Everybody makes mistakes. It's a fact of life. Usually, you learn from your mistake and carry on—but not all mistakes are created equal. We all have that one screw-up that will haunt us forever. Is yours THIS bad?
1. A Negative Experience
I did HIV testing, and I once showed up to work super tired because I couldn't sleep the night before. This guy came in for a test. We went through the pre-counseling, and then I told him to step out for a few minutes while the results came up. When he returned to get his results, I told him to take a seat. The first thing that came out of my mouth was, "Your results are positive".
Then I saw the look on his face, and that's when I realized I had messed up. I said, “Oh, no, no, no, I meant to say negative". I almost gave the guy a coronary.
2. Paper Trail
I worked in palliative care, and I sent a patient home to see if he could spend his final moments there instead of in the hospital. We weren't very hopeful but thought it would be worth a try. To no one's great surprise, he ended up coming back a couple of days later for whatever reason. Since I knew him, I re-admitted him.
I knew he wanted to be a DNR (do not resuscitate), so I wrote it on my notes. But there was one crucial thing that I forgot. However, I didn't re-fill out the hospital paperwork. The next day, I got to work to discover he had coded and was on a ventilator in the ICU. Instead of passing peacefully, his wife had to make the decision to turn off life support.
My entire job at the end of life is to ensure as good a death as possible. In one simple omission, I messed that up royally.
3. Wild Encounter
I knew a girl who, while inebriated, went over to pet a wild raccoon. The raccoon jumped and landed on her face, leaving her with horrible facial scarring that she never fully recovered from. She proceeded to get addicted to the painkillers she received from the doctors after the attack. Two years later, she succumbed to the destructive habit. She was a very beautiful, intelligent girl with a bright future ahead of her, totally ruined because she thought a raccoon in the park was cute.
4. Mr. Wrong
My former best friend started dating this lying lunatic. She hadn’t been in a long-term relationship for years at that point, and this loser showed up on a dating app. Within a week, he was living with her. All of her friends (there was a close-knit group of about eight women) and her family all kept pointing out inconsistencies and outright lies. I got in touch with his baby momma to find out their history and she was more generous than the court documents were to him.
Apparently, the baby momma had left her job and sold her house so she could go live in the work van she had bought this dude. They wound up homeless and pregnant in Florida with two cats and two dogs until her parents felt sorry for them, gave in, and helped them set up somewhere nearby. Before it all fell apart, of course.
Some examples of his lies are that he claimed to be a top-tier chef when he was really a dishwasher. He also claimed to know jujitsu and was a practiced MMA fighter. Nope. He also claimed to know how to build a bathroom because he was a tile guy. Again, nope. That jerk took my friend, this wonderful woman, and turned her into a backwoods baby machine and he still isn’t working a job!
5. Prince Affluenza
I have a relative whose parents were multimillionaires. They indoctrinated my relative with an alpha male complex while he was young, so he grew up believing he was extremely intelligent, powerful, and shouldn’t have to work due to his family’s success. We once argued and he ended up calling me a poor loser from a poor family, or something like that.
His parents more or less supported this mentality. They believed he would be a leader because he was attractive, confident, and academically successful. Naturally, he started taking narcotics and steroids in high school. He also used to drive a Porsche, Mercedes and had all kinds of expensive things. He was very inconsiderate to everyone, including his own family, and was super vain. Then he went to some expensive college and got in trouble for harassing a girl—but he didn’t stop there.
Once he flunked school, his parents continued to support him while he would disrespect them verbally and physically. He was becoming dangerous, and his parents were probably afraid of him. Eventually, his parents divorced (probably because of him) and they cut him off financially. After that, he got locked up and when he got out, he had to resort to couch surfing off other relatives for a while.
During this time, he gained a lot of weight. And, because of his extremely erratic behavior, his parents tried to save face by claiming that he had a mental disorder. But I know the truth. Most of his behavior was learned and enabled by his upbringing. He once had everything in the world going for him, but now, he has a bad record and physical and mental issues.
The lesson I learned from this is to never spoil a child that you care about. Children are malleable, like soft clay, when they’re young. But as a child grows older, they harden into the shape they were cast and molded into. They can’t be easily changed after a certain point.
6. I Got Stumped!
When I was in middle school, I was playing baseball with some friends in front of the school. It had two gardens on either side of its entrance, and we were on the left side, which had a tree stump that wasn’t actually cut but had probably fallen over. Either way, the tree stump was incredibly jagged and dangerous. I was about to learn that the hard way. While trying to catch the ball, I tripped on a root.
My face landed right in the middle of the jagged stump. I had no time to react. I didn’t cushion my fall, I didn’t even have time to block my face. I knocked out two teeth and got cut on multiple parts of my face before class even started. I had blood flowing from my mouth and was absolutely screaming. I was shaking and in shock.
I think I was even crawling, while in a panic, and I probably looked like an animal after it had been wounded. My friend had to drag me to the nurse. Mind you, we were like 8 years old, and this kid immediately saw me faceplant into what was basically a morning star made of wood, yet managed to drag me while I was crying and in shock without losing his composure.
I don’t remember needing any hospital visits because besides my teeth being knocked out I luckily hadn’t been pierced, just cut in the face. All I remember was holding my mouth with my hand, seeing a bunch of blood and saliva on them, and screaming while he put my other arm over his shoulders and lugged me across a bunch of frightened, shocked children.
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7. I Just Ran...I Ran So Far Away...
I was about five or six years old. It was a beautiful day out and I was stuck in the car with my mom going shopping. I kept bugging her to take me to the park, and finally, she relented. It turned out to be a horrible mistake. We first stopped and got lunch at a food truck that was there. I walked to the nearest picnic table which was about 50-60 feet away. I sat down and started eating when a bunch of seagulls landed all around me.
One landed on the table, screeched at me, and came after me. Then the WHOLE FLOCK came after me. I screamed and ran for my mom, who came running, while the massive flock chased after me. I hid behind her and she started to beat them out of the air with her purse. After she smacked a few, they flew over to my food and started to eat it. We ate in the car after that.
8. Taking A Bad Route
At the time, I was working at a furniture factory where we made the pieces for California Closets. We had a router mounted to a table from underneath that cut wood in a specific shape based on the jig that had an industrial vacuum hose attached over the top of it. They would both turn on with the flip of a single switch. I was using the router, and the sawdust wasn’t being sucked up.
That's when I did the stupidest thing I've ever done. I went to check the suction by sticking my hand in the area where the router and the hose met. The router, being connected to the same switch as the vacuum, was still on. My middle finger took the brunt of it. I broke the bone on my finger and in the split second my fingers were in there, the router hit it three times. It was just fantastic.
9. Stockroom Slip
I was working as a bartender and my shift was almost over. I was about to have my sweet freedom after I did the very simple task of stocking the wines. I grabbed a bunch of bottles to carry to the fridge for the next shift. One started to slip. I clenched up hoping that the errant bottle would stay on point. It did not.
The bottle started falling slowly onto the hardwood floor. I acted on instinct—and instantly regretted it. I stuck out my foot hoping to keep it from shattering and costing my employer a full $7.50 worth of bad Pinot Grigio. The bottle bounced away without a care in the world, but I got a nice healthy bruise on my foot. Apparently, those bottles are designed to withstand a lot of things, however, the human foot is not.
10. The Sharpest One In Class
I am a teacher and had a pencil holder in my classroom filled with 30 sharp pencils. They were all facing upwards. I dropped something and quickly went to pick it up but face-planted into the pencil holder. Luckily, I was only pierced by about three of them. One was about half a centimeter (about a quarter of an inch) from my eye. I still have the lead marks under my skin.
11. Let’s Play Kick The Cactus
I saw a cactus. I knew it was a cactus and kicked it anyway. I ended up with a needle pretty deep in my shin. When I pulled it out, a half-dollar-sized chunk of flesh came with it. I had to use a friend's shirt and wrap it around the wound. My shoe was so full of blood, you could have tracked us by following the bloody footprint.
To add insult to injury, and more injury, a second needle went unseen into the toe of my shoe. It was just deep enough to only poke my big toe if something hit the front. For about two months, I would randomly get this stabbing pain and blood, but couldn't find anything. I ended up tearing the shoe apart trying to get the needle out and had to replace my favorite pair of shoes. I don’t know why on earth I kicked that cactus, I just did.
12. The Dangerous Belch
I was showing off my ability to burp by swallowing air. I swallowed some air. My throat hurt a little bit, and I couldn’t burp it up again. I didn’t think about it again for a while. Within half an hour, I realized something was seriously wrong. I had to leave work because I was having chest pains. I went to the hospital. They quickly cleared any suspicion of a heart attack or lung malfunction. They assumed I had some sort of bacterial infection that was moving very fast, so they gave me antibiotics.
