in your probation period.'" "I started walking away to the locker room, devastated. He called me back and said, 'You're not fired; thanks for telling me.' That one hurt, but I've now been with the company for eight years and worked my way into a corporate role!" "I worked as a security guard for a while. One day, I was walking the manufacturing floor when I was asked to accompany a guy to get a roll of Palladium. Palladium was used to make the test strips for blood glucose meters; it's a wildly expensive metal that comes in rolls that cost around $100,000 each. So, I walked with the guy to get it, and while he was getting the roll off the shelf, something happened: three rolls fell onto another shelf, causing many more rolls to cascade to the floor. This ruined them. The total damage was almost a million dollars. The guy I was with wanted to leave right then and avoid the firing, but I convinced him that we might not get fired since it was an accident. He was gone the next day." "One of the helpdesk team members that worked for me was sending sexy texts to his wife, Andrea — one of them being a very graphic, descriptive text explaining exactly what he was going to do to her when he got home. Unfortunately, he had sent the text to Andrew, one of our biggest clients. Andrew's name was next to Andrea's in his phone's contacts list. The help desk guy came rushing into my office to say he'd sent the text, and I had to ring Andrew to limit the damage. Andrew was fine about it; he said he thought my guy seemed 'really friendly.' No one got sacked, but there was a whole lot of teasing." "I was just having a friendly chat with a guy at my new job on a work messaging app. We mostly talked about food and how he was always hungry — just watercooler stuff. And then, apparently, his jealous girlfriend read the messages and decided we were flirting. It eventually led to both of them writing an email to my boss, accusing me of being inappropriate and using work tools to do so. I barely worked there for a month, so I thought I was going to get fired. Thankfully, my boss realized the situation, so I'm still at the company. However, I'm kinda turned off on being friendly to anyone else." "When I graduated high school, I got a job as a bellhop at a Marriott. The front desk would transfer all requests for direction calls to our line. It was my first night there by myself, and my phone rang. The dude said that he must be close to the hotel since he's been driving on Route 78 for two hours. I got confused about where he was and told him to turn around. He drove back the wrong way for an hour before he realized I messed up. When he got to the hotel, he was furious. He stormed over to the bellstand where I was standing and said, 'Hi, Paul, I'm looking for a moron named Pantarus. That dumbass just gave me the most half-assed directions. He's incompetent, and I need something done about this NOW!' There was stunned silence. I thought,I totally forgot that because I was so new, I had to borrow another bellman's name tag." "I told him, 'Sir, we’ll handle this immediately.' I took out a dry cleaning ticket, wrote myself up a 'disciplinary form,' and assured the person that Pantarus is on probation and would be fired immediately. He was happy; he tipped me 20 bucks and went on his merry way." "The company I worked for was losing money fast, and their employee checks were bouncing. This was around Halloween, so as a joke, I went to work as a bounced check. The CEO got wind of an employee wearing a bounced-check costume, so he walked around campus looking for me. He found me in the warehouse chatting with some guys. Three days later, I was pulled into HR, and my position was eliminated. 10/10 would do again." "I lost a scanner that cost around $1,000 at work. These scanners weighed a couple of pounds and were bulky to carry, so we usually left them in the cart we lugged around. Our manager said leaving the scanner in the cart wasn't allowed, so I requested a clip to keep it on my belt. The clip was, like, $10, and I knew it was within the budget. My manager kept rejecting my request, so I continued leaving the scanner in my cart . Well, my manager decided to take the scanner from me one day without telling me. I panicked, thought I was going to get fired, and thought I'd have to pay for a new one. It turns out that the manager went around that day and picked up all of the scanners she could find in the store that weren't attached to a clip." "My grandma yelled at the manager to either get me a clip or apologize to me. The manager apologized to me for freaking me out, and I apologized for not keeping better track of the scanner. I also requested the clip again, but I never received it before I stopped working there." "I used to work at a call center for a supplemental insurance firm. One day, I was making enrollment calls to employees of one of our clients, leaving voicemails if they didn't pick up so they could call me back. One of these calls kept cutting me off mid-voicemail and prompting me to press 1 to leave a message. I