To err is human, but these mistakes are really above and beyond. How does someone even screw up this bad? From relationship blunders to work mix-ups and beyond, these real-life stories about horrific mistakes are seriously chilling.
1. A Change In Your Morning Routine
When I was 10 or so, I woke up before everyone in the house (it was like 7 am) and decided I would sneak into the pool. I was waist deep in the water before I saw the alligator on the other side of the pool.
2. One Wild Night
So, this happened last weekend, and I’m finally getting around to really processing it all and trying to deal with it. I went out for drinks with my girlfriend and met up with my younger cousin at the bar. We'd all hung out once before and had a great time. My cousin invited a couple of her friends to the bar too, and we ended up doing some bar hopping.
I got very tipsy pretty unintentionally—the last bar was, I swear, not putting any mixers in my cocktails, they were straight. So anyway, we're about to leave and my cousin's friends are trying to get her home, because she's gone too. Well, my girlfriend was our designated driver, so we offered to let her stay in our spare room. Everyone was cool with that because who's safer than family, right? Wrong.
I had to piece together some of this later because I blacked out for most of it. We get home and apparently initially everything was cool. My cousin went to the spare room and my girlfriend got her situated. The problems started a little later when I, in my infinite wisdom, decided to walk straight out of my bedroom with my girlfriend in it, and into my cousin's room.
Then we both slept together. I KNOW. I have no idea what I was thinking, I was honestly blacked out and so was she, but we woke up without any clothes on, next to each other. But that’s not even the worst part. At one point, my girlfriend came out of the room wondering where I was because I just disappeared. She didn't barge into the room or anything, but she heard the noises, which are pretty obvious.
So at that point, she left. Like, me. She left me, and I don't blame her. I haven't heard from her all week, and I'm sure we're done. All I can hope for now is that this doesn't get out to my family, because I would probably implode. My cousin and I are not going to start hooking up regularly, OBVIOUSLY. It's actually super awkward and she has hardly said a word to me either. Again, I don't blame her.
3. Suffering By Comparison
So this happened a few days ago and I’m still not sure I’m 100% ready to tell the story, but here goes. I’ve been with my girlfriend for about a year and I already know she is the love of my life. She’s perfect for me. We’re perfect for each other. We’re getting ready to move in with each other and I want nothing more than to start a family with her and spend the rest of my life with her.
We went on a short vacation last week, and when we returned she gave me her phone to look at some photos from the trip. She went to the bathroom while I had her phone, and as I was scrolling through the pictures, it kind of jumped to a period that was about a year and a half ago. If you have an iPhone you know what I’m talking about, you scroll a little bit too fast and all of a sudden you’re back at the start of the photo album.
It’s annoying as heck. But some photos caught my eye. Some photos that I really shouldn’t be seeing, of her and a previous boyfriend. There she is, the love of my life, near the biggest you-know-what I’ve ever seen in my life. I closed the pictures and I’ve acted like nothing has happened, but I cannot get these images out of my mind.
I’ve never been self-conscious about my size—in fact, if you believe the stats I’m significantly above average, but this has destroyed my self-esteem. We haven’t had intimacy since. I can’t concentrate on my work. I just wish I had never seen those pictures. Also, she was with this guy for three years.
4. Coming Clean About Doing The Dirty
I’m a 25-year-old guy, and I have been involved with an older woman, she’s 44 years old, lately. It started a few months ago when I was on Tinder trying to find someone to hook up with. I saw this very attractive older woman and decided to swipe right because you know, it’s every 20-something-year-old’s dream to hook up with a MILF.
A few days go by and I get a notification that I have a new match. Wahoo! I open up the app and lo and behold it’s the fine cougar I was hoping for. We start chatting and flirting, and it’s going really well. Out of nowhere, she messages me and says, “I’m not sure how this app works, do we just meet to get it on or do we go on a date first?”
I was drinking coffee at the time and promptly shot it out both nostrils. My chance had come. I replied back that people generally just meet up to go to the Bone Zone together but I’m easy either way. She replies, “Well good, because I hate formalities.” I nearly pooped my pants in excitement. She sends me her address and tells me she’s free on Friday and to bring a bottle of red.
The rest of that whole week was a complete blur of anxiety. I could not screw this up. So Friday comes, I show up with a bottle, and she looks really, really hot. Even better in person. We talk about music and traveling and all that, not many personal details (which would come back to haunt me) just sort of arts and culture talk.
A few glasses later and we’re full-blown going at it. I left a little while later feeling like I’m the king of the entire universe and go to sleep. The next day, she texts me saying how she had a great time, and it made her feel young again and all of that. She says she’s off every Friday and Saturday and that next week we should do the same.
This has been going on for roughly three months now. We meet up once or twice a week and then go on our merry way until one of us gets in the mood again. Sweet deal right? Well, I just found out how wrong I was. I messaged her yesterday saying that I had today off of work and asked if she wanted to meet up. She said her son was taking her out to lunch, and that I could come over at 3 pm.
She had mentioned she had a son before but didn’t go any further and I didn’t really care to ask. So 3 pm comes and I’m almost at her house when she messages me that she’s running late. No problem. I park on the road and sort of just wait in my car because her car wasn’t in the driveway yet. I’m sitting there listening to the radio when an oddly familiar SUV pulls into the drive.
I sort of looked at it funny, and then I immediately realized where I knew it from. My co-worker jumps out of the front seat, goes around to her side of the vehicle, gives her a kiss on the cheek and a hug, and then jumps back in the car. My jaw was on the ground. He reversed out of the driveway, and stupid me is sitting like a deer in the headlights in plain sight.
He turns around and is literally 10 feet in front of my car and staring directly at me. My face goes bright red and I feel like I’m going to vomit. Me and this guy work together every single day and I consider him a friend of mine. I even trained him when he started at my company. And the kicker is, I’ve been telling him (in detail) about this older lady and he’s been giving me immense kudos about it saying that it’s “his dream.”
He pulls up beside me and looks very confused, asks me what I’m doing, and says how funny it was we ran into each other. I panic completely and stumble over my words and pretend like I’m on the wrong street and trying to find my cousin’s house. He looked skeptical but sort of shrugged it off. The whole time, his mother is standing there watching us through the curtains.
He directs me where to go and I pull off and then circle back once he’s gone. Needless to say, I went inside and told her what was up, and we both sort of sat there in silence before I left. No boom boom that day. I am now panicking because I think there’s no way he’s not going to know, and he’s going to realize all these wild escapades with this she-devil night mistress I’ve been telling him about is actually his mom.
Later, she texted me and says that we should tell him and come clean because it’s the right thing to do. She was adamant about telling him, even after I informed her about the explicit details I’ve been sharing since we started doing this. What is wrong with this woman? She keeps insisting that “he’s a grown-up and he should realize that his mother is a person too with desires like any other person.”
She said regardless of what I say, she was going to tell him the next day because she can’t “live with the guilt and deceit.” So eventually, the cat got out of the bag, and she came clean about it all. My co-worker called me saying it was super weird and his head is spinning but he’s not mad because he knows we had no idea. He asked if it was her I’d been talking about the whole time and I said yes.
He paused. Then he asked, “...even all that crazy stuff?” RIP BRO. Needless to say, I laughed and changed the subject, you’ve been through enough my child. He also said he’s going to look for a new job and already gave his two weeks’ notice because it’ll be weird working together. He genuinely just seemed bummed. He also said he put in a transfer so we won’t be working in the same building until he’s gone.
Jeez. I’m going to see his mom later and tell her we can’t do this anymore. She caused him to lose a job and a friend and gave him a reason to go to therapy over something we could’ve likely played off.
5. The Fine Print
The overhead fan in our bedroom uses one of those compact halogen light bulbs. Six years ago, the bulb burned out and got really dim, just barely a glow. I bought a replacement bulb, but when I put that one in it was also barely lighting up so I realized the unit was bad. The fan still worked GREAT, it literally is the best fan I’ve ever had because it moves a ton of air and is super quiet.
The fan had also been a gift when we moved into our house. The unit cost over $400 so I didn’t really want to replace it even though our bedroom doesn’t get much natural light so it is pretty dark. So since then, over the years my wife and I have had to make do with no overhead light. We open the windows during the day, and at night use a combination of bedside lamps and the bathroom light.
It’s never really as good at lighting as an overhead light so I keep some flashlights up there for when we are cleaning or looking for something, etc. After six years of living in the dark, this winter I just decided I would replace the darn thing. But before I did, I decided to try one last time with another bulb because, however unlikely, it’s possible BOTH bulbs I had tried were bad. This is when I finally came to the worst realization.
