Famous workplace mishaps, from sleeping through alarms to mistaken identity

An internal inquiry found Thomas Woldbye’s phone had ‘gone into a silent mode without him being aware it had done so’ and he was asleep at the time of the calls. Photograph: PA Video/PA

You would normally expect the role of Heathrow chief executive to be a fairly anonymous position away from the public eye, but Thomas Woldbye is in danger of becoming a household name after it emerged he slept through two emergency notification calls and “several” phone calls after a fire at a substation knocked out power supplies to the airport in March.

He would not be the first person to be entirely unaware of what was going on around him. Here are some other well-known examples.