Eventually, they figured out that I had some air in my interstitial space, between organs in my torso. I had to stay overnight to have my body absorb the air. It seems as if I could have collapsed a lung by swallowing air. I felt a pain in my throat, so the doctor figured I had a small tear in my esophagus where the air went through into my chest instead of my stomach. The antibiotics probably saved me from getting an infection in the wound.
13. Daughter Didn’t Know Best
I was a hospice nurse for ten years. I admitted a patient with cancer who had intractable bone pain. Based on my assessment, I expected it to be a week or two before he passed. In his case, the only medication that gave him any relief was morphine. His wife did a great job taking care of him and giving him his meds as we planned.
It was very effective, and he was comfortable. As he came closer to losing his life, he slept more, which was normal and expected. One of his daughters flew in to be with him at the end. She went bananas that "daddy was on morphine" and raised so much trouble that his wife freaked out and caved to her demands. She revoked hospice and called the ambulance.
When he got to the hospital, the daughter told them that he had taken too much morphine, and the ER room doctor gave him Narcan. What happened next was absolutely horrific. He came out of it screaming in pain and didn’t stop. He stayed in the hospital until he passed, and he suffered. It's been years since this happened, and it's still the worst nightmare of my nursing career.
There wasn't anything I could have done, but I still feel bad about it.
14. Her Prognosis Didn’t Sound Good
I was a nuclear medicine technologist working in a PET department. I mainly dealt with cancer patients. Prior to exams, I would ask the patients why they are having the test done and for any other vital information. One day, a female patient told me she found a lump, had a mammogram and a biopsy, and it turned out to be stage four invasive ductal cancer.
Having confirmed the information I had on my sheet with the patient, I made the mistake of saying, "Sounds good". To which she replied, "No, it's actually pretty terrible", and she broke down in tears. I will never say “sounds good” again when a patient tells me his or her diagnosis.
15. Love Can’t Wait
A friend of mine left college in our final semester (she had a full ride, scholarship, cheap and safe apartment, and a great job) to move cross-country for some boy she'd been chasing since middle school. I worked in financial aid at our college and sat her down to explain how idiotic her decision was. She only had four months left and out-of-state charges much higher tuition, she would lose all her state-specific aid, and would lose a lot of credits. Her reaction was brutal.
She called me jealous and cut me off, saying the boy promised he would take care of everything. I was the only one who was honest with her. It took her three years to graduate on the West Coast. She took out tens of thousands of dollars of loans. She lost almost a third of her credits. Her GPA tanked and, of course, the boyfriend slowly iced her out once he had her there. They broke up a year later.
This was 12 years ago. Unfortunately, she never really landed on her feet. She moved from couch to couch, then back in with family, then had a mental breakdown. Only just NOW that she has a stable job. Before this, she was only able to get gig work. To think that she blew up everything she had over some guy that wasn't worth the plane ticket, when she could have just waited FOUR MONTHS, is still mind-boggling to me.
16. Next Level Delusional
One of my best friends walked out on his wife and two kids because a girl at the gym and him were having a relationship. As it actually turned out, she was just being friendly and chatting to him. No relationship, no mutual decision to be together, nothing. He misunderstood polite friendliness for flirting, and destroyed his own family for it.
17. Machine Washable
My cousin. All through public school, she was a snob who looked down on everyone. She was super stylish but struggled academically. We graduated in 2014. We both went to colleges (not the same one). She got a job at a bar, stayed out late partying. Her boyfriend told her she didn’t need to complete college, so she just stopped showing up. She didn’t drop out, she just stopped showing up. So, she completely flunked out.
Our families lived hours away from her college at the time. Her family went to move her back home. My cousin’s mom noticed a pile of clothes in the corner. The mom said, “What’s that, your laundry? Pack it and we’ll wash it when we get home later”. I still can’t believe what she said next. My cousin (I kid you not) replied, “You can wash those”? It turns out, she’d been throwing away clothes instead of washing them. She claimed she didn’t know she could, yet she washed her undergarments and bras without a hitch.
She’s now at home with her family and has started doing more chores to show an increase in responsibility. She still tries to throw clothes away, citing that she didn’t know they could be washed and reused. Makes me wonder what she thought all those years before college, before she left home. She wore some of the same outfits repeatedly—she had to have known they could be washed.
18. Royconomics
I worked once with a man named Roy. Roy had theories about how to live life. We called it “Royconomics”. One day, he turned to me and the other member of the crew. "You boys wanna know how you get nice things"? he asked. "You go to the store and you finance everything. New furniture, new appliances, televisions, stereos, everything. Then, you don't make any payments, and you don't show up for your court date. They'll end up garnishing your wages, but they take way less than the payments would have been"!
Then, about a week later, "You boys wanna know how you buy a house? You apply for every credit card you can possibly get, you take out your entire balance in cash from all of them, and you use that for your down payment. Then, you don't make any payments, and you don't show up for your court date".
19. This Mistake Stuck With Me
When I was working as a medical assistant in an interventional pain management clinic, I was asked by the doctor to place a grounding pad—a sticky pad like they use for EKGs—on the patient's leg during a radiofrequency (RF) nerve ablation procedure. The patient had some lotion or something on her leg that kept the pad from sticking properly, but it seemed mostly well attached.
I didn't want to hold up the procedure to get another pad or clean off the patient's leg. The pad ended up partially coming off right as the high-voltage RF was being applied, causing a small burn on her leg. There was no lasting damage done, and the patient was very understanding, but I still felt horrible. It was the first time I had caused harm to a patient, and it could easily have been avoided had I just spoken up.
20. Never Dismiss A Bad Day
I was a medic in the Armed Forces. This one Marine who came in for physical therapy seemed overly depressed, more so than usual. He had bad nerve damage where he could touch his leg, and it felt like someone was touching him in the back. I was more focused on the therapy that day and was excited that he was making progress.
He didn't seem happy about the progress and made a comment about how it won't matter. I wish I’d seen the red flags. I also recalled when he left, I said I would see him next week, and he didn't say anything and just left. Over the weekend, he took his own life. I still wonder if I had paid attention to his comments and not dismissed them as him having a bad day, perhaps he would still be alive.
21. Next Time Don’t Be Sew Distracted
I was using a sewing machine in home economics and the teacher began talking to me. I think she expected me to stop the machine to listen, as opposed to looking away from the very noisy machine that was going a million miles an hour towards my finger. Well, I did the latter and ended up sewing my finger and fingernail.
22. Scooter Show Off
When I turned eight, I got a kick scooter for my birthday. I rode that thing all day when I was home. I practiced tricks like jumping over piles of bricks and spinning the base around. At the next parent-teacher conference, I took it along to show off to my friends. I couldn't find something "worthy of my skill" to jump over, so I ended up choosing a crack in the hallway to show how good I was. I screwed up the landing and broke my leg.
23. Delivery Route Danger
While delivering newspapers one frigid winter day, I slid on ice and rolled down a hill, across a road, and into a snow-covered bush. I was bruised and banged up, but I was 13 years old, and therefore indestructible. So I picked up my newspapers and continued on my route. For the next few weeks, I healed up and thought I was okay. I had no inkling of the nightmare I was in for.
Soon, my right knee started hurting. I went to the doctor who said it was just growing pains and told me not to worry about it. So I limped around for a few more months and tried to ignore it. The pain got so bad, I could hardly stand on my leg, so I went to a different doctor. He did some x-rays and also told me it was nothing.
He told me to use crutches for a few months to take the pressure off of it and see if it'll heal up and stop hurting. A few months went by using the crutches and it still hurt. Three years passed. I finally went to a sports physician who knew a thing or two about this stuff, and he found out that I had actually broken part of my bone at the knee joint.
He called it osteochondritis. Basically, a small chunk of bone broke off on the weight-bearing edge of the joint and was floating around in a sack of fluid, until I took the wrong step. Then the broken piece would stab back into the raw hole. Imagine stabbing yourself in the knee with a red hot ice pick and you'll get an idea of what that felt like.
The doctor decided to do surgery to place two screws to hold the bone chunk back into place. I was on crutches for another six months. It hurt like the devil but it did heal. It's been over 20 years since then and now I don't have any real issues with my knee, except on days when it's going to rain and I can feel a slight ache in it.
24. Pasta Sauce Projectile
We had pasta sauce that had been batch cooked and frozen in family dinner size portion bags. They were flat so they could stack and take up less freezer space. The floor around the freezer was ceramic tile. I had bare feet and dropped a sauce pack. It fell thin-edge down. The bag acted like a dull knife and smashed into my toes, breaking two of them. They took a long time to heal, but all anyone could do was buddy strap and splint them because they were clean breaks.