I’m up there installing the new bulb, grab the remote (the fan has a remote), and as I’m turning the light on, I realize: The goddarn thing is dimmable. For six freaking years, we lived with the inconvenience of no overhead light, and the whole time it was just because the darn thing was set to “dim.”
6. No Laughing Matter
On April 1st this year, I got a group text from my wife Sarah’s side of the family stating there was an emergency family meeting happening that night over dinner at my mother-in-law Barb’s house. I immediately had April Fools spidey senses starting to tingle, but we haven't all got together since Christmas so I overlooked it and said my wife and I were in.
We were the last to arrive and it was pretty somber when we walked in. We all sat down at the table and my wife’s brother Tim informed the family that his wife Ashley had been having an affair and they are divorcing. The affair was with a long-time close family friend, Chris, who lived a block away. Chris' wife Jen had caught them when she came home early one day last week and broke the news to my brother-in-law.
Both families have been friends for years. Like I said, they live less than a block from each other, they each have been married for 15+ years, and they have four kids right around the same age. Honestly, I have always thought both of them were picture-perfect families. Heck all four of them and their kids were at our house two weeks ago for a BBQ.
Anyways, after airing a lot of dirty laundry and their plans to divorce, talking about how it could affect future family functions, and opening it up to the group for any questions...there was silence. Then I screwed up so colossally I can’t believe it. I broke the silence with laughter and a slow clap. I said this was the best April Fool’s gag I've ever seen, but I wasn't falling for it.
I told Ashley and especially Tim they need to consider going into theater, since their performances were top-notch and their tears seemed genuine. Being the newest member of the family (my wife and I married six months ago) this was probably not the best thing to say in hindsight. I probably should not have said anything. Everyone in the room looked horrified.
My mother-in-law, who had been crying the entire time, lost all composure. She left the room in hysterics and did not return before we left. Tim just shook his head, and his cheating wife actually let out a brief chuckle before calling me out for being an idiot for thinking this was a ruse, then she berated me for being so insensitive.
The rest of the family sat in silence shaking their heads as my wife lectured me for trying to make a joke out of a serious situation. I am still dumbfounded at my idiocy. Note to self: Not a joke.
7. Child’s Play
My wife is working out of town for a couple weeks. Sometime over the weekend, I noticed my son playing with this little silicone cup that kind of looked like a tulip. I asked him what it did and he proceeded to show me its versatility. Over the next few days, it helped the Paw Patrol save the town, it was a treasure chest holding tiny pebbles guarded by pirates, and a force field protecting a space ship.
It came with us to the park, grocery shopping, and even out to dinner one night. I loved that it had its own little satchel and assumed it just went with a playset. Fast forward to this morning and as we’re getting ready for school, Alexa reminds us that it’s show and tell today at school. So my son grabs his little silicone cup and off to school he goes.
I pick him up after school and his teacher asks to speak with me. My son looks happy so I figure he’s not in trouble, or if he is in trouble he did something cheeky that he’s proud of. When I found out what happened that day, I went bright red. Our conversation went something like this. Teacher: “Ben’s show and tell was...interesting.”
Me: “Yeah! It’s cool right? We’ve been playing with that thing for days.” Teacher: “Uh, Mr. Scott, do you know what that is?” I start to panic—oh God, it’s not a toy... Teacher: “...that is a, uh, menstrual cup.” I get confused. Teacher notes my confusion: “It’s um, used to collect menstrual blood...” I’m still confused. Teacher: “It uh, goes inside, and uh...collects blood.”
Me: “It just...stays in there?” She nods. Me: “Are you sure? I don’t think that would, uh, fit...too, uh...comfortably...there.” Teacher: “Oh, it folds in half then springs open inside....” Now we’re both clearly uncomfortable. Me: “Alright then...so where do I get a replacement, because my wife will probably not be too pleased when she returns home and will not want to continue using this one.”
My wife laughed SO HARD when I told her. My son is none the wiser and is having a tea party with the cup right now.
8. Get That Paper
When I was young, my brothers and I snuck a copy of GTA: San Andreas into the house. We spent days holed up in our basement taking turns playing, and down there my parents didn’t bother us too much. In order to get tons of money for guns (we had yet to figure out my parents’ dialup password so cheats weren’t a thing for us yet), we would go to the strip club and stand on the stage, absorbing the money dudes threw at the women and just let the game sit for 10-20 minutes.
We had to be careful, though, because sometimes the girls would do a move and bump into the main player CJ and the bouncers would shoot the place up. One day while I was playing, my mom yelled down at us to get ready, saying we’re going to Pizza Hut. In a stroke of genius, I drove to the GTA club got on the stage, and then turned the TV off and we left.
It was to be the heist of the century. My dad, however, was at church at this time, practicing for a gospel concert he was singing in. He always filmed the practices so he could take notes at home upon playback, and this time was no different. While my mom and brothers and I were still at the Hut, he arrived at home and plugged his camcorder into the VCR.
We had just one VCR, and it was connected to the basement TV. Back at the Hut, my mom gets a phone call that makes her face turn white. She puts her napkin down and slowly looks around the table at us and says “Ooookay” a few times into the phone in this really calculating, specific way that she always did when she knew us kids were in trouble before we did.
Naturally, it was at this point that we kids knew we were in trouble. For what, though, we didn’t know. After a very quiet minivan ride, we get home and my mom says, “Boys, why don’t we go down to the basement. Your dad wants to show you his gospel practice downstairs.” It was at THIS point we knew why we were in trouble. So we drag our feet down the stairs.
Lo and behold, my dad is sitting on the couch, TV on, a girl’s bare polygonal body swaying stiffly back and forth on screen to En Vogue’s “My Lovin’,” with CJ standing mere inches away, collecting money. My dad starts in. “Boys, I don’t even know where to begin. This PlayStation was a blessing to you for Christmas and this is how you repay us? By breaking our trust??”
He is holding the controller up now, gesticulating with it. “Here I am, practicing to bring glory to God, and—” but he was cut off, as he inadvertently squeezed the controller, causing CJ to punch the girl. My entire family stands in silence, watching together as the bouncers in the club shoot the place up for what seems like an eternity.
After the shooting stops and CJ appears in front of the hospital, I look back and see my mom silently weeping into her hand. I look at my dad as a single tear rolls down his cheek and he prays under his breath. After another eternity of silence, without a word, my dad bends down, disconnects the PlayStation, walks back to the family computer, disconnects it, goes to his car, and drives away.
For the next four months, he kept the PS2 and PC locked in his office at work. It’s one of my favorite memories of growing up. I miss my brothers.
9. Fashion Faux-Pas
Minor background: I am a pretty affectionate, and at times effeminate, dude. I'm 6'2” and have a pretty "tough-guy" background in that I was in special forces a while ago, and my roommates all served as well, but I also have thin wrists and sit on my friends' laps and blow kisses to them and stuff. I'm not gay for what it’s worth, I just am me.
So while I was in a shop with a roommate a few weeks ago, he saw these really cool shawls that we both couldn't get out of our heads. So he returned last weekend to buy them and now we have these shawls. Mine makes me look like a Star Wars character and his looks like the Outlaw Josey Wales, these are seriously awesome shawls.
The first night we wore them, everybody at the dive bar we went to (re: dudes) thought they were awesome as well. Then this girl and her friend arrive on an invite from Shawlbro, and it all goes wrong. They are seriously turned off by our sweet shawls. Like, acting pretty weird about them and making comments. Whatever. Around this time, I get a call from my girlfriend.
She's tired and wants to hang out at my place, so I bid these mean girls and Shawlbro adieu and head home. I'm still wearing the shawl when my girlfriend arrives. Well, she's also really taken aback—she won't even kiss me until I take it off. After, we get do the deed and go to sleep…and the next morning she starts asking me if I'm gay.
And she's really serious and aggressive about it. I tell her I'm not, and that if I was I'd definitely know it by now, and she counters with her major evidence of the fact that I own a shawl. Anyway, she gets weird and leaves, and then sends me a text later about how she's sorry and that she "needs to think about what kind of man" she wants, and then doesn't contact me for days.
So yesterday I invite her out, and it all comes crashing down. She's stumbling over her words and talking about how she likes tough guys and how she grew up in the south and needs to get used to The Big City, but that she doesn't know this or that, and eventually I just tell her very politely to get screwed because I'm pretty insulted by this point.
On the way back, now that I'm not directly in front of her, I get this long apologetic text from her but the crux of it is that yeah, she's just not that into me anymore because I wore a shawl. Later on, I tell Shawlbro about this, and apparently he also had a blowout with the girl he was seeing over his shawl that very same night we went out.
We are both going to keep wearing the shawls though, they are warm.
