HadOneJob: photos of monumental cockups

HadOneJob.com is a collection of images showing massive, inexplicable cockups that appear to be the result of terrible negligence and/or deliberate sabotage. I laughed and laughed, and then I cried. Then I laughed some more. Been there, been bitten on the ass by that (as recently as yesterday, when the guy whose job it was to close the door on my Delta flight from Newark to Phoenix broke the door in the process and put the plane out of commission).

YOU HAD ONE JOB! (via MeFi)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

MORE: Funny • opps • photos

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rpadair82

A lot of these are pretty small mistakes and many of them, I would bet, are intentionally done. Pineapples in a watermelon box?! Crazy! I work for a grocery store and we reuse those giant boxes all the time. Why waste em?
Glen Able

OK, so it turns out the “AAA’s Daily Fuel Gauge Report” image above isn’t actually a video, no matter how much you click on it.
- Petzl
  
  Just keep clicking.
  
  The video is awesome, and worth the extra effort.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/stefan_e_jones/ Stefan Jones

I’m guessing an uneven split between Photoshopped, deliberate stunt, mangled English, counterfeiting errors, and genuine screw-ups.

All hilarious. Sometimes pretty subtle.
- toobigtofail
  
  Yeah. I have to call Pshop on the water fountain with the electrical cord that vanishes into thin air. But fun.
  - http://www.markcrummett.com crummett
    
    I think the point of that was the stream of water was too strong to stay in the fountain. Or am I missing your subtle, ironic humor?
- SomeGuyNamedMark
  
  Some are also probably due to being badly rushed. Like the out of place paving stone. The wrong color got mixed in. Do we lose time and dig it up or just finish and say “screw it”.
  
  Some are likely not due to checking the work, like the upside down walk signal. They put it in but no one bothered to step back and look at it.
  - franko
    
    i think some of these are also a case of, “well, do we pay to have a new sign made, or do we just flip it and trust that people are going to be smart enough to understand what we’re going for, here?”
  - http://www.ikaink.net Itsumishi
    
    I saw the upside down walk signal and realised instantly it was a corner in Downtown Portland, OR where I recently visited. I checked my photos and yep, exact same corner.
    I thought at first that it might have been a case of some merry pranksters flipping the cover upside down one night, but if that were the case the lights would be going on and off in the wrong sequence, which they weren’t.
- freshyill
  
  Yeah that one with a bottle of Pepsi in the cooler with bottles of Coke was a real riot.
Paul Cowan

My personal favourite example of the “You had one job!” meme: http://i.imgur.com/KaKhA.jpg

If I could work out how to submit it, I would.
- http://www.ikaink.net Itsumishi
  
  Ahh good old Dick Smith, who is absolutely outraged by all those famous Australian brands outsourcing all their labour and sending profits overseas except of course when it comes to his own massive electronics company which almost exclusively deals with Asian suppliers.
bkad

I’m guilty of the ‘forgotten placeholder text’ error. I made that error more than once at my new job, before I learned not to do it that way.
hyph3n

After a while, looking at these just gets depressing.
Hank

I once flew into LAX and when we got to the gate one of the stews opened the door on the wrong side of the plane. It makes a big ‘whooooosh!’ sound when the emergency slide deploys.
http://twitter.com/racerabbit Fred Swetland, IV

I’m not the only one who keeps reading it as OneHandJob, right?

Right?
ohbejoyful

I actually like all of the “one tile out of place” examples. The Persian Flaw concept at work
GawainLavers

If I had been a smarter kid I would have totally printing up lots of “Your the best teacher ever” cards.
GawainLavers

“Boys 8-20″? This hipster skinny jean shit is getting out of hand.
Heevee Lister

They’d be funnier if they weren’t faked. OK, maybe some of them are genuine, but so many are such glaringly obvious ‘shops that viewing them exhausts my suspension of disbelief.

Also, why does a simple photo album need Javascript to work?

OK, I’ll take off my curmudgeon cap now.
http://www.youtube.com/user/PipLagenta Pip_R_Lagenta

I have long been thinking about trying to document what happened in the neighborhood that my sister lived in twenty three years ago. In that neighborhood, twenty three years ago, the city did many repairs to pipes that ran under the sidewalk. All over the neighborhood, wherever they had to replace a bit of the concrete sidewalk, the new concrete has “lPPO” written in it. “lPPO” on each new concrete patch-job everywhere in that neighborhood. “And what is ‘lPPO’?”, you might ask. Well, the job was done in 1990, you see. Yes, “1990″.
heckblazer

The text “This page intentionally left blank” is generally not a screw-up. In important legal documents it’s there so people can be certain that there isn’t a page missing because it was unintentionally left blank.
- Geoduck
  
  The classic Infocom text-adventure game Zork I has this written on a wall at one point, as a homage to old computer manuals that did it.
  - heckblazer
    
    I suppose I should add that the logic bomb of the phrase still amuses the heck out of me. It’s just not a mistake ;).
- Wreckrob8
  
  But why do they print ‘This page intentionally left blank’ on different colour paper to the actual text?
  - heckblazer
    
    If it’s a bound document, I couldn’t tell you since I’ve never seen nor prepared that. If the document isn’t bound it’s likely because the blank page is a placeholder and the different color makes it easy find it to replace it with the final page.
Halloween_Jack

Utter fail with the very first picture. The idea is that the handrail should be running parallel with the stairs, not at an angle to them, right? But if you look at the picture, it’s obvious what happened: the screws on the upper attachment point broke, and so did the ones on the lower one, leaving the handrail to pivot on the middle attachment point. Looks like it would be a simple fix in less than five minutes (not counting the trip for new hardware).

The creator of this site had one job…
http://www.ikaink.net Itsumishi

Man, I can’t wait to watch “The Habbit: An Unexpected Journey” it sounds like a very interesting film.
- Felton / Moderator
  
  Alternate title: Nuns on the Run.
http://www.gyrofrog.com/ Gyrofrog

Today I did (I guess) the opposite:

The one thing I was supposed to do right, I did it right – but everything around it was screwed up.
pjcamp

42 was teh awesome.
chaopoiesis

Flaws and imperfection are the engine that drives life. It’s all there in Darwin, when viewed from the right angle.
chris young

i just get a black screen
- LintMan
  
  Try a different browser. IE was black screen, but Firefox worked fine. I’m not sure why a simple gallery needs to be so complex.
kobrakai

Is it irony that whoever put this together had just one job: make a navigable web site and they cocked it up.
http://www.karljones.com karl_jones

Loki at work!