25. Oh, Sugar!
When I was a new paramedic, we were called to a house for an unknown problem. We arrived and found the patient unresponsive but breathing on a bed. A friend of his found him after he hadn't returned his phone calls and had gone to the house to investigate. The patient didn't have any pill bottles lying around, and his friend didn't know anything about the patient's medical history.
So, I loaded him up into the ambulance and transported him to the hospital. I started an IV, did an ECG, drew bloodwork—the whole work up. We got him to the hospital, and the first thing the nurse asked was, "What was his blood sugar level"? I forgot to check it. It turned out it was incredibly low, which is completely treatable.
He probably wouldn't have required going to the hospital if corrected on the scene. Every patient gets a blood sugar check now.
26. Bridging The Gap
Once, as a tired medical resident, I was called to the ER to admit someone at around 3 AM. This person had gall bladder removal a week prior and now had a surgical-site wound infection. I asked if they had taken the post-op antibiotics they were prescribed, and they weren't sure. I was getting more and more frustrated with this person preventing my sleep when I decided to take a pause and just shut up.
This usually results in some type of awkward silence. In this case, the guy hung his head low, looked at his feet through unfocused eyes, and started to sniffle while his halting voice cracked. He said, "I can't read. Never could. Didn't know the instructions they wrote down for me and didn't know I had medicine to buy. I didn't ask them because I was embarrassed". I realized people count on us to bridge such communication gaps.
27. Lucky Bird
This story of a biggest mistake actually happened to me. When I was 16, my first job was at PetSmart. One night, I was cleaning out the bird/small animal habitat. The procedure was to haul a ShopVac into the little room and vacuum up the spilled bird food/seeds/litter. Easy peasy. So, I'm cleaning out the cage with the cockatiels in it when one of them decides to investigate the loud sucking machine.
FWOOMP. The bird is gone, stuck in the tube. I use a box cutter to rip the hose in half so I can get him out. I’m distraught. The bird is missing feathers and bleeding. I run to my boss crying, "IJUSTSUCKEDACOCKATIELUPINTHESHOPVACHESGOINGTODIEIAMAHORRIBLEPERSON". He takes one look at me, then the bird, and starts laughing.
I ended up driving him to another PetSmart that had a veterinarian in it as part of the store. The vet laughs and gives the bird some fluids. My co-workers named the little guy Hoover and he lived in quarantine in the back of the store for months until his feathers came back. Then we put him back out for sale.
28. What Are The Odds?
It was a few years back when the Mega Million Lotto had reached its highest in history, more than a billion dollars. Everyone was buying tickets. At the time, I worked at a 7/11 in Maryland and a middle-aged woman came in with a bag full of hundred-dollar bills. She confidently placed the bag on the counter, looked at my co-worker, and said “I’ll take 8,665 lotto tickets”.
At the time, a Mega Million ticket cost $2.06. So, doing some quick math on my phone, I knew she spent $17,849. Also, it was annoying because we ran out of print ticket paper so no one else could buy a ticket for three days. Long story short, she didn’t win. I’ve never been well off personally, but I feel like anyone besides the wealthy losing $17,000 is a lot of money.
29. Big Regret
My friend gave up her full-ride scholarship to play volleyball out of state because her boyfriend wasn't gonna be able to go to college with her—but there was something that she didn’t know. Not only was he cheating on her, he dumped her not even a year after she gave up her scholarship. Now, she lives in a constant “what if” because a couple of her other friends have started to play pro volleyball around the world.
30. My Strange Obsession
I knew a guy who abandoned his wife and child for the My Little Pony fandom. It was during the early days (early 2012, he was in his early 30s at the time) and he was convinced he could make it as a fandom artist. The issue was that his art was...not good. But that would be okay if he wasn't set against anything that could help him improve.
It got to the point where he quit his job in radio to focus on trying to make it as a fandom artist. He started trying to sell at a few cons and did very poorly. Eventually, his wife, who was a British ex-pat with very wealthy parents, was offered a lucrative publishing deal in Britain, so her parents said they would sponsor him and support them moving to the UK. He had a full ride and a very good-paying job lined up at his in-law’s company. He would have wanted for nothing.
He said “no” because there were no Pony cons in the UK. I am not kidding. So, his wife moved back to the UK with his daughter. His wife tried to make it work, and tried getting him to come to the UK to visit her and his daughter. He had absolutely zero interest in doing so. He was 100% focused on MLP art.
Eventually, his wife divorced him. Obviously. He has not spoken to his daughter or his ex-wife in years.
Today, the My Little Pony fandom is relatively over and done with, but he's desperately clinging on to it. He argues with anyone who tells him that it just isn't very popular anymore. He has lost all semblance of sanity. Thankfully his wife has remarried, and his daughter is doing well. I'd honestly be surprised if his daughter even remembers him at this point.
31. Sad Song
My sister was a musical savant on the piano. She turned down a full ride to Juilliard so she could go on a Mormon mission in Los Angeles. Three months into it, disaster struck.
She got hit by a car which broke both of her legs. Got sent home and dealt with years of depression and guilt from "failing God". She got married, had a kid—but then it got worse.
She found out her husband was a creep and extricated herself. Now, she’s a single mom with no skills, no safety net. I think it's one of the most breathtakingly stupid decisions anyone in our family has ever made.
32. What Am I Supposed To Do?
I went on a date with this lady I met online. We didn’t hit it off, so that was that. About a week later, she calls saying she needs my help since I seemed like a kind person, and she needs someone who none of her family or friends knows. Hesitantly, I ask her to explain. Long story short, her grandma died shortly after our date, and it unleashed a storm of drama in her family. She spiraled emotionally.
It was in that state that she decided she needed to get away and took a trip to Las Vegas where she proceeded to lose every cent to her name, which was around $50,000. She even sold her plane ticket home and lost that. The only thing she had left was her phone. She had managed to hitchhike from Vegas to Victorville and that is when she called me.
33. I Could Have Cost Her Her Baby
I was considering starting medication for a young woman and gave her the script. Four days later, she found out she was pregnant. My prescription had clear teratogenic effects. I was sweating bullets. Fortunately, she decided against taking the meds, and I found out from the pharmacist that she didn't fill it. I left a message saying, "Don't take it"!
She called me back, thanking me for being such a great doctor, but I think I just got lucky.
34. College Life Isn’t Easy
I was an EMT ending my first year working at a collegiate EMS squad. Our dear college was known for drinking and going a little too hard in the party department. Although we get a good amount of trauma and other medical emergencies from sports events and other stuff around town, we get a whole lot of intoxication calls. I once got a call that seemed like a standard one of those calls.
The female patient was embarrassed we had been called, was really distraught, and crying. She refused to talk to my two crew partners or me. At least we were able to get a full suite of vitals that were all normal. I went to put her shoes on to get her ready for transport to sleep it off at the college's inpatient department, and she refused to let me touch her.
She picked the only female EMT out of the three EMTs and the three college security officers there and said she only wanted her to help her. So, the males in the room stepped outside for a second because, at that point, we were a little suspicious. This girl also was leaning against her own bed and didn't know where she was, how she got there, or what time it was.
She knew her name, but some things seemed off. Then she told the female EMT she felt unsafe and didn't trust us. Once we transferred care, the only follow-up we got on her was that it was a probable assault, which was on my mind after the call ran its course but didn't occur to me immediately. After that call, I went into every scene looking for signs of victimization, which is often related to drinking and is a problem on many college campuses.
35. His Diagnosis Was Shattering
I CT scanned a guy who didn't speak great English. He had a metastatic tumor in his right leg and was in pain. I felt so bad getting him to lie down for the ten or so minutes it takes to prep for the scan. He was screaming, crying, and kept holding up his hands in a prayer position and saying, "PLEASE"! I kept saying, "Just another minute, just hold on, it'll only be another minute".
We saw the scan and realized that he also had a broken hip. Everyone assumed his pain came from the bone metastases, but he had also fallen and shattered his hip. I felt terrible.
36. Vote For Me
My brother ran for public office without having an agenda. He had no leadership qualifications, background in the position, or support from anyone in the community. He took out a $10K personal loan to finance the run. He lost badly, coming in last. It took him years to pay back the loan and refill his savings, which he drained to pay for signage and flyers—but there was a hilarious twist.
The printer misspelled his name on every item, so any remnant is a harsh reminder of how badly things went.
37. Let It Ride
I watched a gentleman, who happened to be inebriated, throw $2,000 on a single roulette number, lose it, went to withdraw $5,000 more, put it on the same number, lose it, then stare blankly at the table. All while on a cruise ship. Then, I went over to the ship’s bar and ordered myself a drink and it was wonderful.