10. Acci-Dental Emergency
One day, I got out of the shower and 11-year-old me came up with a great idea. Because I had my hands full, instead of using one hand to hold the towel and the other to turn the light off, I was going to jump up and bite the light switch to pull it down with my teeth. What could go wrong? So, I jumped up to bite the switch.
It was one of the switches with the string and a ball at the end where you pull it down, and as I came down, my two front teeth hit the ball… and snapped in half. I called downstairs through a mouthful of blood. “Mum... I think I chipped my teeth.” My mum came sprinting up the stairs, took one look at me, and said, “Chipped them? You’ve snapped them in half! There’s a perfect bloody circle in your teeth you idiot!”
So now, every now and then I have to get the other halves of my two front teeth replaced until I’m 21 and can get permanent implants drilled in. The funny part is that the light never turned off!
11. A Close Shave
I work with kids with developmental disabilities. One of the kids I was working with was afraid of hair clippers. With the approval of his parents and our director, who initiated this, we adjusted a tolerance program so that we were actually clipping some of his hair using a pretty thick guard on the clippers. He was getting REALLY good at it.
One day, I took out the clippers and was about to begin, but the kid looked at the clippers and said, “no no no!!” I reassured him that he was going to be fine, so he very quickly stopped and I proceeded. I began to cut his hair and then BAM, HUGE bald spot. It turns out the kid was saying “no” because he noticed the guard wasn’t on the clippers!
I freaked out and called his mom over. Luckily, she just busted out laughing. She said the kid’s dad preferred him with “short hair” anyways, so we proceeded to cut off the rest of his hair. He did great!
12. Not Knowing My Limits
About two and a half years ago, I was in my last semester at college to become a props and paint person for TV and film. I went to college at 30, when I finally figured out what I wanted to do with my life, so I wasn’t quite as strong and indestructible as I had been when I was younger. Without thinking about possible repercussions, I helped a team lift a very heavy set piece.
It was too heavy, actually; we didn't have enough people, but we got it to where it needed to be. It turns out that that lift messed up both of my wrists. For life. I spent the next two years after graduating trying to fix them, but doctors were struggling to figure out what was even wrong. Their final verdict: “Look into long term pain management."
So, now I can't work in the industry I wanted to be in, and I also can't even do a lot of the stuff I used to do. I can't lift anything more than 15lbs. without it hurting. I finally got a part-time job at an escape room recently, but I can’t stop thinking about the fact that I could have been working in TV, or at the very least, theatre, if I had just said that the set piece was too heavy.
It’s crazy how one wrong move can derail your life.
13. Mistaken Identity
This happened a little over a year ago. So, I work for the TSA, and have for a few years now. It's a good job overall. I'm underpaid, but the benefits are nice, and I get overtime when I want it. A little over a year ago, during the week leading up to Christmas, we had some really bad weather that delayed all the flights. I volunteered to stay late so that my co-workers could go home to their families.
Most of the work was done anyway, so it was mostly just standing around waiting for the odd latecomer. I was working when three passengers came up together: a middle-aged man, a middle-aged woman, and a teenage boy. I figure it's a family traveling together for the holidays, and go about my work. Mom goes through, all is fine. Dad goes through, all is fine.
Kid comes up, and I get a good look at him. Hoodie, sweatpants, shortish hair, smooth face. I figure he's about 13, maybe 14. I hit the button, direct him to wait with me for a moment, and then gesture to the screen, which lit up on his chest area. I tell him that I have to pat that area down. He's a little nervous, but I figure that because he's so young.
This is probably his first time getting a pat-down, but he says okay, and I start the pat-down. I do the left side of the chest, and feel some moob, which catches me off guard because he didn't look chubby at all. I move to the right side of the chest, read what's on the hoodie, and it all clicks at once.
The hoodie has the name of the local college on it. This is an adult, not a child. He's not wearing sweatpants, she is wearing yoga pants. She doesn't even know the couple that just came through. I look at her face, which is bright red, my hand is still on her boob, and I pull it back like I just got bit by a snake. I immediately call for my supervisor, who comes over and asks what's wrong, and I explain the situation to her.
My supervisor covers her mouth, and at first I thought she was absolutely mortified, but then I realized she's trying not to laugh. She takes a minute to pull herself together, tells me to go take a break, and finishes screening the passenger herself. Once that was done, I apologize to the passenger. She tells me it's fine, and that it wasn't the first time she was mistaken for a boy and she probably should have said something before I started touching her. But I wasn’t out of the woods yet.
I leave her alone, and go talk to my supervisor to figure out exactly how fired I am. She tells me to calm down, that it was just an honest mistake, and that she has my back if the passenger files an official complaint, but that probably won't happen and I shouldn't be worried. That reassured me a little, but I still groped a woman and ruined Christmas, so I feel like an absolute monster.
I swallow my shame and finish my shift, then I go into the airport proper to find some food, because I just finished a 12-hour shift and there's no way I have the energy to cook dinner. There, I see my hapless victim sitting at her gate, waiting for her flight. I went up to her to apologize again, and saw that the flight had been delayed until morning; it was about 11 at night now.
I apologize again, she says it's fine, and I ask her if she's planning to stay the whole night. She says she has to, since all the hotels in the area are booked up. I tell her that I'm getting some dinner, and offer to get her some food as well. After all, I already got to second base, I think it's only fair that I buy her dinner. She agrees, and we go to one of the restaurants that is open late, get some food, and start eating.
She said she gets mistaken for a boy a lot, and it's not a big deal. I told her about how I had long hair and no beard in college, and at the gym people would frequently walk into the men's bathroom, see me, and do a double-take to make sure they didn't walk into the ladies' room. She laughed, and we ended up talking for a few hours, before I finally told her that I had to get home, and apologized again. Then came the true twist.
She said that all is forgiven…if I promise to take her on a real date when she gets back. I agreed, she gave me her phone number, and I went home and immediately started texting her. We kept talking until her flight finally left, and when she got back I picked her up at the airport, and a few days later took her on that date that I promised her. We just celebrated our one-year anniversary. She has long hair now.
14. That’s Nuts
I got out of a bad relationship a few months ago and only recently felt good enough to get out of the house again. This was my first-ever boyfriend and he turned out to be a piece of trash, so I was obviously a bit hesitant. But some old friends from high school were visiting my town and asked if I wanted to go on a bar crawl with them and I figured screw it, it's not like anything will happen, so why not?
At the first bar, we run into a group of guys from my university. I had seen some of them around but never spoke to them before. One of my friends decides she's going to force me to "get out of my shell" and drags our group over to talk with them. I'm EXTREMELY quiet (like...weirdly quiet to most people) so I end up sitting in the corner of our booth and not saying anything, just drinking and feeling awkward.
Well, one of the guys in the other group, let's call him Adam, is also being weirdly quiet. So my friends and his friends, who are already tipsy, decide to make things as awkward as possible by making us play truth or dare—except we have to drink when we don't want to answer something. There are a lot of personal questions neither of us want to answer, so we end up drinking quite a bit.
By the time we're done the first bar, Adam and I are on a whole different plane of existence from everyone else. It actually turned out that we had a lot in common, and he was pretty cute, and we're goofing around and laughing the whole time. I started to get butterflies in my stomach, and not just from the drinks. Adam has my exact sense of humor and is really sweet and kind.
We wander off and start having deep conversations about feeling left out of things and how annoying it is when people say stuff like, "Can they speak?" I tell him I'm walking home and he offers to walk with me. I know where this is going but I don't feel nervous, plus I feel like I have a genuine connection with this guy. Our friends are wolf-whistling as we leave and instead of being embarrassed, I feel weirdly proud.
So we get to my place, talk for a bit, and do the deed. I wake up earlier than him and decide I'm going to make a nice breakfast. I want to impress him and show him I like him, and everyone likes a good breakfast when they have a hangover, right? So I sneak out of bed and make scrambled eggs, French toast, and sausage. I prefer almond milk so I use that for the eggs and French toast.
He wakes up and tells me I look just as cute sober. At this point, I'm convinced he's the love of my life. He sees the breakfast and gets excited and I'm like yes! My plan worked! I'm going to get to his heart through his stomach! We eat and everything's going great for a few bites. Then he makes a weird face and clears his throat. His eyes start to widen and he asks me if there were nuts in the bread or something.
I say no, but I used almond milk. He jumps out of his chair and says, "CALL AN AMBULANCE RIGHT. NOW." I'm freaking the heck out. He's wheezing and stuff and looks absolutely panicked. I ask if he has an EpiPen and he shakes his head no. So I call an ambulance and tell them he's having an allergic reaction and paramedics come and haul him off.
This happened last weekend. I have not heard back from him since. I found his buddy and confirmed he is OK. I guess accidentally triggering a severe allergic reaction does not lead to romance.
