The award for dumbest coworker goes to a guy I worked with last summer in Wyoming. His first achievement was the near severing of his right middle finger. He was bored working at the wood pellet mill while waiting for the hopper to top off so we could continue filling bags (we could bag faster than the mill could produce pellets, so there was lag time every now and then). In his boredom, he looked at a bucket elevator and thought to himself "gee, I wonder how many pellets is in each of these buckets?" Here is a bucket elevator very similar to the one in the mill:
The buckets are metal and move at a quick rate bringing material up to the top and dumping it out. He proceeds to stick his hand into the bottom hole of the elevator (see the lower green arrow in the picture, right in there) and tries to quickly grab a handful of pellets out of a bucket. Being the ex-meth addict that he is, his reflexes and general hand-eye coordination are not top notch. He doesn't time it right and isn't at all fast enough, and so his finger gets caught between a bucket and the top of that little opening. The elevator has an auto-stop function if something impedes it, and so it stopped right away. But not after the blunt metal edge of the bucket had gouged into his finger to the bone, fracturing it in the process as well. Luckily, he kept his finger and walked away with some stitches and his finger still usable too.
The second thing he did which merits this award was getting himself lost in the mountain wilderness with no map, compass, food, or any kind of survival gear. This was later on in the summer after the finger incident. He and I and three other guys were up in the Big Horn mountain range taking down a couple miles of old barbed-wire fence. Was a multi-day project that was about an hour drive from Sheridan, so we were camping up there in tents overnight. This guy decided to head into town one night after we got back to camp from working to go to the store. Said he would meet us back in camp in the morning for work the next day. Well he doesn't show up at the agreed upon time, so we wait for about an hour and finally decide to head off without him. He shows up after we leave and since he has no idea where we were (we were starting on a new section of fence that day), he decides to just take off walking trying to find us. Gets himself turned around and lost in an unfamiliar area, and has no clue where he is or where to go. Finds a fence he thinks is the right one (it wasn't) and starts tearing part of it down. Finally decides to try and head back to camp since it was getting dark and is still lost. Meanwhile, the rest of us have gotten back after tearing down the correct fence, and see his vehicle at camp but he is nowhere around. We wait until it is near dark and decide we have to go looking for this guy, he's obviously off on his own. As soon as we leave camp in our trucks, he shows up walking down the road and explains what happened. Needless to say, the boss refused to pay him for the day's work because a.) he showed up late and didn't actually do anything, and b.) tore down someone's fence (he doesn't know exactly where since he was lost) so now that guy's valuable horses or cows are liable to get loose one day.