Not my story: a friend of mine claims he worked with a fella who kept a pill bottle in his tool box that he'd put his boogers in. Let them dry and then shake the bottle to hear them rattle for stress relief....
I can't really top that.

I watched a guy on a construction job take off his tool belt, set it on the ground, get in a zoom boom (forklift), then drive over his own tool belt to pick up a pile of lumber.

No one else involved; he left it right in his own way and forgot it was there. Incredible.

I was an apprentice for an electrician once, whose main specialty was running out the clock and milking every job to the max. I remember once he told me to meet him at the job site first thing in the morning. Then he sent me back 20 minutes the way I came to the store to pick up an order of light fixtures, while he waited at the job. After I returned, he sent me back to the store to get jack chain to hang the lights. Then a 3rd trip to get cable and connectors. I took 3-4 trips to the store to acquire a basic parts list that I could have picked up on my way to work, while he smoked and drank coffee "waiting for me." Yet oddly enough when 5 o'clock rolled around he was motivated enough to work an hour or 2 of OT to get something done. He could stretch a 2 hour job into almost a week. He also figured out that if he didn't get his time into the office by the payroll deadline, and then gave the boss a sob story, the boss would pay him cash instead of payroll. Incidentally, this also allowed him to skip his child support withholding. Needless to say he "forgot" to turn his time in regularly.

Don't worry though, he was dumb too. I watched him park his pickup right behind a ditch witch, jump on the witch, fire it up and pop it in reverse. He pushed the trencher part way through his pickup hood before he shut it off, then explained that he wasn't really sure how to drive it.

I worked at a window factory that made replacement windows for old buildings. We had a lucrative contract to retro fit a high security prison with the best glass we could get. It was an inch thick, embedded with wire, and shatterproof. The boss ordered the glass for the windows but messed up on the measurements.

We ended up getting multiple pallets of precut glass that we couldn't use. It cost the company $100,000 but he didn't get fired as he was the Son of the Owner. We held onto the glass in hope of finding a use for it but eventually it all went into the dumpster.

Brian

You ever asked a new young coworker to go get the board stretcher?