38. Investment Opportunity
My friend retired with a full pension 15 years ago. At the time, he kept bragging about how he was starting a new business with some random guy he knew. My friend legit said, "He's the idea guy. I have the savings and the good credit score".
So, my friend hurries up and takes out a huge bank loan and purchases a bunch of expensive equipment. He had no idea what he was getting into. The business folds up within six months and the "partner" vanishes into thin air with all the pricey equipment. So now, my friend, who should be enjoying his golden years, will be working a retail job until he drops.
39. No, Don’t Bother Listening To Me
My best friend has just left his wife and two children (they’ve been together for 18 years) for my ex-girlfriend. I did try to warn him about the fact that she cheated on her previous boyfriend with another guy and myself and she seduced him, a married man, and cheated on me with him. She lied to everyone, including my best friend, to hide things from him.
She manipulates, she plays the victim, and rejects every mistake she made, blaming others. I know she told him "her truth" yet he still repeats that "the last year was hard on her and he will not blame her for past mistakes". She was telling me less than two months ago that my best friend was a manipulative, harassing, narcissist.
I can see the future already. I know he will be in great trouble when she finally leaves him after cheating on him, all while saying anything to play victim. I can easily see that it’s going to be the biggest mistake he will ever make. I did warn him. But let's pray they will stay in love forever and live happily ever after.
40. Big Fish, Small Pond
I watched two guys in my small town think that they were the "big man on campus". It ended up destroying them both. Over time, they realized they weren't the biggest, the fastest, the best, and people weren't going to just give them everything they wanted just because they thought they deserved it. One of the guys drank himself to the grave and the other one is one-third of his size in high school and looks totally down and out.
41. Dumpster Fire
My friend decided she wanted to move out, because living at her mom’s house when she was nearly 30 was for losers. However, she had two kids under age five and had just broken up with the abusive father. She worked a slightly above minimum wage job. She found an apartment where rent alone would be 80% of her take-home pay. No amount of shouting down the telephone how stupid that would be convinced her it was a bad idea.
So, she moves in, but struggles to find daycare, driving against traffic to drop them off at her mom’s. She has bills to pay and is underwater every single month. She asks the jerk baby daddy to move in. During this time, she starts sleeping with her married boss. When I asked her why not just find a random guy on Tinder, she said it was full of weirdos and creeps...as though her married boss wasn't!
42. Waterlodged
I was still a new EMT and had a new paramedic as a partner. We got a call about a man with no pulse. We arrived and found a 350ish-pound man in the middle of a water bed with no pulse. So the new paramedic did a quick look with the paddles and decided to shock. He couldn’t have known what a horrible mistake he was making. The shock created a muscle spasm and set off a gruesome series of events.
This led to the patient being wedged between the water bed mattress and frame. It was impossible for the two of us to un-wedge him. Never shock someone you can't lift, especially if they’re on a water bed.
43. Stupid Redemption
I was in a cancer clinic, doing follow-ups. I had just messed up a medication choice, but I was under supervision, so it was fine, and I wanted to try and ask something smart to the oncologist. We were in consultation with a woman who'd had a mastectomy. I asked about the probability of the cancer recurring, which was stupid.
Now the oncologist had to answer and be very conservative, which would scare the patient. That really destroyed me. I felt like a total idiot.
44. I Tanked My First Time
I was a new EMT and had a patient in the back of the ambulance who required oxygen via a cannula. Usually, the gurney oxygen tank is much smaller than the house tank on the ambulance, so we generally switch over the gurney to the ambulance tank. So, there would be a small hose attached to the ambulance wall that would feed the patient oxygen to his nose.
Being my first time, I forgot to switch back the hose to the gurney, and upon removing the gurney from the back, I essentially choked the patient when the hose tightened. The poor guy thought he had done something wrong. I explained what had happened, and then he laughed about it. However, I found out later he still tried to sue.
45. Under Pressure
I was a pharmacist working alone on a Saturday. Before closing, a woman brought in 19 prescriptions for her husband, who had just been discharged from the hospital. Then a swarm of people came in after her, and I kept getting interrupted by people who refused to wait until the next day for their Xanax. One of the prescriptions was for isosorbide mononitrate, a heart/blood pressure pill.
It was written for half a tab daily, and I filled it with instructions for one and a half. It was an average dose that I saw often and was well within the dosing guidelines, but it was too much for him. Several days later, he was re-admitted for low blood pressure, and the prescribing physician caught my error. I called his wife to apologize as soon as I found out. She was understanding.
I offered to pay for the out-of-pocket costs of the additional hospitalization, but she would not accept. Unfortunately, he was a very sick man and passed two weeks later of issues not related to my error. It could have been much worse, but it really made me realize the lack of help that puts so much strain on pharmacists.
It haunted me for a while, but I was able to get over it.
46. Is That All There Is?
A middle-aged guy I know was living the dream in a $15 million house, multiple boats, owned a very successful business, had a beautiful wife and kids. Then he threw it all away in an instant. I don't know all the details, but he started an affair with an underage girl, got caught with a stash of guns, and got addicted to pills. It all came crashing down relatively fast. He's still alive and climbing his way back now, but he lost his family, house, possessions, and his business.
47. L is for Loser
My ex-husband right now. I’m not even old, I’m 25. But he ran off to hang out with an 18-year-old. Which was honestly fine. My life has been easier as a single parent. I randomly get a text from him saying that he misses me and the kids. I’m not even stopping him from seeing the kids. Honestly, the amount of drama and heartache he brings on himself. But, of course, I get blamed by him because I want him to buy diapers for the kids and this means I’m trying to destroy his life by asking for child support.
48. Get Out The Popcorn
I’ve been watching a former buddy/roommate of mine ruin his life in real time for the last few months now. We’re both in our mid-20s. He got a bipolar addict pregnant recently. He wasn’t even dating her, just a rebound thing, but she wants to keep it. He’s pretty passive and it’s clear he’s just letting it happen rather than actively choosing that life of parenting with her.
He tends to get involved with disturbed women and never stands up for himself until it’s “too little, too late”. Unfortunately, this time, that’s not gonna happen until after that kid comes along so, right now, I’m just eating my popcorn and bracing for all the drama that’s gonna hit my friend group over the next few months and years.
49. Life Comes At You Pretty Fast
One of my friends in undergrad had a 4.0 GPA our junior year, and was already looking at vet schools, was on a full ride, was absolutely beautiful, funny, smart, would be the first in her family to get a degree. Then, she got pregnant from a guy she had known for two months and decided to keep the baby. He is controlling and abusive.
But at least he had a high-paying job (oil driller). Well, he gets himself fired three months before their baby is born. She took him in and waited on him hand and foot while heavily pregnant and immediately after having the baby. She dropped out of school to marry him, moved back home to her tiny town, and reaches out every few months to try to get me involved in a different pyramid scheme.
50. Don’t Tell Dad
My mom got herself into a bit of debt when I was young. She didn’t tell my dad about it and started hiding the mail and never answered the phone. It kept getting worse and worse. It got to a point where she was also hiding his mail. Before she’d go out, she’d tell us to make sure we throw any letters away if they came in the mail.
Of course, we didn’t know the reason why, but she’d throw a hissy fit if she found that we hadn’t. My dad kept asking us where the mail was. For a while I just said I don’t know, not wanting to upset mom. Eventually, it reached boiling point. Dad found bills, loads of them. A big argument ensued. She owed a lot. They’re still together, but if I’m honest, things have never really been the same since.
51. This Floorplan Is Nicer Anyway
When my parents built their house, the guy that staked out their foundation did so from the wrong blueprint. It was totally the wrong house. That guy lost his job, but before they fired him, the company tried to get my father to change his mind and get a completely different house than the one he bought because of the mistake.
When my dad said, "no way", the housing developer company tried to get him to build on a different lot. When he said "no way" to that, they tried to get him to eat the cost of removing the wrong foundation and having the site prepared for a second foundation. Of course, he said “no way” to that too. There was a huge fight over it with my parents. Lawyers were called, my dad nearly had a heart attack. The end result was that they got the house they wanted but it took an extra-long time.
52. In A Complete Panic
As a paramedic intern, I had one call, in particular, that stuck with me. We were called out for an early 40s male with chest pain. We got there to see a healthy guy sitting in his car, breathing hard. I got a history from his wife and an initial assessment of the patient. He didn’t have any history except for having anxiety problems and was previously treated for overdoing his anxiety meds.
The patient described his symptoms as being just like when he had bouts of panic. I hooked him up to the monitor, and everything looked fine. He had a slightly elevated heart rate, but his other vitals seemed to be within normal limits. I got him loaded into the ambulance and began the 20-minute transport to the hospital. I started treating him with meds for the chest pain protocol, and I started an IV.