assumed their voicemail wasn't actually recording since it kept cutting me off, so after several attempts to leave a voicemail, I just exclaimed, 'Son of a bitch!' and hung up. An hour went by, and the president of the company called me into his office with the call center manager. Turns out, the person's voicemail was recording the ENTIRE TIME and had all the audio. Even worse, it was the voicemail box of the CEO of our client's company. The president played the audio in front of me; it was hard to explain my way out of that one." "I used to work in a warehouse right after school. Not knowing how everything worked and it being my first real, full-time job, I just did what I was told and tried my best to impress the bosses. One day, in the packaging room, someone had thrown a screwdriver out of anger, and it stuck to the drywall. Out of hilarity, my manager bet the guy two gas station taquitos that he couldn't do it again. This became a daily thing around lunchtime: everyone would gather around and throw screwdrivers at the wall, and whoever's didn't stick had to buy lunch. Well, we were doing this right over an $8,000 heat shrink machine. And guess who accidentally hit the control panel and broke the machine? Yeah. Well, one day, one of the owners came in the back, looking for something specific, and noticed the bludgeoned wall." "He looked at us and said, 'So, you guys have been throwing screwdrivers at the wall?' I hung my head and said yes. He said, 'That's cool,' and walked away. I never got fired, but he was extremely pissed about the machine I broke. He ended up just buying a better one." "The company Christmas party happened. Basically, the office closes, and there's an open bar in one of the big presentation rooms. A newer guy takes full advantage of this and has too many drinks in the couple of hours the party lasts. He goes back up to the bar and tries his luck with the bartender. He makes a presumably terrible joke about the name of the liquor he orders as she hands it over, and she looks disgusted. The place is packed and way too loud, so I can't hear exactly what she says. The guy walks away, and I ask what he said. He replies, 'Eh, it was just a joke.' I say back, 'You realize that's the VP's daughter, right?' He looks at me, almost suddenly sober. 'Fuuuuuck.'" "One time, my colleague and I were shit-taking our god-awful deputy manager, who spent more time in the admin office, on her phone, and on personal calls than actually doing her job. We were moving boxes near the admin office, ranting about her, when I decided to look inside for more boxes. She was there. She didn't say anything, so I don't know if she heard us to this day, but...we shat bricks. We both thought she had gone home." "My best bud and I worked at an apartment building. He was maintenance, and I was leasing. We got teased so much about being work-married that we started playing along. So one day, the maintenance manager told me I needed to spank my work husband, and we were giggling like five-year-olds while I was pretending to do so. The regional manager walked in and watched us with his hands on his hips. We were both certain we were getting fired, but without saying a word, he walked away." "At the time, my job was testing the front end of a large billing database. My manager told me to test on Beta. At the time, I thought of Beta as a staging environment with mock data, not an alternative front end to our production database . So when I test, I always use obviously fake numbers. So there I was, in a production database, making bills. Anyway, the next week, a real-life customer wanted to know why he had a bill for $420.69." "On the first day of my first job, I rolled a Silverado off a cliff that had under a thousand miles on the odometer. I figured I would just go turn in all my stuff and start looking for a new job, but my boss was incredibly worried about me, told me not to think about the truck, and personally took me to the ER to get checked out, despite my insisting I was fine. It was a government contract, and Uncle Sam picked up the bill for everything. I worked there for another 16 months." Lastly:"I was working the cash register at a pet store. At that point, I'd only been there for two weeks since my first day. A woman came up, bawling that her dog just died, and she was returning all of these medical supplies. They were all small but expensive items from the same aisle , but she didn't have a receipt. Every time I tried saying something about her not having a receipt, she bawled harder. I felt terrible, so I returned the items and gave her a gift card or something back. A week later, I got called into the office, and my manager informed me that that woman had stolen those items, then 'returned' them to make money. Needless to say, I wasn't there for long. I hated that place."Well...ya live and ya learn. Did you ever experience a moment in the workplace where you definitely thought you were going to get fired? Let us know in the comments, or you can submit your story anonymously using the form below!