15. The Mother Of All Punishments
My son was not doing his homework so I confiscated his GameBoy Advance. I told him he would get it back next week. Well, he’s a pretty clever dude and knew all my hiding places, so I put it someplace he would never look. There was one not so little problem. I suffered a traumatic brain injury a few years earlier and I often forget stuff.
So when he did his homework and asked for it back after a week, I…could not find it. Aargh. I looked everywhere. (Narrator: Obviously not everywhere...) Then we moved houses. And I still didn’t find it. SpongeBob: 18 YEARS LATER...I was donating some coats I had not worn in a long time, and in the pocket of a Viennese trench coat from the 1930s, I found...his GameBoy Advance.
I turned it on. And it WORKED. Pokémon appeared. I put fresh batteries into it and handed it to my 28-year-old son, who proceeded to laugh for a good five minutes, then played it for a few hours. Then proceeded to tell my wife and other adult children how silly I was.
16. Universities Are Businesses
My worst mess up? Student loans. I got into the same private university that my Dad had attended back in the 70s. They have a great engineering program, and he was excited for me to follow in his footsteps. Of course, the tuition rates had skyrocketed since then. The money that my parents had saved for college was gone very fast, and the student loans began.
I ended up with $100k of student loans at the end of my undergrad. Then I accepted a position in their Master’s program with a full scholarship. Two years later, when I finished my masters, the interest had ballooned my debt to $115k, and the Master’s degree has not been any more useful than 2 years of job experience would have been.
Now I am out of school but financially crippled. All of my income goes to rent and loans. So many aspects of my life are on hold because of this debt. I have friends who got four-year engineering degrees with zero loans. Some of them went to the same school and got various scholarships that I didn't qualify for. Others went to less expensive schools.
I feel like my whole life is postponed a decade behind theirs. Choosing the university and program that I chose is by far the biggest mistake of my life.
17. Let Me Rephrase
My son has autism—level 1, what was previously called Asperger’s. Due to that, he also has a psychiatrist, multiple psychologists, and many doctors. We decided to get a new primary doctor who works closely with his other providers to better coordinate his care this past summer. I brought my son in for a standard "well child" visit, and spent nearly an hour with this new doctor going over his issues, medications, history, etc.
Toward the end of the visit she says to me, "Well, he can get the gardasil vaccine today," to which I reply, joking, "Oh, no he can't have that, I don't want him to get autism." I should maybe note here that I am an aspie too, and while I think my sarcasm is on point, I must have been a little too serious looking because she just stared at me.
The silence lasted an eternity while I imagine she was deciding how to proceed. Eventually, I laughed and tried to assure her I was only kidding, but she only returned a nervous-sounding chuckle and left the room. As my son and I were discussing whether I was offensive (he thought I was hilarious) in walked the nurse with a stack of information about vaccines.
He started his lecture about vaccine safety and potential risks, etc. and no amount of my assurances that we are not in fact anti-vax would stop him. He just kept saying, "Okay, well I have to tell you this," in a way that suggested that the doctor told him to give me the full spiel. For what it’s worth, of course we took the gardasil that day.
Shout out to Nurse Pete for being the first nurse to ever give my kid a vaccine without him crying or fist-fighting everyone. I wish everyone could have a Nurse Pete.
18. Karma’s A Witch
My wife has a history of startling and scaring me easily due to me being deaf in one ear from tinnitus, which has dramatically decreased my situational awareness. She finds it hilarious and I’ve grown to tolerate it because of love and all. Still, I decided my time for revenge had come. Cut to dinner time, and I’m about to boil a box of rigatoni pasta when the inspiration hits me from a video on social media I saw.
I hide a piece of that rigatoni between my teeth and make my way into the living room where my wife was relaxing on the couch after a long day of being a nurse. “Hey sweetheart, do you mind rubbing my neck? I feel like I have a kink in it or something,” I ask her. At this point, I can barely contain my excitement for this amazing prank as she happily begins massaging my neck for me.
After 30-45 seconds, I then bite down hard on that piece of uncooked rigatoni, which released a sickening yet satisfying crunch sound. I give a little “ow” sound and immediately go limp, falling face first into the couch. Now my wife is mostly a calm, non-emotional type person, but her visceral reaction of terror and worry and panic that came flooding out of her while she started to shake my limp body and began to check my vitals made me feel guilt like I’ve never felt before.
After only a short time, I give up on the ruse and show her it was just pasta. To say she was livid is an understatement. I’ve been sleeping on the couch ever since. Worth it.
19. Couples Therapy
Recently, I finally managed to convince my fiancée to light up with me. She's always been anti it, but now that we're just a few weeks away from getting married and being all grown up, she's gone full YOLO. This turned into a total nightmare. She became extremely relaxed and talkative. It was cute at first, listening to her go on and on about life and love. But then it got kind of specific.
She mentioned how she never expected to be with someone like me. I didn't even have to encourage her to explain because the floodgates were already wide open. All those details spilled out without any filter. This is what I learned from my fiancée that I never knew before: Most of her past relationships ended because she was notoriously promiscuous.
One of those relationships came to an end after she cheated on her boyfriend by hooking up with his younger brother, while also cheating on the darn brother, with his best friend, who just so happened to be a girl. I'm the first guy she's had to do the "faking it" thing with. Apparently, all her exes pushed all the right buttons whereas I don't.
My asthma is a turn-off when it comes to intimacy because she feels like she needs to hold back, so that I don't get too excited. All her exes were well-endowed (of course they were!). I'm her first average. Those were some of the key points. I was too traumatized to register whatever else she said afterward. I don't think I blinked for the rest of the evening. But it got so much worse.
Even though I knew what my fiancée said would haunt me forever, I was willing to bury it in the back of my mind and pretend like it never even happened. However, the day after, my fiancée wanted to talk. So we did. It was brutal. She said my mom was right about her being wrong for me. Long story short, all of this was building up to her admitting she'd been sending private photos to one of her well-endowed exes.
I'm emotionally destroyed. It doesn't feel real yet, so I have trouble accepting it's over. But it is. Guess I'm returning that ring and getting a PS5.
20. Baring It All
I recently started a new job about 5-6 months ago doing some tech work. With that being said, I’m a pretty young girl, just 24, and definitely the youngest person who works there by far. I also mostly work with men, 30-40. We have a GroupMe for the store I work at, which includes the owner, the manager, and about 5-6 other employees.
The previous night I had been feeling a little frisky and took some pictures and videos for the guy that I was with at the time. No biggie right? The next morning I had work, go in as normal, pretty busy day actually. Noon rolls around and I needed to post a picture to the GroupMe about a issue I was having with a computer I was working on.
I typed what I needed to say and clicked the camera roll icon. Just as I clicked the picture, a customer came up and started asking me a question. I hit send without thinking and go on about my day. I should also probably say that by this time I was working alone and closing so no one else was around. The customer who came in kept me pretty busy for 30-45 mins.
When they finally left, I went to check my phone and saw I had a bunch of missed calls from my boss...at first I thought he was just calling me about the question I had. While the phone was ringing, I went back to look at the GroupMe. My heart dropped instantly when I realized what happened. To my horror I CLICKED NOT JUST A PICTURE FROM THE NIGHT BEFORE, BUT THE WHOLE VIDEO.
My boss picked up the phone and he began questioning me about what my “intentions” were with the video and that he’s never had anyone do such a disrespectful act in the company before. I tried to explain, but needless to say that was my last day working there. On the bright side, the co-worker I had a crush on...I finally got his attention.
21. Slow Drip
There was a leak from my bathroom upstairs to the kitchen right underneath it. Every time someone would shower, water would slowly begin to drip into the kitchen. I thought there was a leak somewhere in the drainpipe and I took the kitchen ceiling down looking for it. And this was an old home, so there was this cement type of plaster with metal latticework through it on top of wooden slats.
It took forever to expose the drainpipe...only to find out that the little knob thing on the shower faucet that you pull up to turn on the shower had broken and I just needed to replace that. That piece costs me $7. Then I had to completely replace my kitchen ceiling.
22. Laugh Attack
So there's this girl I like at work, and we're really good friends. We're having lunch and we're making those ironic depression meme jokes as most friends do. For some reason I got the idea to say "Well hey, you know what's just one letter away from sad? DAB!" and promptly did the deed. Also, I have the ability to cry on demand so I just stared stone-cold at her and let two tears fall down.
She finds it funny. Extremely funny. So funny she drops to the floor and starts laughing her butt off. After a good 30 seconds, she starts grabbing her chest and coughing. I asked if she was okay when she starts wheezing and begins to convulse a bit. Freaking the heck out and thinking she's having a seizure, I start to reach for my phone.