Then, he told me his chest didn’t hurt anymore, but he couldn’t breathe. His vitals didn't line up with respiratory issues, but I put him on high-flow oxygen just to be safe. As soon as I got the oxygen on him, he started losing it. He told me he needed to get out of the ambulance. He started standing up, ripping all the wires off of him, pulling the oxygen off, and even pulled his IV out.
I struggled with him to keep him on the gurney and calm him down. I started another IV, which he pulled out. I hooked him back up to the monitor, but he pulled it off. Same with the oxygen.
The situation turned into me having to physically hold him down to keep him from jumping out of the ambulance on the freeway. I ended up having to be pretty stern.
I was yelling at him to sit down and stop resisting. I gave what little report I could to the hospital, holding the radio in one hand and his shirt collar in the other. All I could tell them was we had an agitated patient initially complaining of chest pain which had resolved, and he was now seemingly having a panic bout.
I didn't use the words "panic attack" because it wasn’t my place to diagnose, but the description of the situation spoke for itself. I had no current vitals to give them, cardiac rhythm, nothing. I couldn't even get him to keep an IV in. When we finally got to the hospital, we wheeled him in, still holding him down. The moment we transferred him to the bed, things turned from bad to worse.
He went from an agitated guy to a full cardiac arrest instantaneously. We worked him up in the ER bed for over 30 minutes. After the doctor called the time of death, he came out of the room with us, looking confused. "I thought you were bringing in a panic attack". So did we. To this day, I have no idea why he died or what was wrong with him.
I couldn't stop thinking that there was so much more I could have done for him had I been able to manage his anxiety.
53. She Was A Mess From Beginning To End
I was in nursing school, and several of our clinical rotations were done at a sub-acute long-term skilled nursing facility. There was one patient there who was in her 80s, and she had just had her second above-knee amputation. She had multiple bed sores, CHF, and horrible diabetes that she never controlled. A classmate and I changed her brief and did some simple wound care on her.
I held the patient over to my side of the bed while my classmate cleaned her up. The patient started frantically grabbing at me. She had a history of anxiety, so I soothed her as my classmate finished up. We laid her on her back and elevated her head so she could catch her breath before I did my side. She seemed more at ease and let us finish up, but as we were leaving the room, she coded.
This facility was so small that most of the doctors only came in once a week, and none of them answered their phones to give orders during the code. So, the nurses and a respiratory therapist ran it. Her intubation was harrowing, with blood coming out of her mouth. Her ribs were broken during CPR. That's how her daughter saw her.
She never came back to consciousness. It was my first time talking to a family about DNR and what they wanted us to do to keep her alive. The daughter signed a DNR about 36 hours later, and the patient was gone the next week when we were there for clinicals. After that, I became a lot more in tune with patients when they try to get me to do or not do something.
Even if they don't know the reason for it, there always is one.
54. Too Good To Be True
I was a registered nurse. One night I had five patients, two of who were being treated for cancer. One was responding well; one was not. I had looked through the charts briefly beforehand, noting vitals, labs, meds, etc. It was extremely busy, though, so I didn't actually write anything down. I went in to do assessments, and my one cancer patient looked good.
She looked healthy, had a great appetite, and was on the phone making plans for her daughter's high school graduation. Surely this was the gal who was responding well to treatment and was probably near remission. She asked me what her CA-125 labs were. CA-125 is a cancer marker that is one test used to measure the body's response to certain cancer treatments in some cases.
I told her they were much better. I said, "Yeah, I think they're in the 30ish range". She immediately yelled, "Oh my god, what”?!?! She started to cry. That’s when I knew something was off. I got nervous and said, "Uh, here, wait a minute, I may be confused. Let's just look it up in your chart together". I logged into the computer in her room, pulled up her labs, and her CA-125 count was sky high and much worse than it was at her previous draw.
I told her the actual lab results, and she said, "I knew it was too good to be true", and started sobbing for real. This woman was 45 years old and losing her life. I apologized profusely, and she was so gracious about it, telling me that she knew the moment I said it that I couldn't possibly be correct. She told me, "You never give up hope, you know, and I just wanted to believe so much that I might live long enough to at least see my kids to adulthood".
I ended up bawling and puking in the bathroom several times that night. I have never before or since cried at work. Later, I found out the devastating truth. No one had gone over her test results yet because they were so horrible. The doctors were conferring about whether to withdraw care entirely or try to limp her along until graduation, knowing that further treatment was hopeless, expensive, and probably not going to buy her more than a couple of weeks.
She passed two weeks later and did not live to see her daughter's graduation from high school. I will never ever give results I'm not sure about again, and I will never ever make a statement that I can't verify to a patient. I am still horrified by the anguish I caused her with my careless comment, and it has stuck with me for years.
55. Suspicious Much?
I dated a woman for five years. She came from a broken family and the consequences were devastating. She just couldn't accept the fact that not all men are cheaters. From sharing passwords to sending her live locations, I still couldn't earn her trust. I asked if marriage would put her mind to ease. She said “yes”. So, I proposed but was told to “try again” because she wanted it to be grand and proper.
Saved up for six months, booked the venue, and started calling her friends to inform them. Five calls in, the person on the line says "Buddy, I like you so I'm telling you this. She has been seeing another dude for three months now and they are hanging out every day after work". Today, she’s still single, always complaining about how men don’t do right by her.
56. Imaginary Wife
I watched a friend let go of his fiancée just as their wedding date was approaching. Somehow, he developed this mental concept of what a wife “should” be like and she didn’t match up to that concept. He lives in deep regret now as she ended up getting married to his friend and they’re living happily ever after whilst he has never found anyone else.
57. Trapped Inside
The biggest mistake I’ve witnessed is watching friends and family remain in an obvious cult that controls nearly every aspect of their lives, from their diet to their time, to everyday choices, to their income, to their underwear. Speaking as one who left the cult, it's mind-boggling that anyone stays, especially with all the historical records and even the cult's own records that effectively renders the whole religion false. Like, so false it's not even debatable.
I can't wait to see my loved ones finally living their own lives and finding real happiness. The cult is even relaxing some hard, strict rules to prevent members from leaving as much as they can, but there's only so far they can go before they start contradicting core beliefs. I've been out for years but still find myself having to de-program my ways of thinking/living.
58. Never Do Business With Family
In 2005, my mom refinanced her house to take out a second mortgage and invest in some guy's house-flipping business at the recommendation of her cousin who vouched for the guy. Turns out the guy was a scammer and then, of course, the housing bubble burst in 2007. She nearly lost the house and is still paying off the debt to this day.
She was struggling with substance use already before this but, after this encounter, she was gone. She has got two DUIs, has no license, and no job. My siblings and I went through hard times. Her cousin convinced his parents to invest too, and they lost most of their retirement. Most of the family doesn't talk to him anymore.
59. Is That Any Way To Say Thanks?
I watched my cousin get married to a guy who needed a US green card. She'd only known him for four months. Everyone told her he was a snake, based on his behavior, but she insisted they were in love. A baby soon came along, then, once he thought she was trapped, the beatings started. What's worse is that she left him for a while and then went back, claiming he had changed. The beatings started again. So, she made the same mistake twice. They're now divorced. If someone hits you once, they'll hit you again.
60. Lowered Expectations
My disabled brother fell for an internet scam—and it was seriously heartbreaking. He met a lady online. She lived on a different continent, but he was certain she was the love of his life. Spent over a year chatting and emailing. He helped her with money too. Very fishy stuff, but he refused to listen to my skepticism. Finally, he saved up enough to visit her. Returned two days later, refusing to admit what had happened. Went to his grave without talking about it.
61. Keep It Shut
A close family member and their spouse decided to open their marriage to outsiders, which is not always a mistake but, in this case, it was awful and quickly descended into chaos, cheating, maltreatment, and separation. It’s now five years later and they are STILL not done with their horrible divorce. It’s seriously the worst, meanest divorce I’ve ever seen, and the situation has ruined four lives so far.
62. Following Protocol
I was a pharmacy tech in a women's hospital. We had issues in the past with labor and delivery not returning the unused narcotics they signed out for a patient. We had strict guidelines that would be written up if meds were not returned properly. I was on break one day, and this young new nurse, who I had never met before, sat down beside me and started crying her eyes out.
She decided to unload and told me how she forgot to put aside the unused narcotics she used and threw them in the sharps container instead. I told her I worked in the pharmacy and it was OK, and mistakes happen. As long as she had her trainer vouch for her, we could just deal with it on our end; the pharmacist just needed to be called. She told me she wished she had known that an hour ago.
Her trainer made her go through the sharps container and bloody placenta-filled sheets to find this small 2ml bottle, which was put in for return to the pharmacy once found. I was floored that someone thought it was better to expose her to that instead of just calling the pharmacist to ask what to do. That poor girl had such a terrible and dangerous first week of being a nurse.
