Unfortunately, I was not in attendance for this, but I certainly worked with this guy and had the story told many times.
This guy was told to remove some weeds from a roof. It was in a plantation and as it goes, these things have a thousand safety protocols. He was told specifically not to go to the edge and stay at least 1 meter from it.
Well, the day started off well. He gets his harness and bucket and had another guy spotting him. Get a permit, pylon out the ground below. Blah blah blah safety. Anyways, after a few hours of hard work, it's break time. He removes his harness and then his spotter starts heading down the ladder to the roof with the safety gear. The roof is pretty high up, let's say about 10 meters.
Now it's about this time the guy sees a couple weeds right along the edge. Now, apparently, Lacking the harness and safety blah blah he sees a rope sitting on the roof and decides to tie it around his waste and then (and this is the kicker) ties the rope to an empty bucket. He then waltzes on over to the edge and starts weeding.
At this time, his spotter is cleaning up the pylons and whatnot.
This is when the head of the plantation (this is a huge chemical plant. I wouldn't be surprised if it was a multi-billion dollar facility, so this guy's got some power) decides to walk out from the building our friend is currently de-weeding. Right underneath him. It was apparently a few shards of roof debris that fell lightly onto and around the head of the plantation, causing him to look up and see this idiot weeding with a cartoonishly large rope tied around his torso. When questioned as to what he was doing, our dear friend apparently answers that he's tied off to a bucket.
Within seconds a swarm of people ranging from safety managers to regular contractors are running up the ladder to make sure this idiot doesn't fall.
He is successfully removed from the roof and is brought into a very Stern meeting with a lot of high-ups
His stated justification for using the bucket was that he thought, if he fell, the bucket would latch onto the ledge and stop his fall.