In that exact second, my manager randomly decides to come in and sees this big guy towering over this poor little girl on the floor. I only manage to cut off her impending rage by saying I think she's having a seizure and I'm calling 9-1-1. Fortunately, I was able to explain to her what happened after the ambulance came. Turns out she has asthma, and my joke caused a flare-up, and she was waving her arms to try to tell me to get her inhaler. Whoops.
23. Speed Cart Driver
I was in a French supermarket when I was three years old. To keep me entertained, my parents supplied me with one of those little shopping carts you occasionally get for kids. I quickly showed why you don't always find them around anymore. Naturally, my little shopping cart was, in fact, a racing car, and I was its small but determined driver.
We went whipping round corners, evading shelves by mere inches, it was wild. However, my control wasn't what I thought it was, and as I went in for a turn into the aisle, I lost control of the cart. Off the cart and I went straight into the wine shelf. I watched as this long aisle of wine wobbled back, and then slowly came back forward, sending all the wine bottles crashing down onto the floor. It was everywhere.
The supermarket was very good about it and didn't accept a cent back. But I never did get one of those little shopping carts again.
24. A Hairy Situation
I am committing one of the greatest societal taboos and revealing a secret that heretofore has been zealously guarded throughout the ages. It is a correlate to childbirth in that just as post-menopausal women wouldn't dare tell an expectant mother how truly agonizing childbirth is, no man in his 50s would traumatize a man in his youthful prime with fears of the anatomical horror that is to come.
But times have changed and new technology places men in grave danger, so now you must know of this biological atrocity, in order that you might avoid my disastrous screw-up: Sometime around midlife, men's hair follicles undergo a revolting mutation. While the hair atop one's head thins and drops, new hair grows in places you never imagined.
Bristle-stiff tufts sprout outside and inside of ears, and up nostrils. Eyebrows become bushy, unruly, and coarse. Hair down there turns gray and scraggly, I kid you not. All these hairs grow alarmingly fast and require constant attention, lest you become that guy with a bunny paw sticking out of his ear. Their eradication is a battle men wage stoically and silently throughout the second half of their lives.
And, as with any battle, there are casualties. So one day, I found a great nose hair trimmer in the As Advertised On TV aisle at CVS. It looks like and operates like a miniature hedge trimmer. It's virtually impossible to cut yourself but mows down the hair. Yesterday I was trimming ear, nose, and eyebrow hairs after a shower.
I was so happy with the results that I decided to try it on my nether regions too. It worked great! Soon I had gone a bit overboard and pretty much shaved everything. I liked the new look, but there was a little spot in the most sensitive area. I positioned a make-up mirror on the bathroom floor and laid down spread eagle, knees up, so I could see and trim everything well.
Where once just a few wispy hairs prevailed, unbeknownst to me a virtual forest had arisen! Trusty new nose hair trimmer in hand, I prepared for battle. Suddenly, my butt hairs wrapped around the trimmer blade like Rapunzel using a superheated curling iron, pulling the device tight against my skin and jamming the blade. The hairs were being ripped from my flesh and the pain was excruciating.
No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't remove the trimmer. Wiggling it tugged the hairs more; restarting it was a double down that I lost—the hairs were wound even tighter against the blade. I frog walked to my bedroom, one hand holding the trimmer tied between my butt cheeks, and searched for my cuticle scissors. No luck. I did, however, find a carpet knife.
Unbearable pain breeds desperation. Back on the bathroom floor, I tried in vain to cut myself free, nicking the tenderest of flesh twice and drawing the first blood of battle. I was making little progress, and it was time to make the ultimate sacrifice. After a suitable prayer, I gripped tight on the trimmer and committed reverse hara-kiri, Brazilian wax style, ripping off the trimmer blade along with its hair trap.
Blinding pain left me curled fetal, hyperventilating, while blood slowly trickled down my butt. I decided to share this and expose life's cruel secret in the best interest of mankind, that others may avoid falling prey to the technological wonders of As Seen on TV hair removal tools. Young men, I beg of you to heed my warning. Do not go gentle into that good night.
25. Chain Of Command
I was working for an international manufacturer that serviced clients in Asia. I got a call from a stressed Chinese woman at my factory. She had been on the phone all day, trying to reach someone who could make decisions because there was a problem with the way the print was outputting during manufacturing. It was Christmas Eve and none of the important decision-making types were answering the phone.
She needed approval to correct the print plates and needed it right away because we were due to load onto a container to ship via sea to LA. The issue wasn't caught until late in the process, and as such, the fix would cost us over $250,000 in lost product. I made a few phone calls, left a few voice mails, but ultimately the decision came to me.
I told her, in my bravest voice, to make the fix—soon, I'd realize just how massive of a mistake I'd just made. I unknowingly set off a chain reaction that made the ship leave port late, more than doubling that $250k figure. After my boss's boss's boss, some VP, reamed into me, he asked if I had anything to say for myself, and I asked him what I was supposed to do and that even he didn't pick up the phone.
My boss coughed back a laugh, and I was shipped off to a doomed on-site account.
26. The Numbers Don’t Lie
We've all been seeing the recent craze of DNA testing and whatnot, so my dad and I decided to jump on the bandwagon and we bought two from 23andme. We got our results back a few days ago and I went into the DNA relatives section to check out my matches. At the top it listed my dad as only sharing 29.2% DNA with me and being predicted to be a half-brother, which is impossible.
This didn't make sense to me since we just look so alike, so he was definitely my father. My cousin also had taken the test a while back and she shared 24.6% with me, also predicted to be my half-sibling. We're supposed to share around 12%, being first cousins. I couldn't think of a genetic relationship that would explain what I was seeing and I had doubts in the accuracy of the percentages, so I asked the company for help.
Basically, the shared percentages are extremely accurate and highly unlikely to be false. The only realistic explanation for what I was seeing was that my uncle, my cousin's father and my dad's brother, is my father. Reality hit me in the face like a flying bag of bricks. All the dots lined up and I felt a sense of loss. I sat in my room for an hour just in shock, and then I had a feeling of anger come over me.
I needed some freaking answers. Without even thinking, I rushed out of my room and confronted my mother downstairs. My mom is a businesswoman and is often away on business trips. She had no idea my dad and I had done one of these tests since she was away on a trip and just got back. My mother and I never had a traditional relationship.
She was always focused on her work and my dad ended up mostly raising me. My irrational self didn't even sugar coat it. I asked her if she cheated on my dad with my Uncle David. I have never seen the color drain from someone's face so quickly. She looked dumbfounded and then mumbled, "What kind of question is that? Of course not."
I told her everything: the test, percentages, DNA matches, ALL OF IT! My mom fell to the ground crying, begging me not to tell dad. I left her there and went back into my room. I called my cousin (now half-sibling) and told her everything. She ended the call screaming. My dad (now uncle) then came home and stumbled into my room asking what's wrong with mom.
I told him everything too. He didn't say anything after calming down. He left the room and I locked the door. For the next few hours, I heard my entire family fall apart outside my door. My parents got into a heated argument and my grandparents rushed over to see what was going on. My aunt-in-law and David showed up shortly after and I'm pretty sure I heard my dad and David get into some physical fight. Utter chaos.
I feel awful. I know it's not my fault but I can't help feeling that this is all because of me. If I had spent my birthday money on something else, none of this would have happened, but another part of me is glad to know the truth. I'm too scared to go outside. I don't even know what the outcome was. The only noise I hear in the house now is the occasional sobbing coming from my mother, and I'm sure my dad is out of the house.
27. Wrong Measures
I'm a chemist and was working on a reaction with a new palladium catalyst that we had just ordered. Since I was a dumb undergrad, I didn't really make the connection that I didn't need to put in equal amounts of the catalyst. I weighed out 200 grams of the catalyst and put it in the reaction. I mentioned to my boss later that day that we'd need to order more because I had used up almost all of it already.
It was at that point that he mentioned that it had cost about $15,000 for the 250g bottle and that I should have been using about 3 milligrams and not 200 grams. Not only was it very expensive though, it had taken over a year to come in after they had ordered it. I was very lucky that I didn't get fired and that we were okay to use the remaining 50 grams for the next few years.
28. Hair Of The Dog
I have a five-year-old dog, and I’ve had him since he was three months old. I love him so much. He's an amazingly playful dog—a Jack Russell. A few years ago, he started developing really itchy red skin on his toes, and the poor pup would constantly lick his toes to the point where he was making them almost hairless. I took him to the vet, and they said it was allergies.
They prescribed him medication. We've been buying this medication for him ever since, occasionally skipping a few weeks and using a mini-dose of Benadryl until we purchased more allergy pills. The pills helped, as in he wasn't constantly licking his toes all the time, but he would still lick them so it wasn't a sure-fire solution. Let's say 80% cured.
