Splish Splash
19 year old me back in 2008 got a job at a pharmaceutical companies as a tablet coater. I had been there maybe 4-5 months and work was slow. A guy in another department asked me to help move some pallets of calcium tablets with an electric pallet jack.
Being the young, curious man I was; I decided to see how high the jack went after double stacking some pallets. I was pretty impressed how high up this thing went, so impressed I forgot to bring it back down before moving.
After going forward like 5 feet I took out a sprinkler head and was shocked when I got hit in the face and upper body with dirty water that hadn’t been purged in 10 years (at a pharmaceutical company, which is questionable).
Anyway water just kept coming out, maintenence guy told me after the fact it was spraying 90-110 gallons per minute (~3.75 Liters/min for my non-American friends). I ended up losing the company around $200,000 dollars by shutting down several packaging lines and one manufacturing process.
There was 2 inches of water on the ground. It took me and 2 other guys 3 hours to direct the water into the drains placed throughout the plant. This was all at from 6pm to about 11pm. At the end of it, I sent a huge apology email to the directors of manufacturing and packaging who were one level below the president.
They wrote me up and let me keep my job. I have no clue how because I was on probation from being a new hire. The only thing that changed was the training on the electric pallet jack. It now includes to check the height of your load, not just the width of the load for any obstructions. Story credit: Reddit / Nickel_Bar13