Some people can juggle multiple tasks at a time and successfully complete all of them on time while maintaining the highest standard. Then, there are some who will mess up anything and everything, even if they have just one job that they're responsible for.
While the former is always impressive, the latter usually makes for way funnier stories. That's why when a person online asked people to share stories about someone who really messed up their one job, the responses came pouring in. Scroll down to enjoy the best of those answers!
More info: Reddit
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From failing this iconic GTA San Andreas Wrong Side of the Tracks mission to the Evergreen cruise ship getting stuck in the Suez Canal, we keep encountering situations where people are tasked with a single task that they're expected to perform well, and yet they fail at it with all their might.
You might wonder how these things keep on happening. Well, as Enrique Rubio explained in his LinkedIn Post, it is usually due to something known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, which basically states that the less someone knows, the more they think they know, and the same goes for their competence.
The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias that reassures our ego and self-esteem, making us reject our limitations and overestimate our knowledge or ability to do something. It usually comes from a lack of self-awareness and an inability to assess our own skills accurately, so paradoxically, people who are actually good at something tend to underestimate their value.
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Happenings like these might be unfortunate and embarrassing for the people responsible, but for the rest, this usually becomes just another hilarious meme inspiration. In fact, there's a whole subreddit dedicated to memes like this, and it has nearly 800,000 members.
But while some memes like this are just a perfect display of pure incompetence, there are also those that come from the side of misfortune. That makes us wonder: Why do people tend to laugh at the failure of others?
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According to Mark Travers from Psychology Today, despite being generally frowned upon, this occurrence is actually quite common. It is called 'schadenfreude,' and it is a German conjunction word made of schaden (harm) and freude (joy).
However, while we all might enjoy some laughs at the cost of others' misfortune, like watching shows such as Impractical Jokers, it can become problematic when it becomes an overindulgence. High levels of schadenfreude are associated with Machiavellianism, narcissism, and even psychopathy, which usually lead people down darker paths in life.
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In the end, no one is safe from messing up whatever task they have at hand, even if it seems to be the simplest thing in the world. It's human to overestimate ourselves, just as it is human to find the failure of others funny.
But everything has a healthy limit, so if these failures keep happening to you, perhaps you should reevaluate your approach. And if you get to the point where you laugh at someone for something like being unjustly fired, maybe it could be wise to talk to someone and figure out why it makes you feel that way.
What did you think about this story? Do you know any good examples that would fit this list? Share all of them in the comments below!
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The CEO of Sears who thought the internet was a passing fad. As the definitive name in mail-order, Sears had the warehouses and logistics in place to be Amazon years before Bezos made it there.
One of very few mistakes that lost a company at least one *trillion* dollars. .Has anyone mentioned that one guy who messed up with the suez canal ship and caused a massive economic chain of events?Secret service for allowing JFK to ride around in an open car. Protecting the man means you gotta say “no”‘to what he wants.Me when I took a door off to fit a cat flap .. cut the hole, fitted the cat flap ,re hung the door , cat flap was at the top of the door .The fake sign language interpreter from Tampa that was signing gibberish… people will figure that out.Costa Concordia's captain. 33 casualties and $2billion in manpower required to move the stuck ship.Liz Truss. Took office, went to extreme lengths to take care of her wealthy pals at the top, took our currency to historic lows with Kwasi Kwarteng's horrendously planned "mini budget", killed off the housing market, announced £45bn of unplanned tax cuts, went into hiding and then dipped out of the job after seven weeks. She is the shortest serving PM in UK history, and the previous shortest serving PM died in office after serving just shy of four months in office.The guard at the gate in Troy that let the horse in.Robin Hood trading app. Was created to “level the playing field” between large equity trading firms and everyday traders. Then when the poors started making money and the big trading houses started losing money on their short positions, they shut down trading by regular people so the big guys could get their positions realigned and not go broke.I work for USPS and we deliver UPS packages as a "last mile" service. There's a person at UPS that puts one sticker on the box before it comes to us. It's a little rectangular sticker...
They manage to cover all of the important stuff on the label 50% of the time. ??
You have a whole f*****g box. Stop putting it on the label. Jesus christ.My forties. How am I still getting zits at this age?!? YOU HAD ONE JOB, FORTIES!!Refuse bag makers. Your ONLY job is to make a bag thick enough to put rubbish in without splitting- is it really that had?The surgeon who had a 300% mortality rate during an amputation. Apparently he performed it under two and a half minutes…the patient died, someone in attendance died of shock and an assistant died because his fingers were also amputated and he got an infection.The guy who sends out ballistic missile warnings in Hawaii.The delivery driver
"attemped to deliver" ?.I had the easiest part-time job ever. But this isn't about me this is about the girl that worked there full-time that I relieved twice a week.
So the entire job was sit there and watch a door and watch movies on your tablet or phone or whatever. Basically the entire point of having security there was that the company got a huge discount on their fire insurance if they had 24-hour security. Basically the entire job was to stay conscious.
So this girl actively brought in a pillow and blanket and probably close to 9 out of 10 times whenever I showed up to relieve her, she was dead asleep. And it's not like she worked third shift, she worked second shift, but she was dead asleep. And that other 1/10 of the time she was just waking up as I walked through the door.
Me personally? I didn't care, my philosophy is do my job, get paid, and go home. I don't give a s**t what my coworkers doing unless it makes me look bad. The only thing I did to cover my a*s in this case was to bring it up to my supervisor who did nothing about it. That way if it was brought up to me I could honestly tell them I brought it up to my supervisor. Once I bring it up to my supervisor, If my supervisor does nothing about it, it's not my problem, I've done my part, it's now on them.
It took the company 6 months to figure out she was just showing up and sleeping during her shift. The client had to literally trip over her to figure it out. She was fired immediately.That armourer in the Rust film comes to mind.Shohei Ohtani's interpreter.
All he had to do was translate words. Follow around the best baseball player in the world, and he even got to be best friends with him.
All he had to do was not steal $16 million from his boss.That dude from Price Waterhouse Cooper's at the Oscar's a few years ago who mixed up the envelopes and f****d up the Best Picture announcement. To the tune of the entire cast of La La Land coming on stage to celebrate, only to turn around and tell the cast of Moonlight that they actually won.Head of FEMA Michael Brown during hurricane katrina.That person first in line at the light, yet texting. You have one job!Steve Harvey at Miss Universe when he announced the wrong winner.The people who install public restroom stalls but leave gaps in the doors so you can make eye contact with the people waiting for a stall. Also, why are they not installing purse hooks in the stalls? Most public bathrooms I use don’t have a place to hang my bag and not because it fell/broke. It’s clear there was never one installed.The writers of Star Wars Episode 7. Their one job was to reunite the OG trio (Han, Luke, Leia). They failed. Making a Star Wars sequel without reuniting the trio, is like making a Harry Potter sequel without reuniting Harry, Ron, and Hermoine. Just a fail.Michael Jackson's personal doctor. (The propofol guy).Kobe's chopper pilot not refusing to take off in adverse weather.Whoever grounded the Exxon Valdez.Phil Tippett, dinosaur supervisor.The Welder who blew up Beirut in 2020, [ended] over 200 people during the peak of Covid and basically caused the entire countrys collapse. 1 welder took down an entire country.LastPass. Their entire business model was protecting customer secrets. Had their customer database compromised. I went to BitWarden and then changed all my passwords.