Now, on to the screw-up. We tried giving him the pills with nothing, and he just puts them in his mouth and spits them out. So, we started putting them in a little bit of peanut butter, which he licks off a spoon, and the pill gets swallowed along with the peanut butter. A few weeks ago we ran out of peanut butter, so we used Jell-O instead.
It worked just as well because he swallowed it right up. Over the next few days we did the same thing, and he wasn't licking his toes AT ALL. We had a light bulb moment. We took our dog to the vet to get an allergy test, which we should have done FROM THE START. Test Result: Our dog is allergic to peanut butter. We've been giving him his allergy pills dipped in the substance he's allergic to. He's a happy dog now with no more itchy toes!
29. Tenant Eviction
When my dad passed on, I was given his house 2+ hours away. At the same time, my wife and I had a newborn and were working full time. I let my lifelong friend move in for monthly rent and he actually helped fix up the house and keep it in good condition. His girlfriend started staying the night once in a while at the house, and then more often. If I had known what she would do, I'd have kicked her out on the spot.
He and his girlfriend had a falling out. He left and stopped paying rent as we discussed. I sent family over to check on the house and apparently someone's living there. I check on house that weekend. It's my friend's now ex-girlfriend living there. She asks for one week to move all her stuff out that I didn't even know was there.
I had my new family in the car with me and was not prepared for having to remove someone and all their stuff so I said ok. I was to come back the following weekend when my schedule allowed and she would be gone. Well this final week let her have a full 30 days living at my house, and she had proof, so she was now a resident and needed a full offical eviction to get her out of my house.
When you’re involved in an eviction, there's all sorts of help and organizations and websites for the person living at the house to get answers. For the "landlord" evicting the tenant, I found almost nil. SO, I had to pay a ton of money and had to drive to the county courthouse 2+ hours away like 6-8 times over the next two months to get her out of my dad's house.
During this time, I set up cameras on the neighbor's property with their permission, attempting record damage to the house, parties, theft of my property still at the residence. I didn't get jack squat. And I was not allowed to enter the house. She did about $40k damage to the home, took a lot of my dad's belongings that were hidden in the attic, and cost me an insane amount of time.
Well, really, I did this to myself by letting my "friend" move in. It took almost two full years of going across the state every weekend to work on the house. I guess I can pay more money to go after her for the damages to the house, but she was living off stolen means and state aid during this whole process and would never be able to pay me back.
One final kicker, the house was heated via fuel oil in Michigan and we have cold winters. This woman ran out of fuel oil in late December and she didn't have $150 needed to get a fuel oil delivery that you have to pay because you have to order a minimum amount to get them to drive out to your house and put fuel oil in your tank. Instead, she used electric heaters and had several of them running all winter to compensate.
Because she was on state aid or something, the company couldn't shut off her power in the middle of winter, so she racked up an average of $1,700 a month in electric bills over the winter. When I went to put the power back in my name, I was told that I have to pay her $6,300 balance before the power could be restored. This was because I didn't set up some landlord program with the power company in the first place. This took another three months or so, and a couple hundred to a lawyer, to get straightened out.
The house is fixed up and sold now—for less than half the profit we originally anticipated. I lost so much money.
30. The Joke Thief
Tomorrow I'll be turning 32. As we were waking up this morning, my wife asked me if I was excited for the plans we'd made for my thirty-second birthday. I responded that it was going to be tough to do everything in half a minute, but I was looking forward to it nonetheless. She looked at me, blank-faced for a couple seconds. I thought she was just trying to make sense of what I had said.
Instead, she suddenly smacks my chest and yells at me that I ruined a joke she's been holding onto for years. I didn't believe her until she showed me an email from 2016 that she had sent to herself to remind her to set a calendar event so she wouldn't forget. It took her 10 minutes before she was calm enough to talk to me again. Unfortunately for her, I've known and used the 30-second birthday joke for years.
31. Ghost Rider
My best mate was in a bit of a rush to buy himself a car. He had a nice little nest egg of $20,000 put aside just for this purchase. He did a bunch of private inspections around our area, but he just couldn't find one he wanted. He finally stumbled across the perfect car for him, great mileage from all country driving, full-service history, and in excellent condition.
The only problem? The buyer was on the other side of the country. For whatever reason, my mate decided to contact the dude and organize the purchase. After the money transferred, the ad disappeared and so did the car owner. I just have no idea what was going through my mate’s head, it’s been five years and they never caught the fraudster and my friend never got his $20k back.
32. I’m Coming Out
My husband and I have always had an inkling that our son was on the LGBTQ spectrum, so my son coming out to me was not a shock in the grand scheme of things. It happened like this. I went up to my son’s room to ask what he wanted for dinner. I knocked and went in. I was tired after work and things weren’t really registering.
He just said, “Mom, I’m gay.” For some reason, it just didn’t register that he had just told me something so major for him. I don’t know what part of my brain thought this was a good idea, but I just said, “Ok, do you want pizza for dinner?” It took a few minutes for me to realize what I said and that I did not react properly. I went back to him and apologized and gave him the whole “I love you just the same” spiel and we laughed about my reaction, but I’m still SO embarrassed and mad at myself.
It definitely wasn’t the way I had always planned to respond!
33. Empty Wreck
I had a vacant house up for rent for a few months without any takers when during a particularly cold week the batteries in the thermostat failed. Without any heat, the water in the toilets froze and cracked the tanks. Once the weather warmed up the toilets began to thaw and began leaking water. The leaking continued for what I believe was about a week before we checked on the house and noticed the damage.
It was absolutely brutal. The drywall and ceiling were sagging off, the kitchen cabinets had all warped, the carpet was completely destroyed, etc. Also, because my home insurance did not cover vacant homes for longer than 30 days, they basically told me to go away. Myself and the co-owners of the house had to pay for all the repairs out of our own pockets while continuing to pay the mortgage over the course of a year while we fixed the damage.
We ended up selling the house for the same as we paid so all the interest payments since we bought it, plus the cost of the repairs, were all losses. Somewhere between $30 and $40 thousand I recall, split between the three of us. The lessons I learned from that experience was to always pay attention to your insurance policies to make sure you are properly covered and if you own a vacant house, turned the water off! Seriously, what were we thinking?
34. Water is Wet
My parents left the country one summer for two weeks and left me alone, so I decided it was a perfect opportunity to have "some" of my "closest friends" over often. My ‘rents lived out in the middle of nowhere with the nearest neighbors 100 yards away; plus, the house had a pool and a hot tub, so it was a perfect set up.
The first night I had people over, the hot tub got nasty because we may have exceeded maximum capacity a little bit. My bright idea was to siphon all the water out of the tub directly into the pool, and refill the tub with the hose. It worked perfectly—the hot tub was clean and the pool a little warmer.
The next night, word was catching on...and the group of friends increased some in size. Again, the hot tub water was almost opaque by next morning. No problem! Just did the same trick from the previous night. The hot tub water went into the pool. And I refreshed the tub with clean hose water. The last night was just...yuck, but I knew the drill!
I just used my previously successful trick and the hot tub gunk got dumped into to pool. But then I couldn’t see the bottom of the pool. Now I had a problem. In my efforts to keep the tub clean, I had neglected the pool water, which had been slowly turning into a sickly grayish-green color! Uh oh.
I thought that the filters could take care of it by the time my parents came home at the end of the week. But I wasn’t sure how to make the pool water crystal clear for my spectacularly anal parents. That's when the genius idea bulb went off in my head. Twenty minutes later, I had tens of thousands of gallons of water roaring out of the pool working its way down the mountain like a grand liquid chlorinated avalanche. I thought I had the perfect solution—but I had no IDEA what I was getting myself into.
I was feeling smug about my dirty water problem solution when I noticed the shape of the inside of the pool becoming less defined. There's a vinyl skin for the interior of the pool, and the water held it down against the concrete. To my horror, the blue skin was methodically sucking itself off the walls and bottom like a yawning college student extricating his hungover body off his gunky bathroom floor.
Immediately I stopped the exodus of water with the pool only a couple feet deep in the far side. The shallow side was a “little” wrinkled, but I could salvage the deep end. I had to think of a different way to refill the pool, then I remembered my trusty water hose that I used to fill the hot tub. I was sure it could fill up the pool in five days! So, I turned on the water confident that the pool would be full of clean well water presently.
What I didn’t realize was that the house used well water. And after a few days of pumping, the water didn’t flow out so quickly anymore. Five days from the beginning of the refill, the water was just reaching the shallow end, and Mom and Dad were coming home the next day.