I sometimes wonder if she stayed in that career.
63. No Time For Goodbye
While in med school, I encountered one patient many times. Everyone knew him. He had spina bifida with lower-body paralysis that also led to many other problems. Despite his poor lot in life, he was always really optimistic and calm about it all. Even when cleaning out a rectal ulcer for him—one of the worst smells I've ever encountered in my life—he was still able to joke around and make the procedure no different than applying a Band-Aid.
Eventually, this patient had signed a DNR order and requested no further surgeries. He was in his mid-20s and just tired of all the procedures. I was on a 24-hour call when the nurse paged me to check on her patient, and sure enough, it was him. We knew each other by that point and greeted each other. Then I saw that one leg was purple and twice the size of the other. It was an obvious blood clot and occlusion.
I went to wake up the senior resident on call, called the surgery resident on call, and they started prepping for immediate surgery. We hurriedly talked the patient into consenting, which he reluctantly did. What we didn't do was call his primary doctor, slow down to actually talk to the patient, or notify any of his family. That fact haunts me years later. The patient did not wake up from the surgery.
His family and doctor arrived at the hospital that morning to find him not in his room but in the OR. He passed in precisely the way he had decided he did not want to go, and no one got the chance to say goodbye. Everything we did may have been medically correct, but that doesn't make it right. We were all new doctors so eager to save lives that we never stopped to wonder if we were saving the person.
64. The Last Line Of Defense
I was an RN. Throughout school, they drilled into us the importance of quality nursing, stating, "You are the last line of defense to catch an error. You, not the doctor, are the primary coordinator of patient care", etc. Even so, in my first months of work, I downplayed my role and expected that the doctor would always know what he was doing.
What I learned later was that every day I had 4–5 patients to be concerned with, while my doctors often had many more than that. Where I worked—in a small critical access hospital—the doctors had those admitted in addition to simultaneously managing their clinic patients, primary patients, and OB patients, and some do 48-hour ER shifts. They simply couldn’t be attentive to everything.
We had one patient who stayed with us for weeks. Initially admitted for lower extremity pain and weakness, he had undergone physical therapy, been worked up for fibromyalgia, had been aggressively treated with painkillers, and only seemed to be getting worse. I was concerned that he was beginning to show signs of delirium related to his narcotics, and I relayed that to his doctor.
The doctor ordered around the clock ibuprofen to supplement his analgesics and increased the duration between narcotics doses. Later, he was switched to Mobic, a longer-acting NSAID that required less frequent dosing. What the doctor never ordered was a GI prophylaxis. He was receiving daily doses of potent meds that could cause GI bleeding and got no meds to counter that effect.
The patient changed hands to another doc. The doctor did a thorough workup and finally found what may have been the most likely cause of his symptoms. The patient was experiencing spinal stenosis enough to pinch his lower spinal nerves. The doctor immediately ordered a powerful IV steroid twice a day for five days. But there was still something crucial missing.
Unfortunately, he did not perform a thorough medication review. He did not realize how long he had been on Mobic, how frequently the patient took ibuprofen, or that his GI system was not protected with Prilosec. He didn't know all these details because it was the nurse's job to snoop out these problems and present them to the doctor before harm could be done.
The patient developed severe GI bleeding. He was found ghost white and covered in sweat with blood pressure so low it was unreadable. We pumped him with fluids and shipped him out to a regional medical center, but, unfortunately, he didn't make it.
65. Gone Too Far
I was an internal medicine doctor that specialized in hospital inpatient medicine, also known as a hospitalist. I had a lovely but truly unfortunate lady who was in her late 40s and had metastatic cancer. It had spread to her brain and her intestine, causing persistent bleeding. She was in an out of the hospital for about two months. I knew she wasn’t going to make it, and so did her oncologist.
I began talking about what to do if she got sicker and neared the end. She wanted "everything". I was off, and my partner took over. She eventually got sicker, was bleeding again from her tumor, coded, was placed on a ventilator, and sent to the ICU. It should never have gone that far. I should have made her DNR. She had no hope of survival.
She should have had a peaceful end. Instead, she was intubated and passed in the ICU.
66. Shear Madness
When I was little, my mother and I were gardening. I asked her what the knob in the middle of the shears did. When she didn't answer, I turned it in any way. The shears didn't seem to change in any noticeable way until I tried to close them and I found out that it was to make the blades easier or harder to open. I put in the usual amount of force I needed to close them, but it was now drastically too much.
I closed them so quickly that I lost control and they cut my upper lip in half. It's a cool scar.
67. The Plan That Went Astray
One time in grade school I was in gym class. There was a table against the wall that had wheels. Usually, everyone in the class would sit on the table while we waited for our coach. One day I wanted to fake hurting myself to skip class. So, when everyone got off the table I was still sitting there and slowly leaned back against the wall, carefully pushing the table from under me.
The table moved really fast and I fell behind the table, which was my plan. What wasn’t in my plan was to land on my arm and twist it so badly to the point where it became dislocated. After that, I had to go to the school nurse, who put ice on it. I don’t remember how my arm came back, I just assume someone came and relocated it.
68. If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Touch It
I was in a Staples store once and I saw this new-age stapler that looked like it was hanging open. I thought it was broken, so I put both hands on it, with both my thumbs on the part that the staple comes out of, and tried to pull it closed again. The stapler was not broken, and it fired a staple into both my thumbs and stapled them together.
69. What Were You Thinking?
We have family friends, a couple married for 30 plus years with three daughters between 24-30. The whole family is very social, lots of social gatherings at their house. The husband/father was a general manager at a popular local brewery and restaurant. He decided to have an affair with an employee who is absolutely crazy.
This horrible decision ended up breaking up this man’s entire marriage and family. He also lost his job at the restaurant and now he’s in this busted-up relationship with this crazy chick who beats on him. This has all gone down in the last year. It’s been absolutely wild and heartbreaking to witness. And to steer clear of!
70. Trainwreck
Just watched my cousin move out for the fifth time with no plan, nowhere to go, and hanging out with manipulative people because they want her disability check. Cussed out grandma when she tried to help and got kicked out of one of the hardest community centers to get placed in. Now she’s sleeping in one of the most dangerous parks in town. I’m gonna try to talk to her tonight but honestly not sure what to do as this has been continuous for months.
71. Hollywood Or Bust
A friend of mine wanted to go to LA and "make it big" in acting. He quit his job, sold all of his possessions, and hit the road with no real plan. We are in Canada so at the border, he was asked the normal questions border guards ask. When they realized his intent was to go there to work and live without any kind of work visa, it did not go well for him. He did not get into America and had to move back in with his parents.
72. Wowwww
I seriously can’t believe I had to watch this happen. A family member got tricked into adopting three children because her "friend" was dying of Stage 4 cancer. Miraculously, after the adoptions went through, the "friend" started to get better and bailed on her family by moving to another country. Now my family member is a single stepmother with three kids that hate her.
73. All For Nothing
My co-worker stayed with her boyfriend who went to prison for taking another person’s life. He served 20 years. He got out and she rented a house with him, financed a car and motorcycle, and got two pit bulls. She paid for EVERYTHING. She had also spent the last 20 years caring for his son from a previous relationship. Two months after release, he knocks up his side chick and leaves my co-worker. We all tried to warn her. She got stuck with all the debt and fiddled away 20 years of her life.
74. No Thanks, I’m Done
I know a guy who just one day decided he didn't want to be married or be a father to his two kids anymore. Didn’t care about custody, just didn't want any responsibility. He didn't have a mistress (as far as anyone knew), he didn't move far away, he didn't change jobs, he just seemed to not want any responsibility anymore. Well, he didn’t see what was about to happen to him.
He quickly found out that people are kinda judgmental about voluntarily abandoning your kids. People at work who knew him stopped talking to him, his entire family shunned him after yelling at him for being a lousy fella, and anyone that might have been a friend didn't want anything to do with him anymore. His now ex-wife rightly took him to the cleaners for full child support, alimony, etc.
75. Paperback Writer
A woman at my job quit to pursue writing because "she liked to tell stories". There were just one or two problems. She never had written anything and didn't do any research on how to make a living as a writer. I tried to suggest to her that maybe she could work part-time to at least have some income until she can live off writing.
She had two kids and, from what I understood, her husband didn't earn much. She said money wouldn't be an issue because "she was going to specialize in writing best sellers". Biggest facepalm I ever had.
76. Success Story
My best friend met a woman who was a refugee. They were about to break up, but she manipulated him into sleeping with her a few more times. She got pregnant so he married her. He renovated his parents' former home so they could live there, but she said it was too ugly and demanded an expensive condominium.
