A few months ago, we did a post on the stupidest things ever done with a forklift.

It was an amazing piece, full of haunting imagery and biting criticisms, but it lacked one very critical element: video.

So this time, we’re going to change it up a little bit and do a play-by-play of a few videos of warehouse accidents and see if can’t learn a thing or two (which we might, but really we’re just here to watch people do stupid stuff).

We’ll start off with a “not so bad” one.

Football and warehouses don’t mix

At the start of this one, we see a few guys who are hard at work, just going about their day, being good employees. But if that was all that happened, we wouldn’t be watching, now would we?

Then the guy in white starts walking to the right of the screen, and then at about :08, he looks up.

That’s when he suddenly finds himself dodging falling florescent bulbs, and hey look at that there’s also a football.

A few seconds later, a guy in a white cap comes shuffling slowly into view from the right side of the screen, with a defeated look that says “I should not have done that.”

So it would appear that Mr. White Hat is the guy who threw the football and broke the lights, so my only question is “Who in the WORLD was he trying to throw that to?”

The lesson: Look, we all like to have fun at work. There’s nothing wrong with blowing off a little steam from time to time.

But the warehouse is not a playground. Or a football field.

Just take the ball outside. There’s less to break there, and fewer ways to hurt somebody with your terrible, terrible aim.

Broken glass EVERYWHERE

This is a bit of a long one, but totally worth it.

The primary subject here is our friend in the forklift, who appears to be trying to move a huge pallet full of glass bottles.

It’s worth noting that there is already a significant amount of broken glass on the ground when the video starts. That means that whatever they’re trying to do here is ALREADY NOT WORKING, but they’re going to go ahead and go for it anyway.

For the first 45 seconds, the guy in the forklift attempts to get into the proper position to lift the pallets. We see some scattered bottles start to fall, which, again, probably should have been an indication that this was never going to work.

Then, at :45, the genius behind the camera says “You should be right to just tilt straight back,” and IMMEDIATELY a bunch of bottles crash to the floor, foreshadowing for a third time what is about to happen.

After about a minute and a half of quiet contemplation from the driver combined with bottles continuing to fall one by one, we finally get the big one.

At 2:30, the driver backs up, and half of the pallet just goes crashing to floor and spills broken glass everywhere.

For those of us watching, it’s awesome.

For those guys…well judging by their reactions, they also think it’s awesome, but that will probably change once they start cleaning up the HUGE PILE OF BROKEN GLASS THAT IS NOW ON THE FLOOR.

The lesson: Winging it is never a good idea, especially when the stuff you’re trying to move is a bunch of empty glass bottles.

Bringing down the house

Right away, we know something intense is going to happen in this video thanks to the dramatic music.

We open on a typical warehouse scene, just a couple guys working the forklifts and going about their day.

Then, at about :10, the forklift on the left starts to back up.

And that’s when the driver’s day goes from “normal day at work” to “Wow, there’s a lot of stuff on top of me.”

He suddenly begins to accelerate, and before anyone can react, he crashes into the shelves behind him, sending them and everything in the surrounding area crashing to the ground.

Honestly, the most amazing thing about this video is the fact that nobody got hurt (at least according to the description). We even see a few people scaling the wreckage to free the guy who knocked everything over, who is now trapped beneath a pile of his own failure.

The Lesson: There are actually a couple things we can learn from this. There are basically two explanations for what happened here.

Either, a) the guy driving the forklift didn’t know what he was doing, as evidenced by his sudden acceleration, or b) he just wasn’t paying attention to his surroundings.

If it was “a,” then the lesson is “Don’t use a forklift if you don’t know how, genius.”

If it was “b,” then the lesson is “DUDE PAY ATTENTION.”

Whatever the case, it’s always fun to learn from other people’s mistakes instead of your own, especially when other people’s mistakes are hilarious.

Photo by Gwan Kho / CC 2.0