35. Sharp Turn
At work, I had a pallet of beer on the jack and I ended up taking the corner too fast and then it all went sideways. When it fell, it seemed to go in slow motion and when it landed, the noise was incredible. In the end, I think they salvaged like 12 boxes with an estimated total of $2,000 in wastage. I had glass in my hands for days and my work pants still smell like stale Waikato Draught.
36. Going Ham
Once, I made my company throw away 46,000 lbs. of ham. I dropped my screwdriver into a vat full of ham it got stuck in an auger and chipped a piece of the handle off. Since it's plastic and very soft we obviously couldn't use a metal detector or an x-ray since the hams are so thick once cooked. I guess they sold their tainted meat to dog food companies so it wasn't super bad but still expensive.
37. Well Oiled Machine
I had a ‘99 Miata that I loved. It was the most fun thing I’ve ever owned with nice coil-overs and sticky tires. One day, I noticed my oil gauge was doing wonky things. It was jumping from 0 pressure to normal randomly. I actually drove back to where I was parked to see if there was oil on the ground. Nope. I looked it up and everyone said, “Oh, don’t worry about it. The oil gauges in these cars are mainly for show. If you change your oil regularly, you’re fine.”
Oh, how I regret listening to those fools. Apparently, a lot can happen in between oil changes because one day, maybe two months after my oil gauge started acting up, I’m driving and suddenly, “TICK. TICK. TICK. TICK. TICK,” like the loudest ticking I’d ever heard. I gave it a rev and it went, “TICK. TICK. TICK.TICK.” I drive it home and check my oil levels. It's at 0.
Now I don’t know how this happened because I wasn’t leaking oil and some serious witchcraft had to be going on for me to burn that much oil in a convertible car and never smell or see it. But I refilled my oil and prayed that somehow it would go away even though I knew it wouldn’t. I knew it was bad and my car didn’t have much time so I drove it to the DMV to get my motorcycle license to have a way of getting around while I figure out what’s wrong.
As I pull into the DMV parking lot, I heard a loud crack and then my car turned off. The tow back to the mechanic cost $400 and was expensive because I requested a flatbed tow truck because my car is so low. But then they brought a regular tow truck and then told me, “Oh we can’t tow it with this truck. We need to get our flatbed,” which I had already said but apparently I still had to pay for their mistake.
They quote me $4k for a new engine, which is almost as much as I paid for the car. I only paid the insanely expensive tow and did it myself, which cost me $1,200. But still, I could’ve saved $1,600, if I had just checked my dipstick when my oil gauge acted up. Now, I check my oil religiously on all my cars.
38. Barely Robbed
I was traveling across the states with my friends and six days in, we got to Miami. We got drunk in Wet Willies and met a couple girls and we decided at 3 AM that it was a good idea to go skinny dipping. We all got naked and ran into the sea, leaving EVERYTHING on the beach. We got out of the sea after playing around for a while and someone had stolen all our stuff.
They took everything. I lost my wallet with $300 in it, my iPhone, my passport, and not to mention ALL of my clothes. We all had to run back to our hostel naked which was a good mile away. I still got laid. But I'm an idiot.
39. Minor Accident
I rented a U-Haul to move from my apartment to a condo in the same town. I bumped one of the balconies in the alley behind the condos. I made a very small dent in the canopy part of the truck and when we returned the truck, they told us since we didn't get the insurance, we would have to pay for the fix within 48 hours. They said that it would cost $4,800 to fix and they refused to let me take it to a third-party mechanic for a quote.
Then they said that if we didn't pay within 48 hours, it would go to court where it would be doubled. I wasn't too well off then, financially, and maybe too naive, but we decided to pay to avoid having it doubled. My wife was in tears at the counter as she gave them her credit card.
40. Cold Calling
When working at a video game company, we had three trespassing incidents in just one summer. All three times, it was students from a nearby art school. And all three times, they snuck into the building to cold-crash the art director into a job interview. The first time, we just figured it was some young student oblivious to the multiple levels of security and protections around our IP.
He blended in with a bunch of company employees out in front during their break. When they started heading back in, he walked in with them. Once inside, this guy just started wandering the halls looking for an office with an "art director" plaque on it. This kid was let off with one heck of a stern warning, but nothing beyond that.
Very detailed emails went out to all employees to keep our eyes out for unfamiliar faces without badges, and to keep our own employee badges visible. A week later, it happened again. A student from the same campus walked in through the side door with a group, but they figured something was up. When they asked about his ID, he lied about having a job interview with the art director.
They tell him to stay put in the hall, but he doesn't. He follows them anyway, right into the art director's office. In the two seconds it takes the director to call security, this dope is already going 100 into his "tell you what, am I the artist for you!" pitch. He is told to never apply for our company, and his name gets shared with all associated dev studios under the publisher's umbrella.
Again, emails go out, security is tightened, and side doors are now exit only. A month later, it happens again. We don't even know the details. The company email didn't specify how yet another random student from this art school managed to actually locate and sit himself down in our art director's office. Even worse, this student entered his office while the art director was out at a meeting.
He just arrived, took a seat, and waited. When the art director returns to his sanctimonious keep, he is startled by an excited "Hello future employer!" Just...What the heck? At this point, the authorities are called. We have had enough of this, and a message needs to be sent. Stop trespassing into our offices, you idiots. The student is escorted out, and is met by two officers at the front door to take a report for yet another case of trespassing.
But as this student is getting questioned and processed, we discover what is happening. It all makes sense. We now know why it is this one particular art school. There was a teacher at that campus that was encouraging students to sneak in and force directors and managers into cold interviews. He explained to them how easy it is to just follow a group of employees in during their break, to just meander the halls aimlessly as long as you "look like you belong."
He was giving them strategies and techniques to blend in, not raise suspicions, and locate who would be best for an interview. As you could imagine, he was probably teaching "They'll be impressed by your initiative. They'll know how much you want the job if you do that." I mean, wouldn't be that far-fetched? I personally have had college teachers (also with backgrounds in art and media) encourage the same thing.
It's funny, because they always sign off with the same assurance: "Besides, the worst thing they can do is say 'no'." Surprise. The worst thing they can do is a misdemeanor trespassing charge and a hefty citation, as well as blacklist you permanently in the industry as a security liability. It's so unfortunate that these students were the ones who were punished.
They're just impressionable kids putting trust in a stupid art teacher. We don't know why this teacher thought this was okay or what decade they think they're living in, but it's unnerving to think that kids are paying so much money to receive bad advice from some delusional lunatic with no idea how the real world works.
Their teacher should have been severely reprimanded for doing this to his students. However, after intercepting a fourth prospective infiltrator in the front walk before getting inside, it was pretty clear this teacher was still employed.
41. Silver Screen Dreams
There was this woman I knew a few years ago. She had a job, but she was convinced she was supposed to be a movie star. She never did any acting, though. She also told me about the married man that she had slept with: “He loves me, but he can’t leave his wife...” She actually did stop sleeping with him, but they still hung out.
42. Put It In Writing
The other day, my 18-year-old brother-in-law got married to his high school sweetheart in a parking garage so that they can live off campus at their Christian college together. The girlfriend's, now wife’s, mother is an ordained minister. His parents, my in-laws, were very upset and he couldn't understand why because, "it's just a fake marriage for school."
Oh no, sweet boy. You are MARRIED. I just laughed and laughed. I love him dearly. He is an idiot.
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43. Robsten, Is That You?
I had a friend who insisted she was in a relationship with a C-list celebrity whom she met once during a comic convention. All the celebrity’s Instagram and Twitter posts were for her and everything had a meaning behind it. When the celebrity got married, she said that it was just for the media so she and the celebrity could live a quiet life.
When he didn’t do anything for her birthday, she had a breakdown. She went to therapy not long after.
44. All Good Things Come To An End
I woke up without an alarm, had breakfast, took a bath, and drove half hour to my work feeling great. I even thought to myself on the way, "Lucky me, the traffic is very nice today." Just when I arrived, the security greeted me with the worst words possible: "Good morning, sir, working even over the holiday?" I drove all the way home and had a nap.
45. This One Will Make You Sick...
When a "good" friend of mine who I worked under had cancer and wasn't able to pay some bills, I loaned her $200 just to help. I was only 18 years old at the time and I felt bad because she had kids. It was right around the holidays and I just wanted to help however I could and be a good person in life. She promised to pay me back when she could.
Turns out she lied about having cancer, was embezzling money from the company I worked at, scammed my other coworkers, and would come in after skipping work for her “chemo” to make fraudulent returns while I was overseeing the store by myself because of her absence. I eventually got her fired and got promoted to her position.
46. Sounds Wrong
My uncle is a deputy sheriff, and one time, he was at an airport speaking to my aunt over the phone in Spanish. Once he was done with his call, some nearby Karen who overheard him went up to him and started demanding to see his green card. Huge mistake. My uncle decided to mess with her and said he didn't know what a green card was.