This woman did not want to get a job, so my friend supported her. Then, she arranged to bring over her family from overseas—her mother, father, and seven siblings who my friend became responsible for. They also had four more children together. My friend was fairly certain that at least one of the children was not his child.
Fast forward ten years and my friend has had a complete mental breakdown. He is living as a homeless man, penniless, and cannot see any of his children. His ex-wife is a well-to-do local semi-celebrity. She joined some kind of foundation for immigrant women's rights and because she was attractive and charismatic, she became a kind of spokeswoman for the group, appearing on the news and local TV frequently.
77. Ignorance Is Bliss
This story happened to me. When I was 18, I worked at a bagel shop. I was fairly new working there when a customer came in and ordered a bagel with, what I heard as, "lots of cream cheese”. So, I toasted a bagel and lobbed a large amount of cream cheese on it. He paid, and left. A few minutes later, he came back and complained, with what I heard as, "I ordered LOTS of cream cheese"! I thought that this man was insane. How much cream cheese can one person want!?!
So, I lobbed on two heaping ice cream scoops of cream cheese onto the bagel, packed it up, and sent him on his way. He came back, irate, yelling "I ordered LOTS of cream cheese!! What is the problem"? I responded, stating I gave him lots of cream cheese. I couldn't fathom eating any MORE cream cheese than what I'd given him. Two HUGE ice cream scoops full. He suddenly had an amused look on his face and said "I ordered LOX and cream cheese! LOX! Salmon"!
78. Get Here ASAP
Many, many years ago I worked with this dude at McDonald's here in Ohio. We were work friends, I guess you'd say. He comes in one day and tells us all that he's quitting, that this was his last day. When we ask him what was going on, he tells us that he met a girl on the internet a few days prior and she convinced him to drop everything he had and move in with her up in Providence, RI. We try to explain to him all the reasons he shouldn't go but, of course, he doesn't wanna hear it.
When we ask him how he was even going to get up there, he says he's using a credit card to rent a car, then after he gets the car, he's going to cancel the card so he doesn't get charged for it. He's essentially planning on trying to plunder a car. We tried to explain to him that that wasn't going to work either and was probably not allowed, and he ignored that as well. We never saw or heard from him again.
79. Life Choices
When I met my boss, he was a bit of a wunderkind in our Division, having come in at a young age and moved up the ladder. Younger than me, he had already become a manager and, while I had no interest in following his path, he always seemed to be zooming through life. He'd check his credit score constantly at work but, at the same time, did overwhelmingly dumb things like leasing an expensive motorcycle and car simultaneously.
We finally parted ways when our location was shuttered, and we split apart to different locations. He had traded in both of his vehicles for a much more modest car, had met some girl with SIX children who were all from different fathers, and was planning on marrying her. After a MONTH. Now, I have nothing wrong with single mothers as I was raised by one. But this woman was not hard working. Fast-forward, he marries the girl, has a kid with her almost instantly, lets her stay at home while he works.
She ends up getting him hooked on illicit substances and cheats on him repeatedly. It all came to a head when he tried to end it by downing every pill he had, drove his car the wrong way through traffic, and crashed in a hospital parking lot with his heart-stopping. They were able to resuscitate him, thankfully. After all that? He went back to her. That is the worst mistake I've seen someone make.
80. It Turned Into A Blood-Bath
I was a respiratory therapist and worked most of the time either in the ICU or emergency department. One time, we had to resuscitate a patient who went into cardiac arrest. Due to me doing CPR, I displaced a few ribs off the sternum—which is common—but also managed to nick an artery, which is terrible. It was a grave mistake that I still regret to this day. The code team was wondering why the patient couldn’t sustain his heartbeat.
The doctor got an ultrasound reading of the chest, and true enough, the patient was bleeding like gangbusters. The whole inside of their chest cavity was soaked with blood. CPR made it worse too. The doc stuck a chest tube in to drain the blood while we kept on resuscitating the patient. The bleeding didn’t look like it would stop anytime soon, so a cardiothoracic surgeon had to determine where it was coming from. He passed a day and a half later.
81. I Was Almost Labeled Incompetent
I was a tech in a busy inner-city ER. When the doc ordered blood work on a patient, a little printer would print out the stickers with the patient's name and info and what type of test should be performed on that particular blood tube. On one particularly busy day, several patients needed to have blood drawn for tests.
I gathered up all their labels, grabbed my blood draw kit, and went to work. I drew blood on a couple of patients and sent them off to the lab. One of the patient's results came back off the wall wacky for someone who was there for something that wasn't very serious. The doctor took one look at the results and immediately ordered the patient to get hemodialysis.
The procedure is pretty serious, especially if you don't need it, but renal failure patients need it fairly frequently. Fortunately, before they rushed him off to the dialysis lab, a smart nurse put two and two together and realized I had put the wrong labels on the tubes. Never again would I grab multiple lab slips for multiple patients. It was only one at a time from then on.
82. What’s Wrong, Buddy?
I was a medical student looking after an eight-year-old boy who had broken his arm. He needed an IV but was terrified of needles. I was trying to calm him when he asked, "Will it be like what they did in the movie Elf"? I had not seen Elf, and I figured it must have been a pretty benign scene with that title, so I said, "Yes".
The kid started freaking out. I saw the movie later and understood why the poor kid got so upset. I became an expert in Barney, Dora, Bob, and Blue to try and prevent future misunderstandings. I watched some Teletubbies too, but it kind of freaked me out.
83. What A Fool
There was this guy at my high school that wasn't too bright and was mostly harmless but about halfway through, he decided he was gonna be a thug. One day, he goes into a class of first years when their teacher wasn't there, and robs all their electronics, cash and valuables at knifepoint without covering his face. Before he left, he gave them his real name saying, "And you better not tell them it was me, Jim Conrad, that took all your stuff".
He then proceeded to leave the school grounds with all the lifted stuff. But he decided against stashing it off campus, so he came back with all the plundered stuff in his backpack and went back to spy on the class with his backpack full of loot while authorities were taking statements to make sure the students weren't ratting him out. Of course, all the kids did rat him out.
When Jim hears his name mentioned, he storms back into the classroom proclaiming he's going to hurt them if they don't take back the accusations saying he did it. Meanwhile, the authorities are still inside the room, and he has all the loot on his person. He was seized and expelled from school. Everyone in our year group just face-palmed.
84. On Fire
This reminds me of someone I used to live with as roommates. I heard panicked shouting from the kitchen, so I rushed in to see what was happening and see him holding a burning paper towel in his hand, waving it around and holding it so the flames were climbing towards his hand. I told him to drop it and quickly stomp it out. When I heard the story, I was stunned.
It turns out, he had turned on our gas stove with the paper towel nearby (for some reason). I don't know if you can be stupider than screaming about something about to burn you and then doing absolutely nothing to stop it. I realize it was part of his panic response, but what if I had not come into the kitchen at that moment?
85. One Small Thing
A guy I know worked in windows and doors. He spent years developing an excellent reputation for working on high-end homes, working with the architects on the front end, clients and contractors on the back end. It was a sweet deal for a guy in his late 20s. The money was good and business was booming. Some of the jobs were big and needed serious project management so he needed to be on site a few times a week.
In this particular job, everything was custom; paint, wood, mill work, glass, hardware. The total job cost was $750,000+ and he was acting as an independent contractor supplying the material.
For nine months, every detail was planned. It took two whole days to go over the specs line-by-line. The client and contractor signed off on every item. Finally, with the deposit on the materials, he initiated the order.
Six months later, everything was in and the contractor was ready. Delivery to the muddy site was not easy. It took three trips over five days just to get the windows delivered. It all looked good. The contractor signed off and all he needed to do was go home and wait for the final check. The phone rings. His blood runs cold.
It was the interior designer saying, "These aren't the right color". He has to eat the windows and eat the cost of sending a crew out and replacing the windows with the correct ones, eat everything. He went out of business at the end and went back to college.
86. Grand Theft Auto
Buddy used to work at a car rental place. His job was to clean the cars, prepare them for customers, and do inspections before renters took off with them. One day, he was in the lot parking a cleaned truck before heading back into the office. It wasn't uncommon for people to approach with their rental papers and ask for the keys, so as he was walking back, a couple of older grimy looking guys walked up to him.
The one guy says, "Hey, we're all done inside and the lady said that truck is ours". Without even asking a question, he hands over the keys and says, "OK great, here ya go"! Then, he returns to the office without a care in the world and sees his boss. She asked if he saw those two guys out in the lot and he says, "The guys who rented the truck? Yep".
