‘What’s the dumbest misuse of an object with an actual purpose that you’ve witnessed?’ – 21 especially idiotic misjudgements

Human beings are idiots. We see evidence of it every day, from global trade-destroying tariffs being applied willy-nilly to people spending ridiculous amounts of money on chocolate, just because it came from Dubai.

And it turns out we’re utter wallies on a smaller scale too. Redditor HikingOtter asked ‘What’s the dumbest misuse of an object with an actual purpose that you’ve witnessed?’ and followed it up with their own example:

‘I started a job as a manager in a restaurant. On my first day a younger manager was showing me around and introducing to the procedures. There was a spreadsheet with a count of used linens allocated to each day.

‘So he opens Excel, we have a list of napkins and table cloths from the previous day, ready to be entered. He types them in. And sits there staring at the screen. After a minute or so, I ask what is he doing. He said HE IS ADDING THEN UP IN HIS HEAD TO TYPE THE RESULT IN THE WEEKLY TOTAL COLUMN.

‘At first I thought he was joking, he was not. I grabbed a mouse and typed in a sum formula in the new column, dragged it through all the rows to sum everything automatically. Turns out about 20 % of the values were miscalculated. He was stunned as if I made a magic trick.’

And this mind-blowing misunderstanding of spreadsheets prompted an avalanche of replies…

1.

‘Not a tool, a potato. I found a baseball bat near my house and had my cousin go look for a tennis ball, he couldn’t find one but came back with a potato. You’d be surprised the damage a potato can do to a 10-year-olds collar bone.’
–Constant-Section8375

2.

‘I watched someone trying to alter a table in Word, so that the columns were equal. They held up a ruler to the monitor to try and manually adjust the lines. I did try and say that I could show them how to do that with a couple of mouse clicks but she wouldn’t let me because I was quite a bit younger than her and something about young people being lazy by using computers. That was 20 years ago and I think about it frequently!’
–ilovewineandcats

3.

‘Brother tried to cook burgers in a toaster.’
–Klossomfawn

4.

‘My Dad nearly lost his job awhile back after losing his shit with a coworker. The guy was cooking his sausages in the kettle (holding the button down). My Dad makes a cup of tea and immediately loses his temper after the first sip. He then threw the kettle at the other guy and told him to buy a new one for everyone else.’
–BrieflyVerbose

5.

‘Back when I was in uni, another neighbouring student household used to go to the local pub each Sunday, come home drunk and cook a roast chicken dinner as a group. One Sunday all but one of them decided to stay in the pub for a real drinking session. The one that decided he’d had enough and headed back to the house.

Determined to have his Sunday chicken, he took the chicken out of the fridge, cut what he though was his share of it off, decided for some reason that the best way to cook it was on the base of an upturned clothing iron!’
–punkfunkymonkey

6.

‘Lived with a guy in my first year of uni who took the instructions ‘Cook bacon on the hob’ very literally, and slapped some rashers directly on the metal hob plates. Small fire later, and he bought a pan.’
–adamneigeroc

7.

‘Worked beside two people that spent their week manually typing data into a spreadsheet that they were getting from aa different printed off spreadsheet. Then every Friday morning one would call out account numbers and amounts from their screen and the other would check they had the same on their printed out spreadsheet.

Their entire jobs could have been done by any of the rest of us in less than five minutes a week. And with a tiny bit of effort could have been fully automated. This was 10 years ago and they were both earning around £35k.’
–BerryOk966

8.

‘Working behind the bar at uni I had to stop a new barman open a bottle of Moet with a corkscrew whilst facing the crowd of people waiting for drinks! We fired him soon after for a number of reasons.’
–Aware-Flounder10

9.

‘In school my ICT teacher would open her internet browser, the home page was Bing, and then she would search in Bing for Google to open Google to search for something.’
–Collide74

10.

‘Hammered colleague tried to make a cheese toastie using a clothes iron in a hotel, when hotel didn’t offer room service. Bread and cheese acquired from garage. Iron RIP.’
–selkiefolk

11.

‘I used to rebuild and repair aircraft seats. I saw a complete fool hammering off the old part with the new part, straight from the stores. These parts cost thousands and are integral to the structural strength of the seat.’
–geth1962