He told her he had never even heard of it. She became more upset and kept demanding to see it. He messed with her more and then eventually went, "Well, I don't have a green card, but I have this," then brought out his wallet and showed her his badge. She immediately walked away while my uncle just kept laughing at her.
47. That's No Scratch
I'm a nurse, but I was working in the ER when a guy came in for a scratch on his neck and "feeling drowsy." We start the usual workups and this dude's blood pressure TANKED. We scrambled, but he was dead within ten minutes of walking through the door. Turns out the "scratch" was an exit wound of a .22 caliber rifle round.
The guy didn't even know he'd been shot. When the coroner's report came back, we found that he'd been shot in the leg and the bullet tracked through his torso, shredding everything in between. There was really nothing we could've done, but that was a serious "what the heck just happened" moment, and for a good while we thought we had made a fatal error.
48. Step Into My Office
Ever since I was a kid, I loved to fiddle around with staplers. Playing with the automatic ones and doing dumb stuff like any child would, opening the manual ones and swinging it around, stuff like that. One of my favorite things to do was to open up a new strip of staples and break them apart before putting them in. Running my fingers through the staples, counting them, and breaking them apart...I loved it.
There are 210 staples in a standard strip and sometimes I’d break off each individual one until my fingers hurt. I’ve even found strips with 209 and 211 a few times. This progressed from me messing around with staples in Ms. Grady’s second-grade class, to buying a box of staples every other payday to play with, to literally having a collection of different brands and sizes of staples in my college dorm to break apart.
I had a problem, but no one was hurt, so who cares? Well...Fast forward to present day. I am a functioning middle-class adult with a wife and two children. I have a home, a normal car, and an office job. I am by all accounts a normal human being, and I still love staples. Working in an office with a supply room full of staples was a problem.
I’d spend my lunch break in the room opening boxes and breaking apart staples to get my fix before returning to work. It got so bad over the course of a couple years that my boss changed our supplier because the boxes all had broken apart staples and were sometimes ripped. So I had to stop doing that...I turned to Amazon first, buying 10 boxes of staples at a time for about 20 bucks a pop. It wasn’t enough. I went to 20, then 40.
My wife got curious then and asked, “Why are you buying all of these boxes of staples,” but I brushed it off as a work issue that I’d get reimbursed for and knew I had to change my methods. Over the course of a few months I enabled myself. I started using cash only at different office supply stores around my town and neighboring towns.
I would sit in my car and break apart staples before going to the next store. I began to stay out late and tell my wife I would be home soon, so I could go buy more staples from different stores. I opened up a new credit card to put online so she wouldn’t know, but she caught it in the mail. She then got suspicious because things weren't adding up.
This past Thursday after one of my “late nights,” I get home with a trunk full of broken staples and 10 freshly broken boxes in my passenger seat to see my parents’ cars at my house. I walked in and everyone is sitting around like it’s an intervention. Because it is. My wife asked if there was anything I wanted to tell them, and to tell the truth about my problem.
I sat down and kept saying, “What are you talking about?” until my mom said, “Honey, we saw the pictures.” Then my wife tells me that my late nights, excuses, and general weirdness about the credit card, and some other little things made her hire a private investigator. This man followed me around to office supply stores and watched me “do something” with what I had in the bag from multiple stores.
It basically looked like I was a drug runner for Office Depot who was using some of the product for myself. At this point, my wife started to cry and my dad shook his head. I had to come clean and all I could muster was, "I...I like staples." The “what the heck” looks I got afterward turned into disbelief, then concern, then fits of laughter when I showed them my car.
I came clean. I backed this up by showing my secret stash of used staples in my attic and explained the purchases on the card to my wife. Right now, my only concern is my dad. He didn’t laugh—just kind of shook his head continually in disappointment without saying a word. Believe it or not, I think therapy or addiction meetings may help, as my wife gave me these suggestions the day after. I was told that although the addiction is not typical in its damage regarding my mental or physical well-being, I do need help.
I am going to go through addiction counseling like any other addict would. Just tailored to my specific issue. Apparently, part of fixing my brain is to know that it is not okay to continue this level of staplephilia. That included cleaning out my car, attic, and not garnering more attention through memorializing pictures, and stuff like that.
My wife initially thought I was having an affair. She didn’t think I was doing substances until she got the pictures. The PI just told her what he saw, and she deduced that I had an undercover type distribution thing going with someone in the office supply business. She admitted that she didn’t think it all through, but her mind was racing and conclusions came as they did.
I do not have autism or any diagnosed mental disability. I am just an addict, and an idiot. I know how stupid the addiction is and so I tried to hide it. It’s not a big deal in the grand scheme of things I guess, but my embarrassing white lie just spiraled out of control.
49. Polite Dinner Conversation
This happened about a year ago. I was 18 years old at the time and I was dating a boy named Jacob, who was also my age. His father was a mechanic, and his mom was a homemaker. They were a pretty typical white suburban family in the south and had asked Jacob if they could meet me even though we had only been dating for a month.
At the dinner, I met his mom, dad, older brother, older sister, and her newborn daughter. The dinner went well and I was chatting about my volunteer work at my college's blood drive, to which his father explains that his doctor told him he was O negative and a universal blood donor. My boyfriend mentions he is also O, but his siblings casually mention they are both AB.
I don’t think anything of it because my boyfriend had mentioned that his mom was married once before and was widowed. The following conversation went like this: Me: “Oh that's really cool. You're a really rare blood type. If you don't mind me asking, is your mom's blood type A and your dad's B, or your dad's A and mom's B?”
Older sister: “What do you mean? He's O.” She gestures to my boyfriend’s father here. Me: “Oh I know. I was just asking about your biological father, but of course, you don't have to answer if you don't want to.” I notice his mom get really pale, and it was in that moment I realized I screwed up. Older brother: “What do you mean biological father?”
Me: “I'm sorry. I didn't mean anything by it.” At this point, Jacob's dad got real quiet and was looking at his wife's face. He knew instantly. I look over to Jacob who I think was starting to put the full picture of what was happening together. Dad: “Are you saying they're not my biological kids? Because my wife swore up and down in marriage counseling (by "marriage counseling" he means with a pastor) that they were my kids and she would never cheat on me.”
At this point, I’m putting together that she never had any kids from her previous marriage. Mom: “I would never cheat on you. They are your kids.” The dad turns to me and says, “So why do you think they're not my kids?” I tried to excuse myself because it was very clear the cat was out of the bag, and with a quick Google search from my boyfriend, he starts cussing out his mom.
She starts to sob and apologizes over and over again, and I am forced to explain 9th-grade biology to his father about the fact that the only kids he could have produced were with the blood type: O, A or, B, but absolutely not AB. Jacob was the only one with the possibility of being his son. They all start screaming at one another, and the older sister eventually leaves because her newborn is screaming too.
His mom goes and locks herself in the bedroom. His older brother follows her, screaming and asking who his real father is. My boyfriend is trying to figure out if his dad still wants to be their father. I eventually have a friend come pick me up. Yeah...we broke up shortly after, but not before figuring out through paternity tests that none of the kids produced from the marriage were the dad’s. They divorced soon after.
50. Taking The Fall
So, I work in a workshop, and we often engrave stuff for customers. This particular guy wanted a really nice wooden jewelry box for their wedding anniversary with a custom message he emailed me. For some reason, he chose to give the box to his wife at the workshop. Not the most romantic place I can think of, but whatever.
The guy's wife starts to look confused and tear up: "You don't remember the date?" Guy turns pale, looks at me with a deep stare, says: "No, I'm sure it's a mistake." Me: "No, I've copied it straight, can't be wrooon...waaait a minute, oh my god, it's my fault, I'm so sorry, I will redo it right away, no need to pay, please accept it as a gift..."
Wife gets angry a bit at me, but they leave with a different box and the correct date. But that wasn't even the best part. Guy comes back next day and pays triple the original price without a word.
51. Musical Urinals
We went to a movie. During the movie, she got up to go to the bathroom. After she left, I thought I could run to the bathroom myself, and be back before her (for some reason, I thought it would be rude to leave her alone). When I came back to our seats, she was already there but I didn't give it much thought.
I hung out at her place for a bit afterward, gave her a kiss goodnight, and went home thinking that I just had a pretty nice date. A week later, after she wouldn't return any of my calls, I asked our mutual friend who introduced us what the deal was. Turns out that when I went to the bathroom, I accidentally walked into the women's room.
I peed in the stall next to her, and she recognized the boots I was wearing. She was totally freaked out. When I finally got a hold of her and tried to explain myself, she told me she was moving to Turkey to get back together with her ex-boyfriend.
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