She looks at him with her jaw on the floor and says, "NNNNnnnoooooooooooo". She then immediately calls 9-1-1 to tell them a truck was stolen from the lot. Weeks go by and eventually the truck turns up out in the middle of nowhere completely trashed. Buddy then had to go to the station to pick out the guy he gave the keys to out of a photo lineup.
87. The World, Ontime
My friend and I worked in a mailroom right out of college for a fairly large company. Oftentimes, we had “Overnight” and “Next Day AM” packages that had to get there or, apparently, the world would explode. He was responsible for getting these to the drop boxes before pick-up time, which means he had to take them when he left work and drop them off.
Well, one Friday, he had one of these urgent letters. He left work and completely forgot about it. It sat in his car all weekend. When he got to work the next Monday, the CFO and several upper management were literally freaking out because the letter didn’t arrive. Apparently, it was a half-million dollar check that this company was waiting for or they were going to take some kind of court action or something.
88. A Fine Performance
I used to work at Chuck E Cheese and saw a fellow employee take a pizza from the kitchen to the customer. At the time, it was extremely busy and there were little devils running everywhere and this lady was at the far end of the restaurant, so he had to zigzag through the games to get to her. After successfully maneuvering through a bunch of games and small children, he came within 10 feet of her table. Home free, right? Wrong.
Turns out there was a two-year-old kid crawling right in front. He tripped on the kid, the pizza went flying and hit another kid, and both of the kids were crying because he stepped on one and nailed the other with pizza. And before you think this can't get any worse, he then had to deal with the parents.
That part alone still makes me shudder to this day. After yelling at him, they pressure the manager to fire him. The manager was a cool guy so he said no, but he pulled the employee aside and told him he would have to pretend to go berserk on him to make the parents happy. He did and it was the finest acting I have ever seen a non-actor pull off.
89. As Loyal As A Golden Retriever
My dad quit an $80,000-a-year job in solidarity with his department after the department was dissolved and they were all given notice. My dad would have still had a job at that same salary but he felt loyal to his work family, so he gave notice. So, my parents used up all their savings, lost their house, and went into bankruptcy, I guess for the principle of the thing?
90. The Ang-kler
My mom bought me a red fish at the market to eat. It looked cool, so I wanted to send a picture to my dad. I asked my boy to take a picture of it since it was too big to hold it with one hand. I realized the light in the kitchen was bad and decided to take the picture outside in the garden. I was so excited, I was walking very fast and ended up missing a step.
I flew into the garden and hurt my ankle. I wasn't able to get up, so my boy brought me the fish and took a picture of me holding it while laying on the grass.
91. Scarred By Social Media
I was following a celebrity/Instagram hack that was trending about taping your bust to give it a cinched look, especially in low-cut tops. I tried it. It ended up being an excruciating mistake. When I removed the masking tape, it ripped out a good chunk of my skin, leaving a nasty scar that ran from just underneath my armpit all the way to the lining of my underboob on both sides. It took almost three weeks to heal. I couldn’t wear a bra and had to wear loose clothing because the slightest chafing would cause the scab to tear and the wound to reopen.
92. Breakfast Bacon Burn
I was cooking bacon in a skillet and was using the rendered fat to make breakfast gravy. I had left bits of bacon in there as well. A small piece of bacon popped out of my cast iron skillet and landed on my foot. Since the bacon piece was covered in the gravy, it stuck to my foot. By the time I could get it wiped off and my foot rinsed, it had burned my foot so bad that it was impossible to wear a shoe for a few days afterward.
93. Hand Washing Hazzard
I was doing the dishes by hand and dropped a glass. I instinctively put my foot out to catch it, forgetting that I had bare feet. The glass cut my foot open about an inch. It looked deep but didn't bleed a lot. I figured I needed stitches. I tried to put a shoe on, and my big toe didn't work. That's when I realized it was much worse than I had thought.
As it turned out, I had cut the tendon leading to my toe. I needed surgery and spent two nights in the hospital and five weeks in a cast.
94. A Matter Of Size
While I was driving home from work one day, I saw two half-ton trucks driving two feet from a poor old man’s bumper. I drove next to them and flipped both of them off, then told them to pick on someone else. I had no idea what I was in for. In response, one of the guys roared past me while screaming and cursing at me and got a half a mile in front of me.
That was when the second truck with a trailer got behind me. I, also driving a truck, looked in my mirror and couldn’t see the truck’s grill because he was that close. I was watching both as we came up to an intersection at a red light. I’d driven the route countless times and knew the light was just about to change.
As the truck in front of me braked, I continued at full speed with the other truck still on my bumper then quickly switched lanes. He had no chance. Going fast, he went right into the back of his buddy’s truck, and the trailer on the truck flipped. That made the tank spray gunk everywhere. The highway was shut down for two hours.
95. 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.
96. A Rash Of Problems
I had a small rash that wouldn't go away, so I went to see the doctor after a long while of hoping that it would just disappear on its own. He said it was ringworm and gave me an antifungal, but the rash got worse. I went back and he gave me an even stronger antifungal. Still, the rash spread, and this time it was all down my arms. I went back to the doctor to get a referral to a dermatologist.
The dermatologist took one look at the rash and said, "That is contact dermatitis." I had changed soaps and it irritated my skin, giving me a little rash. The doctor's stupid antifungals, in the meanwhile, were making my skin go crazy. I just stopped using soap for like a week and it was fine, but I had skin discoloration for like a year.
97. Always Check The Decimals
One day at the hospital, I very nearly injected a premature baby who had Down Syndrome with ten times the amount of Lasix I was supposed to give him: I had put the decimal in the wrong place when I did the math on the dose. That baby would almost certainly have died if I'd given it to him. I had the liquid drawn up in the syringe and had the syringe actually in the port ready to push through before I looked inside the chamber and realised how uncharacteristically full it seemed.
Paediatric IV doses of anything are simply tiny. I was supposed to give him 0.1 mls, and nearly gave him 1.0mls. I needed a very large cup of tea after that.
Public Domain Pictures
98. Odd Anatomy
I’m a biomedical scientist, and my officemate was a medical doctor working on his PhD. He once did an appendectomy and cut into this person’s abdomen—only to find no appendix. He started freaking out. The support nurses in the room, however, started snickering at him because they knew right away what the problem really was.
Occasionally, they see someone with a rare genetic disorder where all their left-right asymmetries are reversed. This patient’s appendix was on the other side.
99. Jamie Lee Curtis, Eat Your Heart Out
One day, I was shopping at the local Walmart and had my headphones in. These headphones are incredibly nice and a gift from my parents. I had just gotten off work and was in business casual, khakis and a plain grey polo. No logo. Nothing to indicate that I worked at Walmart. I was looking in the freezer section for some ice cream for dessert that night when someone yanks my headphones off my head and they fall on the ground.
Cue Karen starting to yell at me. "I have been trying to get your attention for five minutes! You shouldn't be listening to music while you work! How can you help customers if you can't even hear them!?" She screeched at me. Now I am seeing red. If she damaged my headphones there was going to be a big problem. I lean down to pick up my headphones.
Then, I say to this crazy lady, "Don't you ever touch me you crazy witch. I don't work here you stupid idiot. Touch me again and I will scream so loud the whole store will hear." "Don't you talk to me like that! I am a customer!" She said as she grabbed my bicep to haul me to a manager like a child to be punished. So I let her have it.
I screamed the loudest scream I could possibly imagine. I actually lost my voice for the next day because of it. It startled her so bad that she let me go and dropped her purse. Not even 20 seconds later a manager comes running with the security guy. The manager demanded to be told what was going on. I told him this crazy witch attacked me.
She tore my headphones off my head and grabbed me. I feared for my life (a complete embellishment) so I screamed. By now we have an audience, and the manager takes us both and separates us. Luckily for me, a very nice woman was a little farther down the aisle and saw the whole thing and told the security guy what happened and backed up my story.
She got what was coming—and so did I. The manager asked if I wanted to press charges and I told him no. I just want my ice cream and to go home. He told me to take it. It was on him. As I was leaving I saw the crazy witch getting thrown out of Walmart by the security guy and being told to never set foot in the store again.
Flickr
100. That’s On You
I film and edit promotional videos, then post them on my company’s YouTube channel. The day after I uploaded a particular run-of-the-mill video, my manager called me into his office because one of our directors, who hates our department and loves undermining me in particular, sent an email to my manager and a few higher-ups. That's when it got cringey.
In the email, he stated that I had messed up the promo video, because there were “all of these other disgusting videos attached to it.” As proof, he included a screenshot of the end of the video, where all of the recommended videos appeared to star scantily-clad Asian women in suggestive poses. Neither he nor my manager knew how YouTube algorithms worked.
He didn’t realize that the videos were suggested because he, or someone on his account, viewed that kind of content before. I have no idea how my manager explained this to him.
